The Rankin-Bass Company is famous for such Christmas favorites as "Santa Claus is Coming to Town", "Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer" and "The Year Without a Santa Claus", but the company made many more stop-motion and animated shows...many. A few are very obscure and haven't been shown on television in many years, such as this film, "The Ballad of Smokey the Bear". I found it on YouTube and decided to give it a try.
The story is about ecology, preserving the environment and other issues that were gaining traction in the 1960s. In this case, they took the Smokey the Bear story and brought it from books to the television screen. An old, wise bear (the narrator, Jimmy Cagney) tells little bears the story of Smoky the Bear's life...from his near-death in a fire to conservation efforts he undertook to stop a stupid gorilla from polluting and destroying the woods. It's all accompanied to the usual music by Johnny Marks and singing you'd expect in such a production. What I didn't expect was that the animated characters looked second-rate...not as cute nor detailed as the ones from their famous Christmas specials. It really looked as if a different company made it, it was so different. Part of this could be because Rankin-Bass used several different Japanese companies to animate their stories...and perhaps this one was made by one of the lesser ones. I really don't know for sure...but it was kind of ugly compared to their better output. Mildly enjoyable but far from a classic.
