Curated: Rankin Bass Production

Posted October 12th, 2009 / By Michael John in Animation, Cartoons, Curated, Idents

In today’s curated post, I’ve decided to revisit Rankin Bass Production (one of my favorite production studios), who just so happen to be responsible for some of my all-time favorite cartoons when growing up as a kid. Thunder Cats, Tiger Sharks, and Silver Hawks are just to name a few of the 80s Saturday morning cartoons that they produced. They were also responsible for animated movies, such as The Hobbit, The Return Of The King, Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, Jack Frost, Frosty The Snowman, a Rankin Bass adaptation of Wind In The Willows, and my personal favorite, The Flight Of Dragons. When you watch all of the sequences back to back, it’s apparent how similar the animation styles are, and you can even catch some similar character traits being reused, not to mention, commonly reused voice actors. If I recall correctly, I believe James Earl Jones & John Ritter appeared as voice actors in some Rankin Bass productions. (quick note: Apologies for the videos with bad quality. Unfortunately the only one I could find in HD was Thundercats. When I find better quality versions to replace the others, I will).

Rankin Bass Production Identity Spot (1975)

Source via:

Thundercats

Silverhawks

Tigersharks

The Hobbit

The Return Of The King

The Flight Of Dragons

Thank you very much for viewing / reading. Although I would very much have liked to provide more history into the Rankin Bass production studio; their history is rather long & controversial, involving some pretty nasty, unethical decisions by Warner Bros. I’m afraid that would certainly have resulted in getting really side-tracked, and could have easily resulted in a post in and of itself. So if you’d like to learn more about the history of Rankin Bass, please visit RankinBass.com « (I know that site is super atrocious, but… well, there’s really no excuse).

Colorcubic + Nueva Forma + = .