If you’re from Chicagoland, you know this one: “Hardrock, Coco and Joe” was a part of WGN-TV’s kids programming for decades. I caught it every December on The Bozo Show, and before that it had been on Garfield Goose and The Ray Rayner Show.
If you’re not from Chicagoland, or if you came along after Bozo Circus had left the air, let’s get you up to speed. The song explains that Santa Claus has three helpers with him every Christmas Eve. Two of them have jobs: Hardrock manages the flying reindeer, and Coco handles the navigation. The third guy is along for the ride: “Old Santa really has no need for Joe,” explains the song, “but takes him ’cause he loves him so.” Joe’s contribution to this whirlwind holiday trip is to repeatedly sing “I’m Joooooooooe” in his deep voice and, once in a while, stand around while Coco hits him with snowballs.
The song (whose original name was “The Three Little Dwarfs” – I’m just the messenger, and also, why wouldn’t they be elves like everyone else at Santa’s workshop?) comes from Stuart Hamblen, who the Texas State Historical Association says was radio’s very first “singing cowboy.” He would later start writing Christian music and hosting religious radio shows after an encounter with evangelist Billy Graham. In 1952, like a year after the release of this song, Hamblen ran for president as the Prohibition Party’s nominee. (He finished fourth, with about 75,000 votes).
The song’s publisher, Hill and Range Songs, hired a company called Centaur Productions to make an animated TV promotional film for TV out of Hamblen’s song. Centaur was a relatively short-lived company, but its co-founders were titans. One of them was George Pal, who created the award-winning Puppetoons films in the 1940s. He knew and/or worked with film effects masters like Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen, as well as big name animators like Walt Disney and Walter Lantz.
The other was Wah Ming Chang, the Chinese-American artist and animator who had worked for Disney, sculpting the physical model the animators used while drawing Pinocchio. Later, he would design the headdress Elizabeth Taylor wore in “Cleopatra” and the head of the original Poppin’ Fresh, the Pillsbury Doughboy. Chang’s work on Star Trek is legendary: he designed the tricorder and the flippable communicator, reworked the phaser into its final form, and designed the Gorn, the Romulan Bird-of-Prey and the tribbles!
So the fun here is that this company has been tapped to make a visual commercial for a kids’ song, but they turn in a really arty and innovative film, every bit as interesting as the song is catchy. Also note how the Santa here has Asian features; that was rare to see any Asian character in mainstream animation in that time (unless the character was a stereotype), but it was especially rare that it was a character as universal as Kris Kringle.
