Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is the title character of an American Christmas story told in an annual network television show and a popular song that gets heavy airplay each December. Rudolph, a fictional reindeer with a glowing nose, starts out as an ostracized freak and ends up as the fog-cutting hero at the front of Santa Claus's sleigh team. The character was invented in 1939 by Chicago copywriter David May for a booklet given away to customers by his employer, the Montgomery Ward department stores. May received rights to the story in 1947 and asked his brother-in-law, songwriter Johnny Marks, to put it to music and lyrics. The result was a radio hit for cowboy singer Gene Autry in 1949. Since then it has been recorded by at least 30 other performers. The one-hour, animated TV special debuted on NBC on 6 December 1964 and has aired every year since.

Extra credit: The TV version differs slightly from May's original 1939 story, in which Rudolph grows up not at the North Pole but in a reindeer-populated village elsewhere and is discovered by Santa not before but during his annual gift-delivery run... The TV show's other songs, including "A Holly, Jolly Christmas," "Silver and Gold," and "The Most Wonderful Day of the Year," were also composed by Marks... Though created for a U.S. network, the animated show was filmed in Japan and its soundtrack was recorded in Canada... Folk singer Burl Ives provided the voice of the TV show's narrator, Sam the Snowman.