Humans generally have a hard time understanding long stretches of time. There’s the fairly common frustration as the years seem to fly by the older you get and the corresponding nostalgia at how eventful your childhood seems to have been in contrast. There’s the moment where you realize that by any kind of measure you’re no longer young and Grandpa Simpson starts to make a disturbing amount of sense. This also translates over to our use of technology: the cars have different switches, the televisions have different options, and home media formats improve resolutions at a pace where eventually your eyes can’t keep up and you have to tap out of future upgrades. At a certain point in your life what is normal technology got set in stone and it becomes harder and harder to shift expectations. To me cassettes still seem completely reasonable.
This means that there’s an increasingly large wake of technological detritus left in the wake of progress. Best case scenario they get turned into nostalgic little ‘remember when’ specials on basic cable channels, or get lengthy YouTube memorials arguing that maybe there was something worthwhile about the original series iPod. Most of it, though, gets forgotten about, or if it is remembered compared completely unfavorably with the things that replaced it. Vinyl records might stubbornly stick around for decades but nobody is pining after dot-matrix printers.
Which brings us to educational filmstrips and the records that accompanied them. Despite being underfunded and undervalued the teaching profession is as quick as any to latch on to new technology to trick kids into learning something. For a good chunk of the 40’s to the 80’s the cutting edge of educational science was the filmstrip. They were simply short 35mm strips of film designed to be projected one after the other to the amazement of the watching classroom. They were accompanied first by written scripts, then later by vinyl records or cassettes. Even though it was on film, since it wasn’t being fed through a projector at 24 frames a second the audio couldn’t be included on the strip itself, necessitating the extra equipment. The step up to cassettes greatly increased their utility since it was much easier to pause and restart the audio with those than it was with records, which required the careful raising and setting down of the needle to halt the sound.
While a student at Cheshire Academy in Connecticut Roger Himmel had the idea for the Lollipop Dragon while walking home from a screening of the 1962 film ‘The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm.’ He would later describe fondly thinking of the scene where comedian Buddy Hackett fought a dragon, thought he’d like to write something like that, and jotted down the phrase “lollipop dragon.” Later on he would remember the idea and publish a story in the Cheshire Academy literary journal, which he edited. He later attended Kent State in the late 60’s pursuing a degree in children’s education. He collaborated with husband-and-wife duo Luther Peters and Connie Ross in developing a children’s book, which they then shopped around to the Society for Visual Education, Inc., which produced exactly what their name states. An order was placed, and they incorporated under the company name Lollipop Dragon Productions, Inc. in the state of Ohio, producing a number of educational film strips starring the titular dragon. Himmel would go off to join the Army and on his return would write several accompanying books through the 70’s before they eventually renegotiated the contract with SVE to merely license the property. While generally overseeing the various directions the property took he became less hands on, busying himself with merchandising rights, culminating in the Lollipop Dragon being named the 1980 Marine Corps Toys for Tots mascot.
I’d like to point out that all of that very specific information comes from an article Himmel wrote himself for the July-August 2020 edition of the magazine Scottish Rite Journal of Freemasonry (“Serving the Scottish Rite Since 1904”). Sometimes the internet truly is a thing of wonder.
As befits something springing from the educational side of children’s entertainment, the Lollipop Dragon was originally meant to teach simple morals to children. Film strips and books would teach things like how to be polite, why you should pick up litter, form orderly queues, and listen to your parents, that sort of thing. Eventually it was established that the dragon lived in the TumTum Kingdom, ruled by a good king and queen, with Princess Gwendolyn and Prince Hubert and a random little four-armed furry thing that’s apparently the court musician. Despite originally being deliberately sedate and free of antagonists the narrative needs of actual animated specials led to the creation of a villain in the form of Baron Bad Blood and his nameless assistant. He’s a be-goateed generic villain who lives in a castle, presumably also in the kingdom, and his reason for being evil is refreshingly simple: he has bad blood in him. Sometimes it’s nice to have a villain who’s just a villain.
The special itself seems to have come from thin air, though that’s mostly a result of the only existing rip I can find coming from a repackaged version of the special from Blair Entertainment and thus missing a lot of production details. In addition to adding a slightly creepy live action intro of a smiling kid explaining the concept of VCR tracking, Blair Entertainment seem to have excised the original end credits and replaced them with new ones due to the rights changing hands. The director, Guy R. Mazzeo, would only direct this and the following year’s special, ‘Lollipop Dragon: The Magic Lollipop Adventure.’ The credited writers are Roger Himmel himself and the same husband and wife duo who illustrated the original books, Luther Peters and Connie Ross. The replacement titles are suspiciously short on production information, such as listing any animators or production companies, which might not be the biggest loss for those involved since the animation, while not abysmal, does not impress.
The story itself is paper-thin and just a stretched-out variation on Wacky Races. The titular Christmas race is one announced by the king as a competition among his subjects for the prize of having a lollipop made in their image with a flavor of their choosing that will be delivered to all the kids of the world that year by Santa. These subjects all seem to also be workers in a giant lollypop factory. I’m sure there are supplemental materials assuring us that the king and queen are just and fair rulers and that everyone is happy to work in such a wonderful place as a lollipop factory and working conditions are good and they’re treated well and any rumors of being paid in company scrip and the subsequent plague of scurvy and rickets due to malnourishment from only being fed lollipops and never being allowed outside the confines of the factors are totally false. The announcement is greeted with general applause by the workers and dragons and with scorn by the evil Baron Bad Blood, who’s spying on the announcement by way of magic mirror. The power set of the Baron is very ill-defined, he seems to have access to both magic and advanced technology depending on the needs of any given scene.
On the day of the race the Baron shows up and is booed by the crowd until the Lollipop Dragon himself agrees that the king said anyone could join the race, and they’re off. Of course the Baron immediately starts cheating, but this is more than offset by the other contestants doing their own set of questionable maneuvers, such as taking shortcuts or combining forces to increase speed. Refreshingly nobody really complains that the Baron is cheating, apparently that’s just the price you pay for not being specific in your race announcements.
In true cartoon style the villains could have easily won if they’d just kept racing while they were way out ahead, but they stop to sabotage the rest of the racers, causing Mr. Lollilop to go full dragon and unleash his fiery hellbreath to demolish the ice boulder the Baron dropped on them. Near the end of the race the Baron’s evil assistant gets distracted by the crowd throwing snowballs at them and stops to yell at them, eventually getting so angry he rips the steering wheel from their rocket sled, causing the entire thing to explode. Everyone else has joined forces due to the Baron’s machinations and cross the line together, rather negating the entire point of having this kind of competition, but the bad guys lost so it’s apparently ok.
The king and queen announce that everyone’s a winner except the bad guys, who are losers, so unveil an eight-headed lollipop monstrosity with everyone’s faces on their own lollipops, presumably with everyone’s favorite flavors regardless of whether or not they work together, thus making the candy completely inedible and far too big to feasibly eat. If I was the Baron I’d take that as a qualified win. Everyone is happy and singing and dancing and then they loop the dancing animation under the new credits and it’s over.
There may be a moral in there somewhere but I really can’t seem to find it. The major takeaway seems to be not to be evil, which is fair enough for a kid’s cartoon. Despite starting with such educational goals by this time in the lifecycle of the IP it seems to have basically devolved into something kids recognized and thus able to be sold to their parents. The subsequent 1986 special seems to have been the last developed Lollipop Dragon product that I can find evidence of and the books are all out of print. From the way he talked in 2020 Roger Himmel is still very proud of his achievement, and that’s hard to argue with. An entire generation had to squirm in their seats while waiting for the series of beeps and still frames to be over and that’s the kind of memory that follows people their entire lives. The cartoon is harmless enough but seems to have been lost to the tides of time and I can’t muster a very strong argument against that fate.
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