The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus is a 1902 children's book, written by L. Frank Baum and illustrated by Mary Cowles Clark.
Baum pictures the forest as a mighty and grand forest, with "big tree-trunks, standing close together, with their roots intertwining below the earth and their branches intertwining above it;" a place of "queer, gnarled limbs" and "bushy foliage" where the rare sunbeams cast "weird and curious shadows over the mosses, the lichens and the drifts of dried leaves.
As a baby, Santa Claus is found in the Forest of Burzee by Ak: Master Woodsman of the World (a supreme immortal) and placed in the care of the lioness Shiegra, but he thereupon is adopted by the wood nymph Necile.
Because he cannot reside in Burzee as an adult, he settles in the nearby Laughing Valley of Hohaho where the immortals regularly assist him and Peter Knook gives him a little cat named Blinky.
Claus presents the first one to Bessie Blithesome, a local noblewoman, after consulting with Necile and the queen of the fairies about whether he should give toys to wealthy children.
With the aid of the Asiatic dragons, the three-eyed giants of Tartary, the goozzle-goblins, and the black demons from Patalonia, the awgwas believe their might superior to that of the immortals as they fight them in the war.
In restriction of the deer's service to a single day annually, their supervisor Wil Knook decides upon Christmas Eve, two weeks away from the hearing, believing this will mean a year without taking the reindeer from their homes; but the fairies retrieve the toys the aaqwgwas stole and bring them to Claus, allowing Claus's first Christmas to proceed in spite of Wil.
At the end of the book, the immortal Santa Claus takes on four special deputies: Wisk the fairy, Peter the knook, Kilter the pixie, and Nuter the ryl.
Larry Kenney was the Commander of the Wind Demons, who initially served as a devil's advocate to Ak at the fateful hearing, but soon became the Immortal most approving of giving the Mantle to Claus.
Screenwriter Julian P. Gardner created a musical production number, "Big Surprise" as the children at Weekum's orphanage plead with Santa Claus for more toy cats.
Other songs include the chorus "Babe in the Woods" and the powerful chant, "Ora e Sempre (Today and Forever)" representing the immortals.
[7] The Mike Young production, which also uses an ampersand for the title, features Robby Benson as "Nicholas", who plays a bigger part in this film than in the earlier version.
While the Rankin-Bass production made the sequence with the Awgwas a centerpiece, in this film, they become running villains, and the story is structured around the upcoming battle.
LaMarche also plays an unidentified Bo, an argumentative figure at the film's climax, which is crosscut with the Spirit of Death's approach to Nicholas's house.
Shiegra does not accompany Nicholas to Laughing Valley, but visits him at his home when she is near death to say goodbye, after which he creates a large monument in her honor.
The biggest change is the transformation of Wisk into a Brian Froud-designed long-tailed Pixie (Carlos Alazraqui), introduced early in the film and serving as comic relief.
A significant thematic change is Nicholas spreading information about the immortals far and wide, to the point he never coins the term "dolly", just mass-produces "Neciles".
Dixie Carter portrayed Necile and Hal Holbrook played Ak, who chooses Christmas as the day of Claus's yearly rides for its significance, much to the delight of Wil Knook, for the same reasoning as in the book.
The Gnome King has been omitted from most other adaptations, presumably to avoid confusion with the malevolent character in Return to Oz, though an unidentified figure voiced by Peter Newman appears on the council over immortality in the Rankin-Bass version.
[10] The script is written by Jake Thornton and Ben Lustig and is set to be directed by Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg.