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
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (TV special) alone and unloved, are suddenly cheered up when Santa arrives to pick them up. Santa wishes everyone a merry Christmas as he and Rudolph fly off into the night. The TV special, with the teleplay by Romeo Muller, introduced several new characters inspired by the song's lyrics. Muller told an interviewer shortly before his death that he would have preferred to base the teleplay on May's original book, but could not find a copy. Other than Burl Ives, all characters were portrayed by Canadian actors recorded at RCA studios in Toronto under the supervision of Bernard Cowan. After the script,