On Christmas day in 1999, the BBC broadcast a half-hour stop-motion animated special, created and sold in aid of the charity Comic Relief. Written by Andy Riley and Kevin Cecil and starring more famous actors and comedians than you can shake an antler at, it proved popular and was followed by two more programmes several years later. Over the years, this trilogy of British short films has earned something of a cult following worldwide, thanks to its abundance of humour and the appeal of its central character - a somewhat chubby talking reindeer named Robbie.

What's It All About?

Each of the three films is set at the North Pole, in the aptly-named town of Coldchester - a place home to opera-singing walruses, irritable Geordie polar bears, the infamous party-throwing Santa, his elves and most importantly his reindeer. First there's Robbie, the hero of the stories and the son of the original Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer. Like his father, Robbie's nose has special powers, albeit odder ones; it can track down and point to any given location and is very bouncy, allowing him to bounce over hurdles or do press-ups with his arms behind his back. However, he's also incredibly lazy and often borders on the completely daft. In Britain, the character is voiced by Irish comic Ardal O'Hanlon.

Robbie's love interest and eventual wife is Donner. Voiced by Jane Horrocks¹, she often comes across as the only reindeer at the Pole with any kind of common sense, despite her love of Robbie. The villain of the first two films is Blitzen, an arrogant and over-competitive deer played by Steve Coogan with a jealous hatred for Robbie's father. A running joke in the series is that none of the characters can say Rudolph's full name without being stopped by an outraged Blitzen, who doesn't want it said in his presence (the real reason is that the producers couldn't get permission to use the name, which is, strangely, copyrighted). Other recurring characters include Old Jingle, a hilariously insane reindeer coach who lives in a house perched precariously on top of a pointy hill and often appears, Yoda-like, to offer athletic advice to Robbie, and aging-rock-star persona Prancer, who carries an entire portable disco around with him.

The Films

Hooves of Fire

The first of the Robbie trilogy, Hooves of Fire² was directed by Richard Goleszowski, who normally worked at Aardman³ and is probably best known for turning Nick Park’s Oscar-winning short Creature Comforts into a TV series. The story begins with our hero catching a bus into Coldchester and joining the reindeer’s ranks, sent by Rudolph to be a navigator. He immediately catches the eye of Donner, but is instead in love with the bored-looking Vixen, who can’t stand him. Blitzen, meanwhile, plots to get rid of Robbie in order to take revenge on his father, persuading our hero that he doesn’t need to train or keep fit, and can just laze around. At a party being hosted by Father Christmas⁴, he persuades Santa to fit a state-of-the-art GPS system onto his updated sleigh. Since the sleigh team now no longer needs Robbie as a navigator, it’s decided that the reindeer to leave should be the one who is the most unhealthy, determined by the upcoming Reindeer Games. This disheartens Robbie, and he leaves the Pole (with a little encouragement from Blitzen), where the next morning he’s discovered frozen in a block of ice by some elves, who plan to eat him for lunch. Luckily he thaws out on the grill, and is eventually offered a job at the elves’ workshop.

After being demoted from painter, to cleaner, and finally to being part of a forklift truck, Robbie is picked up by Donner, who persuades him to come back and join the Games. They go for help to the mountain-top home of Old Jingle, who trains Robbie to use his nose to do exercise.

Legend of the Lost Tribe

After the success of the first programme, a sequel was soon written, this time directed by another Aardman filmmaker, Peter Peake. It aired in 2002, and brought back all the original cast members. It’s summer at the North Pole, and the reindeer have had to set up their own holiday resort to make money. On a tour round the area, Robbie falls over the side of a mountain rescuing a rather arrogant penguin customer, but is saved from death by a Viking, who promptly disappears. When he treks back to the other reindeer, they tell him that because of all the customers being refunded, the business has gone bankrupt. A conversation with Old Jingle also reveals that the Vikings all perished long ago when they ran out of battles to fight and so decided to fight each other.

Meanwhile, Blitzen (having been locked up at the end of the last film) is released from jail for winning the ‘Best Behaved Prisoner’ mug three times in a row. He turns up at the reindeer’s lodge claiming to be sorry for everything he’d done wrong, but is finally accepted back in when he tells them he knows how to save their holiday business. He gets them building a large hotel out of wood and captures the reindeer inside it, furious that they never bothered to get him out of prison. Robbie is the only one to escape, and so he sets about finding the Viking tribe to help him defeat Blitzen and his disguise-wearing white rabbit accomplice. But when he finds the tribe (whose short members include a dog wearing a helmet, and who are all named Magnus) he discovers that the reason they survived is because when all the other Vikings killed each other, they fled and hid under their Viking duvets. Figuring out that Blitzen has enslaved his friends as robot exhibits for a new theme park, ‘Blitzen’s Reindeer World’, Robbie persuades the tribe to help him before being kidnapped by the white rabbit on a hang glider. The Vikings get inside the theme park on a slightly violent ride depicting the history of reindeer⁵ and rescue Robbie from falling into a pit filled with animal traps before fighting off Blitzen’s rabbit henchmen. Robbie frees his friends and chases down the escaping villain on a flying popcorn shaker, asking Donner to marry him on the way. Blitzen is once again jailed, along with the white rabbit – now unmasked as wanted criminal mastermind Carlos the Hamster – and everyone celebrates with a huge Viking disco.

Close Encounters of the Herd Kind

What's The Appeal?

NOTE: This definitely needs shortening once finished