Trivia / The Little Drummer Boy

• Acting for Two: The Three Kings and their servant discussing how to replace their weary camel — are all Paul Frees.
• Children Voicing Children: Aaron is voiced by 13-year-old Teddy (later Ted) Eccles in the original special, and by 15-year-old David Jay in the sequel.
• Channel Hop: Both Little Drummer Boy specials were produced by Rankin/Bass, but the first one was retained by General Electric when it spun-off R-B to an independent company again in 1974 (after having bought the studio several years after the special produced), who in question produced the follow-up The Little Drummer Boy II. Warner Bros., who owns the post-spinoff R-B library, thus owns the second special while the first one is controlled by NBCUniversal along with the rest of the pre-spinoff R-B library.
• Reality Subtext: Throughout the special, Aaron is embittered with hatred for all humans due to the murder of his parents until playing for the newborn Jesus. When his lamb is healed, Greer Carson's narration mentions that "Aaron's heart was filled with joy and love. And he knew at last that the hate he had carried there was wrong. As ALL hatred will ever be wrong." A valid point regardless of when it aired, but the moral seems especially directed to those struggling with the horrible events of 1968 (a year that saw, among other things, the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King that April; followed exactly two months later by the assassination of New York Senator and Democratic Presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy along with race riots following Dr. King's death, and another riot at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, instigated by the Youth International Party/Yippies, who instigated a similar riot at Disneyland two years later; the year would've been viewed with scorn had it not been for Apollo 8).
• Release Date Change: Book II almost made its DVD debut in 2008, as part of the Classic Christmas Favorites boxset. However, Warner ended up removing it to make room for Pinocchio's Christmas. This pushed back any official DVD release of Book II until 2012, when the Warner Archive included both it and Pinocchio's Christmas in the Rankin/Bass TV Holiday Favorites Collection.
• Sequel Gap: Book II came out eight years after its predecessor. Since Ted Eccles hit puberty during that timespan, David Jay takes his place as Aaron's voice actor.
• Screwed by the Network: As of 2015, ABC Family/Freeform has taken to cutting out the song "When The Goose Is Hanging High", presumably to retain precious advertising time. This means that the movie transitions from Aaron fleeing into the desert following his parents' murder, to the scene in Jerusalem. When AMC acquired the rights to all post-1974 Rankin-Bass specials in 2018, the song was restored in Freeform's airings.