I’m just gonna come out and say it, friends: there are not enough great Easter specials. There are a billion Christmas TV specials, and a healthy number for Halloween, but other holidays often get the short end of the stick. Were it up to me, every single holiday – including Happy Honda Days– would come with at least two specials, one by Rankin and Bass and another starring the Peanuts gang. 

However, that doesn’t mean there are NO Easter Specials, and so this week’s Geek Punditry is going to take a look at some of the very few that are out there and worth your time…and believe it or not, the Christmas Kings at Rankin and Bass actually took not one, but THREE swings at Easter Specials.

First up was Here Comes Peter Cottontail from 1971. In this special, narrated by Danny Kaye, Peter Cottontail (Casey Kasem) is tapped to become the new Easter Bunny when the incumbent is retiring. Before he takes the job, though, the Easter Bunny is approached by a bitter bunny named Irontail (Vincent FREAKING Price) who hates Easter. What’s more, he’s got a loophole to prevent Peter’s appointment to the top post – apparently the rules say that the Chief Easter Bunny will be whoever delivers the most eggs. He proposes a contest between himself and Peter, but roofies Peter’s rooster with magic bubblegum, preventing it from waking him up on the day of the big delivery competition. Ironheart has only to deliver a single egg to win the title of Chief Easter Bunny. 

As Irontail immediately sets out to ruin Easter, Peter runs into Danny Kaye’s character, an inventor named Seymour Sassafras. Seymour hooks up Peter with his time machine, piloted by a caterpillar with a French accent, and sends him back to try to win the contest. But Irontail manages to knock them off course, sending Peter on a trip through time, colliding with every major holiday in his quest to become the true Easter Bunny.

There’s a lot to unpack here.

Anybody who thought Barry Allen had a monopoly on screwing up the entire timeline because he tries to use time travel to fix his own screw-up needs to watch this special. It’s pretty bonkers, even considering this is the studio that had Rudolph similarly travel from one time island to another in order to find Baby New Year. But the best reason to watch this special is to listen to Vincent Price himself hamming it up as the villain of a kid’s Easter special. He’s deliciously evil, and somehow absolutely perfect. I wish we’d gotten more of him and a little less of the singing French caterpillar.

Rankin and Bass’s second Easter special came in 1976 with The First Easter Rabbit. This film is a loose adaptation of Margery Williams’s children’s book, The Velveteen Rabbit, which I remember reading as a child and finding remarkably depressing. This version is considerably peppier. When a little girl contracts scarlet fever, all of her clothes and toys are tossed aside to be burned, including her beloved stuffed rabbit, Stuffy. A passing sprite named Calliope sees the bunny and takes pity on it, bringing it to life and whisking it off to the North Pole, where the now-living Stuffy meets Santa Claus. Santa convinces him to take on some of the responsibility for the Easter deliveries, but Stuffy winds up in battle with a sort of snow demon named Zero, because there were a LOT of those in the Rankin and Bass universe. The special has a happier ending than the book, if I recall correctly, but it’s still probably my least-favorite of Rankin and Bass’s Easter specials.

In-between the other two is the 1977 special The Easter Bunny is Comin’ to Town. In this one, Fred Astaire returns as S.D. Kluger, the mailman who told us Santa Claus’s origin story in Santa Claus is Coming’ to Town. He does it again, this time weaving the tale of an orphaned bunny rabbit named Sunny and how he grew in prominence to become THE one and only Easter Bunny, even overcoming the machinations of an evil bear named Gadzooks who hates ALL holidays. This one is almost a beat-by-beat knock-off of the earlier Santa Claus special. It’s not just the same idea, it’s almost the same PLOT. I suppose a little kid doesn’t notice, but as an adult who spends – I’m going to be honest here – entirely too much time analyzing the structure of children’s animated specials, it stands out like a fireworks display. But what I find amusing is that, despite this being the Easter special most directly copying one of the Rankin and Bass Christmas specials, it’s the ONLY one that doesn’t include an appearance by Santa Claus.

I’m more enamored with a non-Rankin and Bass special, one featuring the star of the recent cultural phenomenon The Day the Earth Blew Up: A Looney Tunes Movie. I refer, of course, to the 1980 TV special Daffy Duck’s Easter Egg-Citement (or sometimes just The Daffy Duck Easter Special). In this era, there were several Looney Tunes compilation specials – a new cartoon frame story wrapped around classic cartoons from the Looney Tunes catalogue. I like this one mostly because it’s a sort of take on the greatest Daffy cartoon of all time, Duck Amuck. Not unlike that earlier masterpiece, in this special Daffy finds himself at odds with the animator of the cartoon itself. This time, he’s trying to get things suitably in the season for Easter, but stuff keeps happening. As with all of these compilation shorts, the best thing about this is revisiting the classic cartoons…but this isn’t bad.

Perhaps the most famous Easter special of them all, though, is the 1974 epic It’s the Easter Beagle Charlie Brown. With Easter approaching, the Peanuts gang is caught up in a series of semi-related storylines, kind of like a Robert Altman film. Peppermint Patty is determined to teach her sidekick Marcie the proper way to dye Easter Eggs, but one misunderstanding after another keeps throwing things into chaos. Snoopy is trying to help his buddy Woodstock build a new birdhouse. Lucy, meanwhile, is planning to win the big Easter Egg hunt by hiding the eggs herself, carefully documenting the location of each. As all of this is going on, Linus constantly tells everyone that they’re wasting their time, because the Easter Beagle is going to take care of everything. As usual, everyone dismisses him except for Sally, although even she’s somewhat skeptical, still remembering the fiasco that happened at Halloween.

There are a few things about this special I find particularly interesting. I’ve always thought it was funny that Linus – the wisest and most philosophical of Charles Schulz’s characters – has such a fundamental misunderstanding of not one, but TWO major holidays. I also like the callback to the Great Pumpkin special, one of the few such callbacks in the major Peanuts specials. Similar to Linus, Marcie is usually painted as the voice of reason whenever Peppermint Patty starts going overboard, so seeing her constantly screw up their efforts to do something as simple as preparing Easter Eggs is actually really funny. But perhaps the best gag in the whole cartoon comes when the gang goes down to the store to pick up some more eggs (following Marcie’s most recent debacle) only to find the whole place already decorated for Christmas.

As you can see, if you’re looking for a truly legendary Easter special to share with your kids…well, the pickins are a little slim. We need more. And I’m not even sure where to find most of these specials these days – I own most of them on DVD, but I don’t know if those DVDs are still available. You can possibly find some of them on YouTube, and the Charlie Brown specials have been in the nefarious domain of Apple TV for a few years now, but other than that, we’re really at quite a loss. So my special message, to the animation studios of the world, is to give us a few more great Easter specials next year. Let’s have the Addams Family grappling with a holiday so dedicated to pastels, let’s see Batman chasing down the White Rabbit on the streets of Gotham City…shoot, I’d even settle for something with Minecraft. I don’t really know much about Minecraft, but I’m led to believe there’s a chicken involved, which certainly implies the presence of eggs.

Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. Sorry to cut this short, but he’s got his own eggs to dye.