Fu n Fact #447 HCR

 Fun Fact #447

Hardrock, Coco, and Joe 

In 1951, Chicago’s WGN-TV reached out to Centaur Productions requesting three holiday specials be made to fill gaps in its run time for the upcoming Holiday season. Thus they sent it to their best stop motion animator Wah Chang at Universal Studios with songwriter Walter E. “Jack” Rollins to back him up. 

The three 3 minute Specials which resulted from this were the Original “Frosty The Snowman” film while the other two films were Frosty’s Siblings:  “Suzy Snowflake” and “Hardrock, Coco, and Joe –The Three Dwarves'' Yes Dwarves, at this time the idea of Santa having an army of Elves still hadn't been thought up yet and instead he had Hardrock (Driver) Coco (Navigator) and Joe and that was it. The songs proved to be hits, as H.C.J. became a bestseller twice with a 2008 parody by SNL called “Christmas Anxiety” while Suzy Snowflake became the #1 selling Christmas songs the year it was released. The specials have since entered public domain and may be shown at public events with all three taking a little under 8 minutes from start to finish. They also are still broadcast by Chicago’s WGN-TV in the Chicagoland area in December. 

Yet most important of all was the fact that Walt Disney gained an interest in HCJ who had worked with Wah Chang years before to make Pinocchio more accurate. Apparently he liked the mobility of the reindeer and sought to solve a long time issue, by having Chang make Claymation puppets of all non human characters going forward. The reason was at that time it was very time consuming to draw non-human characters as artists would make their best guess on proportion and how a movement should look from various angles, but by having clay figures they could pose and then inspect they sped up the process drastically saving time and money for the Disney company. 

Today Disney still uses puppets in this way, however most of their “puppets” are now 3 models which makes the job much easier for their animated movies.