by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After that NBC showed a rerun of How the Grinch Stole
Christmas! (the exclamation point is
in Dr. Seuss’s original title), originally made in 1966 and featuring Boris
Karloff as both the overall narrator of the story and the voice of the Grinch —
which enabled him to do his warm, lovable, comforting voice and his sinister villain’s voice alternately in the
same project. I hadn’t seen this one start-to-finish in years but I enjoyed it
— particularly for the spectacular sight gags created by animator and
co-director Chuck Jones, the genius behind the Bugs Bunny and Road Runner
cartoons (so he can be forgiven the misbegotten 1970 MGM feature The Phantom
Tollbooth, which TCM showed on
Thanksgiving Day and which Charles, our friend Peter and I watched about half
of before getting bored and turning it off). Much of Grinch is un-narrated and carried mainly by Eugene
Poddany’s musical score and Jones’ incredible sight gags, and it was also nice
to look it up on imdb.com and find that the voice of little Cindy Lou Who was
June Foray — who was also the voice of Rocky the Flying Squirrel on the Rocky
and Bullwinkle show and the villainous
priestess from India in the 1953 film Sabaka (which also starred Boris Karloff, so this was a
sort of reunion for them!). The songs by Albert Hague with lyrics by Ted “Dr.
Seuss” Geisel (“Seuss” was his given middle name) are infectious — the Grinch’s theme song is
especially fun (and though it’s sung by Thurl Ravenscroft one could readily
imagine Karloff doing it himself) — and Jones, who co-directed with Ben Washam,
deserves credit for combining his artistic style with the incredibly
distinctive drawings of Geisel/“Seuss.” And of course there’s the famous anecdote that Karloff, upon winning the Grammy Award for the release of the film's soundtrack on record, looked at the award — a model of an old-time gramophone — and said, “It looks like a doorstop.”
