NOTES: The one thing that gave me the most headaches and heartache out of everything in this project was Hardrock, Coco, and Joe. The original special had a cut-down version of the Grampy cartoon Christmas Comes But Once A Year, but inserting Count Floyd into the special changed the flavor of the cartoon--I needed something recognizably Christmassy, but also a little creepy. The initial plan was to simply link to the complete, three-minute short, but I wanted to create a more authentic experience. To that end, I downloaded an open-source video editor, put the file into it, hacked off everything after the second verse, put a little bit of black screen in there, separated the audio from the video at the end, and capped it off with an authentic fade and "The End" card from what was used on Playhouse at the time.
What you're seeing here was the fourth or fifth attempt. There's still just a little bit of a join between the cartoon and the edit.
So this cartoon is famous in Chicago for being featured on the old Bozo's Circus from the 60s to about the 80s, back when Bob Bell portrayed Bozo the Clown--I grew up with Joey D'Auria's version; he lasted from about 1985 or so until 2001-2002. The 40th Anniversary special featured Hardrock, and WGN shows it along with a Frosty the Snowman cartoon (no, not the more famous Rankin-Bass one) and Suzy Snowflake every Thanksgiving.
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