The Great Rupert




You can call it "Rupert The Great", you can call it "A Christmas Wish", you can call it "Willie The Squowse" but I call it one of my favorite movies! There are tons of free public domain versions floating around, and all of them are of very low quality, both audio and video. Despite this, I bought several DVDs in the hopes it would be better. FINALLY, I got a hold of a DVD copy with the re-title "A Christmas Wish" and it looked and sounded GREAT! It had both the B&W and a colorized version. The colorized one wasn't very good, so I'm glad they included BOTH versions. Terry Moore supplied some fun informative commentary. If you are a George Pal or Jimmy Durante fan you'll love this. Heard they used real dead stuffed squirrels for the animation in addition to some live shots!


There's a free version of the entire movie at Internet Archive that has pretty good video but the audio is a little muffled. 


The Great Rupert, is a 1950 comedy family film, produced by George Pal, directed by Irving Pichel and starring Jimmy Durante, Tom Drake and Terry Moore. It is based on a story, written by Ted Allan, which has also been published as a children's book under the title "Willie the Squowse". (source: Wiki)