Historian’s commentary misses the mark on “Mad Monster Party”

Back in October I picked up a copy of Mad Monster Party produced by Rankin/Bass on Blu-ray to add to my Halloween movie collection. I finally got around to watching it, and the Special Features, which included some commentary by Rick Goldschmidt, credited as a Rankin/Bass historian. Some of his trivia and insights were interesting, but some were way off base. Paraphrasing two of his comments in the video, he said that the stop-motion animation work of Rankin Bass was amazing for the 1960s, and that their holiday stop-motion films were special given that previously nobody had put such character into the animated figures.I couldn’t believe it when he said these things. As a historian he should cast his specific subject matter against the backdrop of other expressions of the art. If this is done his statements are shown to be inaccurate. In the 1930s and 1940s George Pal produced his Puppetoons shorts, which included some of the first commercial work by Ray Harryhausen. Harryhausen would go on to do stop-motion in feature films, and whether the Puppetoons or feature length films, he invested his animated characters with personality in ways that often rivaled human actors. While I appreciate Mr. Goldschmidt’s fondness for the stop-motion animation work of Rankin/Bass, an appreciation I share, his commentary on this Blu-ray release is historically inaccurate when considered against the broader backdrop of the history of stop-motion animation.