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“Puff the Magic Dragon”: A magical mix of writing, animating, and other

fancy stuff

A dragon lives forever but not so little boys

Painted wings and giant rings make way for other toys.

On an overcast afternoon in 1958, a college student named Lenny Lipton

typed those lines into a friend’s typewriter. He had become saddened after

realizing that the days of his innocent childhood were gone and always would be,

and had been reading poems about a “Really-O Truly-O Dragon” by Ogden Nash.

Thankfully for those of us who consider this song to be one of our favorites now,

the friend with the typewriter was Peter Yarrow, of “Peter, Paul, and Mary” and he

quickly wrote music for Lenny’s poem and shared it with the world. In 1963, “Puff

the Magic Dragon” reached #2 in the charts (Appendix A).

15 years later, an animated short film premiered on TV by the same name,

and this too reached into the hearts of viewers young and want-to-be young.

However, the complete story of how this animated film came to be and why it

came to be that way involves more than just an anecdote. The winning
combination of a creative studio called Wolf-Marikuma-Swenson, an “animagical”

writer named Romeo Muller, and a broadcasting company that welcomed animated

children’s TV specials led to the creation of this timeless animation.

By the time Muller was asked to turn Peter’s song into a 40-minute narrative

film, he and his talents were already well established in the animation world. His

career began years earlier, as an 11-year-old amateur puppeteer in Long Island.

Muller would create the puppets, write the scripts, and voice them during his

shows. He later joined an acting troupe where he began as just an actor but soon

became a director, writer, and producer too. Muller was a large man at 6’2” and

200 lbs, so even though his acting skills were equally strong, he decided to focus

his attention on writing instead. This turned out to be a very good decision indeed

for millions of TV viewers.

In 1963, Directors Arthur Rankin, Jr., and Jules Bass asked to meet with Muller

about the screenplay for “Return to Oz,” which would become the first Rankin-Bass

television special (but certainly not the last). This pivotal meeting sparked a

relationship that would last for years and spawn a number of animated children’s

TV specials, including “Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town,” “Frosty the Snowman,” and

“The Hobbit.”

During Christmas of 2004, the most famous of these TV specials, “Rudolph

the Red-nosed Reindeer,” will celebrate its 40th anniversary as the longest running
holiday special, and CBS will once again broadcast the film, and it will, as always,

be received warmly by both loyal fans and new watchers (who perhaps won’t be

able to express their appreciation more than a “ra,ra” yet). One of these loyal fans

once wrote Muller a Christmas card that said, “...Those specials were as much a

tradition in my parent’s home as the Christmas tree itself, and have become a

tradition with my own children. You must be very proud of the joy you have

brought to children all over, even me, a simple girl from the Mid-West. Without

knowing it, your visit to our homes each Christmas through your specials, was just

as important as a visit from Grandma and Grandpa. My son thinks you are the

greatest thing since sliced bread and in all honesty, his mom thinks so too.” In fact,

Muller was so associated with the warm holiday specials he scripted that he was

nicknamed “Mr. Santa Claus.” The sentiments of peace and happiness that are so

jubilantly expressed during the Christmas season were what Muller tried to express

year-wide in his scripts – and even the villains couldn’t escape his good feelings.

“He never killed off the villains. He would make them look ridiculous or reform

them in the end,” explained his best friend Ken Donnelly.

In the transformation from a short folk song to an entire narrative film,

Muller’s distinctive sentimental style is quite evident. The song is inherently a sad

one, at least for those with fond memories of childhood, but most viewers of the

film can tell you that when they turned off the TV, they felt more happiness than

sadness. Somehow, Muller managed to tell the tale of a boy who loses the simple

joys of childhood like (non-)imaginary dragons in a way that makes us smile in the
end. And just like Donnelly claimed, all the would-be villains in “Puff” were either

made to look ridiculous, like the clouds that were too jealous to let the little star

twinkle higher than them, or more often, reformed, like the pirate who comes to

realize that he is in fact a master chef (Appendix B, Fig. 4) later goes on to cure

other would-be villains, the Living Sneezes. In a world where the more typical story

centers around the hero killing the villain, it’d be beneficial to have more Mullers to

show the alternative ways of dealing with would-be villains.

While Muller was responsible for giving “Puff” its script and sentiment, the

creative team of Fred Wolf, Jimmy Murakami, and Charles Swenson was responsible

for giving “Puff” its distinctive style of animation. Before signing on to animate

“Puff,” the Wolf-Murakami team had worked on animated TV commercials and

theatrical shorts, including an Academy Award winner called “The Box.” Those

shorts were shown at international festivals and appreciated by the animation

world, but it wasn’t until 1971 that Wolf became a household name. It was then

that ABC aired “The Point,” the first animated feature ever made for television.

Similar to “Puff,” this feature was a fable about a boy learning about the (round

and pointy) world, and was accompanied by songs from a famous

singer/songwriter – in this case, Harry Nilsson. However, “The Point” is a more

satirical film than “Puff”, with subtleties that will go unnoticed by children but

understood fully by adults. Wolf actually pen animated the entire film, a rare

accomplishment for any animator. The style of drawing can be described as

whimsical, simplistic, and ridiculous at times, with a soft line and fat, lumpy bodies

(Appendix C).

Together with Swenson, who would later become known for his work on

“Rugrats,” Wolf created a similar look for “Puff.” The characters have either lumpy

bodies or bodies exaggerated to the extreme in another direction. This is seen in

the first scene, where three doctors give their professional opinion on Jackie

Draper’s dire state. The first doctor is basically shaped like a human ball, the

second is so tall that he towers over everyone in the scene and apparently, so tall

that the shape of his thin body undulates like a wave, and the third doctor is of

medium height and chubby (Appendix B, Fig. 1). The background scenes look like

they’ve been shaded with an airbrush, with darkness at the edge of each object

leading to a bright highlight in the middle, adding to the overall round look to the

animation (Appendix B, Figs. 2-3).

The transitions and “effects” are considerably primitive in “Puff,” but they

are still both effective and memorable. People, things, and dragons change scale to

fit the confines of the current scene, without explanation or implied magic. A little

sparkle or bright flash is enough to transition any new element into or out of a

scene. Through Puff’s bubble, a crudely drawn crayon drawing of the “scary ocean”

is animated into raging sea waves ridden with pirates, sharks, and a soundtrack.

The most radical change in style throughout the film comes in the Honah Lee

scene, when it changes from a mostly linear narrative to something resembling a

music video. While the lyrics to “Weave Me the Sunshine” are displayed on the

screen in a bulbous lettering, the film bombards you continually with new scenes,

some of them more abstract and artistic than anything seen earlier in the film, and

finds creative transitions from one scene to the next, so that you’re quickly

surprised to see that one object has morphed into another.

“Puff” was created and aired in a time when children’s television specials had

become the most time efficient and cost efficient format for animation. When the

TV first became popular in the 1920s and started drawing audiences away from

movie theatres, children’s shows began to include animated cartoons, like Disney’s

Mickey Mouse. In the 1950s, Hanna-Barbera Productions became the first studio to

realize the potential profit gain in producing animations solely for television,

specifically in the evening “family hour” time. Hanna-Barbera created a huge hit

with “The Flintstones,” still popular in reruns today. By the time the concept of

“Saturday morning cartoons” had permeated the TV-using, baby-making

households of America, Hanna-Barbera had created a monopoly on the cartoons

for TV market. As with most monopolies, this soon meant that the quality of the

Hanna-Barbera cartoons, and thus the majority of cartoons on TV, decreased

rapidly.

Because of the labor-intensive process of creating cartoons for TV, it was

difficult for new companies to even try to compete with Hanna-Barbera’s low-

quality cartoons. So while most studios stood by and quietly watched the masses
engorge themselves on embarrassing excuses for animation, animator Chuck Jones

refused to compromise. He smartly realized that if he didn’t have the money to

produce a full-length feature, and he didn’t have the labor to produce 20

animations each year, then he could produce periodic “TV specials” instead. These

specials were aired during primetime television, and so had also to appeal to

adults and obtain high ratings. CBS in particular was a station that embraced the

concept of the TV special, allowing many of them to become cherished classics.

Most of Romeo Muller’s films were originally aired on CBS including, of course, “Puff

the Magic Dragon.”

It is fortunate that the histories of Lenny Lipton’s poem, Pete Yarrow’s

songwriting, Romeo Muller’s storytelling, Fred Wolf’s stylistic animating, and CBS’

appreciation of the TV special format should coincide to produce “Puff the Magic

Dragon,” so that we will always have proof of their co-existing talents.

Appendix A:
“Puff the Magic Dragon”:
by Peter Yarrow and Leonard Lipton [2,2]
Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Hanalei,
Little Jackie Paper loved that rascal Puff
and brought him strings and sealing wax and other fancy stuff.
CHORUS
Oh! Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Hanalei,
Puff, the magic dragon lived by the sea
And frolicked in the autumn mist in a land called Hanalei.
Together they would travel on a boat with billowed sail,
Jackie kept a lookout perch on Puff’s gigantic tail,
Noble kings and princes would bow whene'er they came,
Pirate ships would low'r their flags when PUFF roared out his name.
CHORUS
A dragon lives forever but not so little boys
Painted wings and giant strings make way for other toys.
One great night it happened, Jackie Paper came no more
And Puff that mighty dragon, he ceased his fearless roar.
His head was bent in sorrow - green scales fell like rain,
Puff no longer went to play along the cherry lane.
Without his lifelong friend Puff could not be brave
So Puff that mighty dragon, sadly slipped into his cave.
CHORUS
 Appendix B:
Scenes from “Puff the Magic Dragon”:

Fig. 1

Fig. 2.

Fig. 3

Fig. 4
 Appendix C:
Scenes from “The Point”: