Burl Ives Disney's "Summer Magic" with Hayley Mills, Dorothy McGuire, and Eddie Hodges, and a score by Robert and Richard Sherman. In 1964, he played the genie in the movie "The Brass Bottle" with Tony Randall and Barbara Eden. Ives' "A Holly Jolly Christmas" and "Silver and Gold" became Christmas standards after they were first featured in the 1964 NBC-TV presentation of the Rankin/Bass stop-motion animated family special "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer". Johnny Marks had composed the title song (originally an enormous hit for singing cowboy Gene Autry) in 1949, and producers Rankin and Bass retained him to compose the TV special's
Ross Bagdasarian Sr. play any musical instrument in the accepted sense of the word." Bagdasarian owned Chipmunk Enterprises, which sponsored Chipmunk-related sales. By 1963 some 15 companies were using or planned to use Alvin figures. By that year "Billboard" magazine estimated that the total income from the Chipmunks' record sales (including overseas sales) and record club sales to be around $20 million (around $165 million adjusted for inflation). In the following years the Chipmunks released several hit songs: "Alvin's Harmonica" (1959), "Ragtime Cowboy Joe" (1959), "Alvin's Orchestra" (1960), "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer" (1960), "The Alvin Twist" (1962), and the album "The Chipmunks