Trivia / Rapsittie Street Kids: Believe in Santa

• All-Star Cast: Even with its extremely low production values, Rapsittie somehow managed to get a cast that includes Mark Hamill, Jodi Benson, Grey DeLisle, and Nancy Cartwright, the latter of whom was also a producer for the special.
• Creator's Apathy: The producer's daughter said that the special's abysmal animation was the result of her father never once looking in on Wolf Tracer to make sure production was going smoothly.
• Creator Backlash:
  • The producer's daughter expressed her father's feelings on the final film on her Twitter account:
    Kennedy Rose: That movie was my dad's biggest disappointment. Besides me, of course.
  • Paige O'Hara joked that she was surprised someone actually remembered the special when asked about it by Pan Pizza. But when other people started asking her about the special, she claimed to have no memory of making it.
  • Grey DeLisle called it a "secret shame" on Twitter.
• Descended Creator: Animator J.R. Horsting provides the voice of Zeke in this movie.
• Domestic-Only Cartoon: A painfully obvious example at that.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: For over a decade this special was thought to be lost, until Dycaite, founder of the Lost Media Wiki, managed to secure a copy and upload it to the internet. The software used for animating the special itself, 3D Choreographer, remained lost for a few more years until a build of it was found by a Reddit user in 2021.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends:
  • Rumors of Wolf Tracer being a money laundering scheme have circulated the internet since the special's first airing. It's never been confirmed, but Colin's shady history suggests there's some truth behind it.
  • Grandma's being The Unintelligible is often rumored to be the result of her audio recordings being corrupted, and the producers being too cheap to redub them. Debra Wilson has confirmed this to be untrue, and that her performance in the film is the one she was instructed to give. Additionally, direct-to-digital recording was not yet the industry standard approach, with voice tracks usually being recorded to either magnetic tape or Minidisc, meaning that even if the files were corrupted it would have been a trivially easy task to make new ones.
• Produced by Cast Member: Nancy Cartwright is credited as a producer.
• Reclusive Artist: The special's director, Colin Slater, has a quiet presence on the internet. His Twitter account reportedly featured many retweets from The Church of Scientology and it's known he had connections to the church, which explains how Nancy Cartwright (also a member) got involved. It was revealed in a Twitter post from 2019 that Slater had died of a stroke. However the few people who managed to find info on or make contact with him during his lifetime have a few... interesting recounts about it.
• Stillborn Franchise: There were meant to be more specials (the end credits promise an Easter-themed movie called A Bunny's Tale), but thanks to the failure of this one all hopes of a franchise have completely vanished. A soundtrack album featuring Whitney Houston was also to be released, but that too was scrapped. Though 2003's Wolf Tracer's Dinosaur Island (by the same people, including managing to somehow get Mark Hamill back) may be considered a Spiritual Successor.
• Troubled Production: Animating the special was no easy task, hence why it came out the way it did. Highlights from the Polygon article on the special's making include:
  • The software used, 3D Choreographer, was never meant for film and television production. Described by the developers as “an animation program designed for non-artists,” it was a way to create simple animation using pre-designed models for use in PowerPoint presentations and mid-1990s internet. Because of this, the software's functions proved to be very limited. The animators found out that it doesn't let you model new character designs, forcing the studio to send the concept art to the software developers so they could create custom models specifically for the special's production. The animators were horrified when the resulting models came back.
  • Another setback with the software was its pre-programmed animation trajectory, which could not be changed or altered. This is why there are strange edits and scene continuity errors throughout; it was the only way they could cut out the unwanted parts of the animation.
  • One of the animators grew increasingly frustrated with the poor graphics and the limited functions with the software, to the point that he told the investors who financially backed the special that they were being ripped off (up to this point they haven't seen a single footage of the special). When Colin Slater found out he promptly fired him, forcing the remaining animators to work overtime as the deadline was just days away.
  • Speaking of deadline, they only had four months to animate the special. It was such a tight deadline there was no time to storyboard at all. Surprisingly, they were able to deliver the special on-time and on-budget.
  • Despite getting screen credit for directing Colin Slater was very hands off during the production, to the point that the animators didn't get any direction at all. Making it worse was that, aside from the very basic instructions, he was not an expert on how the animation software worked, forcing the animators to figure it out themselves as there was no one they could ask for help. As an inside joke, when the "Directed by Colin Slater" card came up in the closing credits they animated a snowman winking in response.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Whitney Houston was initially considered to record a soundtrack for the radio as a tie-in for the special's airing. While the album was released as Through a Child's Eye, she had no involvement in the final outcome.
  • You know how Ricky's grandma sometimes speaks proper English, and yet the other time speaks in incomprehensible gibberish? Well, according to the daughter of the film's producer, she was supposed to speak actual words. It's unclear when or why this was changed (and it certainly wasn't changed by the producer, who didn't see the film until it was finished), but Grandma's voice actor confirmed in an interview that she was asked to give that kind of performance.
    Debra Wilson: They were like, "Great-grandma is disheveled; she can’t get her words together." So that had to be in the script. That’s not audio. That’s me. I can tell the difference. That’s me.
• Working Title: The Bash Street Kids and The Rhapsody Street Kids, both of which had to be changed after they were found to already be copyrighted by other companies. The former one may not have been coincidental, given that Colin Slater was originally from the UK, where The Bash Street Kids are regulars in The Beano, and both works feature characters called Smithy/Smiffy — albeit the Beano version is a Cloud Cuckoolander rather than the annoying prankster seen here.

---