Fridge Brilliance
- In the Rankin/Bass adaptation, when the young Claus travels the world with Great Ak and they arrive in Japan, the camera focuses on a towering statue of Gautama Buddha. This is fitting for reasons beyond establishing the scene's Asian setting. This version of Santa Claus shares some parallels with Siddhartha Gautama: he spends his childhood living a sheltered life with no knowledge of suffering, but then ventures into the outside world and is appalled by the hardships he sees, and so he leaves his home and establishes a new way of life, in which he strives to bring relief to the suffering people of the world (in this case by making children happy rather than by spiritual enlightenment).
