Things you didn't know about Frosty The Snowman! Behind the Christmas Hits

Rudolph and Frosty teamed up for a TV special in 1979, but their relationship goes back a lot further than that. In fact, you could say the song Frosty the Snowman is a direct sequel to Rudolph.

Gene Autry had made Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer a huge hit in 1949 and like the true businessman he was, he wanted to do more of the same. Remember, this was a singer who eventually became the owner of a Major League Baseball team – Gene Autry was savy.  
 
Enter songwriters Jack Rollins and Steve Nelson. Their idea for a sequel was not to do another Christmas song, but a song for a different holiday. They thought about the potential…of Easter. So they wrote a song about the character from the Thornton Burgess books called Here Comes Peter Cottontail.  

Autry recorded it while Rudolph was still a hit and released it around Easter of 1950. It too was a hit, peaking at #5 on Billboard.  

But as Christmas started to roll around again, the businessman in Autry wanted a new hit for the holiday season. Because of his recent string of success, all the top songwriters of the day pitched songs to Autry. Some of the songs submitted were even team-ups between Rudolph and Peter Cottontail.  
 
Rollins & Nelson kept banging away at it but weren’t having any luck with a new concept…until Jack had a thought. For so many people, Christmas meant snow on the ground.  Kids loved to build snowmen. What if a snowman could come to life?

Unlike Rudolph, where the song was based on a book, the character of Frosty was created for the song. Even though Autry was looking for a follow-up to Rudolph, there’s no actual mention of Christmas in Frosty’s lyrics. In the classic TV special, Frosty says “I’ll be back on Christmas Day”, but that was done for the special…and not in the original lyrics.  Lots of winter imagery – but not a single mention of Christmas.  
 
There were some doubts about the song. Executives at Columbia Records felt that much like other holiday songs that recurred in popularity, Rudolph was poised to be a hit all over again in 1950. They were worried that the living snowman might be overshadowed by everyone’s favourite reindeer.  

They were kind of right. While Frosty was hardly a flop, Rudolph did do better on the charts again in 1950 than Frosty did. However, this was just the beginning of the legend of Frosty.
 
Do you remember Little Golden Books?  A series of children’s books that are still published today? Golden Books worked with Rollins & Nelson to create a backstory for Frosty for a children’s book. That’s when Frosty really started to take off…reaching even higher levels in 1969 with the TV special from Rankin/Bass production – a special that STILL airs on TV every single year. Jimmy Durante’s version for the special might actually be regarded as the definitive version of the song in the minds of many, but it was Gene Autry that first brought the snowman to life.  

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