Mystery Solved! - Korean Rudolph Traffic

Aha!

As my longtime reader knows, for about a year now, I've been getting pretty much daily traffic from Korean search engine naver.com. on searches for "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer". This was perplexing, but lacking any written Korean-language skills, and any real motivation, I failed to figure out why this might be. Judging by the exitramp posts I found on Naver, it looked like the rolled out a blog search in 2005, and just indexed every major blog platform around that time, and exitramp got indexed. (Original Rudolph post here)

"But why", I wondered, "Why were so many RoK-ans searching for "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer?" Luckily, this cold, rainy December eve gave me the opportunity and the motivation to find the answer.

Turns out that there's a superstar cutie-pie pop sensation, BoA who did a cover of the classic holiday tune. I can't find the album on her wikipedia discography, but you can hear a sample here.



Well, mystery solved, BoA is now officially my favorite RoK musician.

Technorati Tags: BoA, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, naver.com

Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer

Last night, I went out and bought the classic Bass-Rankin "Frosty" and "Rudolph" on DVD, and my girlfriend and I spent the evening making home-made Bailey's-style Irish cream liqueur, then watching those Christmas classics. I hadn't seen either of them in years, so I was looking forward to seeing them as an adult.

Rudolph, from the classic Rankin-Bass classic holiday TV show.

The one thing which struck both of us was the fact that, in Rudolph, Santa really comes across as being a total dick. As soon as Rudolph's fake nose pops off, during the Reindeer games, Santa disses him. After listening to the elves do their special song for him, he slams the performance saying it needs work.

Admittedly, he's supposed to be worried sick over the fact that the huge snowstorm is threatening to force him to cancel Christmas, but still. They portray him not as an otherwise-Jolly, but troubled Santa, but more of a crotchety, autocratic cobag. I wonder how many kids were subliminally conditioned towards anxiety about not pissing Santa off by the endless repetitions of "Rudolph" throughout the years.

At least in Frosty, Santa was mainly portrayed in a more standard Jolly Old Elf character. Although, at the end, they did leave Karen on the roof of her house with no apparent way down....