I keep hearing that this film was "Edited for violence" & is missing a few minutes of original material. Does anyone have any more knowledge of this or even better know where to find any of the cut scenes?
(I know it's a long shot but hey you never know)
I did a TON of research on this years ago, and I even emailed a guy connected with Rankin-Bass, and they all said the same thing: there were no deleted scenes.
Keep in mind, Rankin-Bass was in the business of making TV specials for children. So it had to be a specific length (despite what IMDB says, there is no record of it being released theatrically) and animation was so expensive it was unlikely they would have fully animated something that was cut out later.
Also, the script was written by the same guy that wrote "Little Drummer Boy", just to give you an indication of where they were coming from.
Many sequences in the movie match up with parts of "The Dragon and the George" and anything that doesn't is a little more "Disneyfied". "The Dragon and the George" itself wasn't particularly violent, and neither was "The Flight of Dragons" (which was just a science paper).
There IS a TV syndicated version of the movie that had the drinking part cut out, but that's a little different. ;)
Honestly, some dude posted this whole "deleted scenes" rumour to his website years ago, and I've never been about to corroborate that information anywhere.