After Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer but before Frosty the Snowman, Rankin/Bass produced Cricket on the Hearth, a very rare misfire for the company. Loosely inspired by Charles Dickens’s novella, this 1967 television special follows a talking cricket (Roddy McDowell) as he helps an impoverished toymaker (Danny Thomas) and his blind daughter (Marlo Thomas).
The screenplay is sloppily constructed, disjointed, and uncentered. A feature film’s worth of materials get crammed into a 49 minute runtime and a continual barrage of crummy, forgettable songs slow the already languorous pace. The animation looks cheap, clunky, and stilted. Too many harsh and garish hues comprise the sickening color palette.
Comedian Danny Thomas gives a phony and unconvincing vocal performance. His singing comes from another era and should stay there. Marlo Thomas (Danny’s real life daughter) is unmemorable like the movie itself. McDowell does his best with a rudderless script and dead dialogue. His counterfeit cockney accent eventually grates on the ears. The only listenable voice acting comes from Hans Conried (voice of Disney’s Captain Hook) and Paul Frees (a legendary voice actor, look him up.)
A bizarre scene involving the Cricket getting expositional assistance from living toys, who are forbidden from revealing their sentience to humans, eerily echoes Toy Story a few decades later.
Cricket on the Hearth is an inept, clumsy, and snoozy waste of precious mortal time. This cricket is a humbug.
-T.Z.
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