Tolkien had some thoughts on how he had to portray dragons, much like how a vampire is a monstrous representation of evil nobles, by them literally feeding and devouring their underlings.
Dragons are greedy hoarding monsters. Obviously and this remains true in Rankin Bass' animated feature and in the book. Dragons have either taken this form or the form of a living catastrophe.
But while the book had time to show case it and the Silmarillion revels it to be a trait shared by dragons like Glaurung whose eyes allow him to toy with the minds of the heroes.
The Rankin Bass production lost this feature in translation, Syntagmatically between them we get the broad strokes correct. A fire breathing lizard who hoards wealth. But like a vampire that sparkles in the sun, a dragon that does not prey on greed. Whisper in your ear that your dwarven companions are cheating you! they will claim your share with cartage costs and evil tricks! You have a less mythological dragon.
Paradigmatically with culture id say dumber dragons like smaug who just get played by heroes and dealt death are most common in telling such as Rankin Bass. Like video games that just make the dragon, the scally enemy, who might have a nice reward for killing him. DND 1e's monster manual which came out the same year as Rankin Bass's version and we see how tolkien influences it by reading the read dragon stats. A chaotic evil being with exceptional intellect that knows what is in its hoard to the last coin, or cup in our favorite burglar's case. After the stats it reccomends how to run/play the dragon as a DM(dungeon master) engange from above the foolish monkeys with flaming breath and magic spell before getting into melee. That's how the designers saw dragons, many dms likely ran it that way at first. I assume over time it wasnt very fun for fighters and barbarians so these how to run them parts are gone now.
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