A glowing red nose didn’t start as folklore—it started as copy. We follow Rudolph’s unlikely path from a 1939 Montgomery Ward booklet written by Robert L. May, forged in grief and grit, to Johnny Marks’ earworm melody and Gene Autry’s reluctant hit that stormed both pop and country charts. Then we pull the curtain on the Rankin/Bass special: GE’s sponsorship, Arthur Rankin’s partnership with stop‑motion pioneer Tadahito Mochinaga, and the Animagic craft that studied real deer in Nara to give ...