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Rankin-Bass is an American production company founded by Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass in the early 1960s. They produced
a large number of stop motion and traditional animation movies, TV specials, and TV series from the 1960s through the late 1980s.
Some of their most widely recognized pieces are their stop-motion Christmas
specials such as Rudolph the Red-Nosed
Reindeer (1964) and Frosty the Snowman (1969), many of which are still shown on American TV stations in the present day
(2004) around the holiday season. Rankin-Bass stop-motion features are recognizable by
their visual style of doll-like characters with spheroid body parts, and ubiquitous powdery snow.
In 1977, Rankin-Bass produced an animated version of J.R.R. Tolkien's The
Hobbit. It was followed in 1980 by an animated version of The Return of the King, the final book of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy. (The animation rights to the first two books in the series were held by
Saul Zaentz, producer of Ralph Bakshi's cartoon adaptation of the first half of the trilogy. See The Lord of the Rings on film.)
Rankin-Bass also produced the popular cartoon series, ThunderCats (1985), a cartoon and related toy-line about battling cat-like people in
a high-tech future. It was followed by two similar cartoons about animal-like people, Silverhawks (1986), and Tigersharks (as part of the series The Comic strip in 1987) which
never enjoyed the same commercial success.
Outside Links
The Official Rank Bass Website - http://rankinbass.com/
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