Dr. Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (The Cat in the Hat Productions, MGM Television, MGM Animation/Visual Arts, 1966)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After last night’s episode of Jeopardy!, my husband Charles and I got a nice surprise: an NBC network showing of the 1966 half-hour TV Christmas fable How the Grinch Stole Christmas! Charles and I had already encountered the Grinch story on Christmas Eve, when we’d walked past the Old Globe Theatre in Balboa Park and posed for selfies in front of the big Grinch Christmas tree they put up every year for the holidays to promote their on-stage production of the classic “Dr. Seuss” (actually his real name was Theodor Seuss Geisel, and before he started writing children’s books he’d been an editorial cartoonist for the Left-wing daily PM in New York in the late 1930’s and early 1940’s, as “Ted Geisel”) tale. Earlier on Christmas day Charles had asked me to play the CD of the soundtrack to How the Grinch Stole Christmas, but then had me take it off after a few minutes when it turned out to be the soundtrack to the 2000 feature-length remake with Jim Carrey plastered with rubber appliances to play a live-action Grinch. Charles had hoped it would be the soundtrack of the original 1966 cartoon version with Boris Karloff as both the narrator and the Grinch, which was released as a record at the same time as the film and won Karloff a Grammy award. (When he received it – a statuette of an old-style wind-up phonograph – Karloff said, “It looks like a door-stop!”) So we got the unexpected and surprisingly welcome treat of getting to see and hear the Karloff original, co-directed by Chuck Jones, who’d worked at Warner Bros. in their cartoon department in the 1930’s, 1940’s and 1950’s and, among other things, had essentially created Bugs Bunny.

I’ve got an odd relationship with the works of Dr. Seuss; my mom couldn’t stand him and actually pulled me out of public school when in second grade we were being taught The Cat in the Hat. She loathed the book as being way too simple-minded – she taught both me and my brother to read when we were four, so when the Los Angeles Times did their big “Reading by Nine” campaign a few years ago, my reaction was, “Reading by nine? Way too late!” I didn’t develop any appreciation for Dr. Seuss at all until I started dating my girlfriend Cat in my early 20’s and she was a huge Seuss fan, turning me on to the progressive political messages in many of his works, notably the pro-environmentalist The Lorax. I think I first watched How the Grinch Stole Christmas! with her on a TV screening in the late 1970’s, and as an enormous Boris Karloff fan I was particularly attracted to his double casting as both narrator and Grinch. Actually, according to imdb.com, his “Grinch” voice was at least partly electronically created; directors Jones and Ben Washam had the sound crew tweak Karloff’s voice electronically so it would sound “grinchier” (to use the sort of crunchy expression Dave Hurwitz uses quite often on his “Classics Today!” raps on YouTube) as the Grinch than he did as the narrator. (It reminded me of the story Karloff biographer Donald F. Glut told that when he was offered the part of opera singer Gravelle in the 1936 film Charlie Chan at the Opera, he insisted on doing his own singing – but, though they may have told him they were using his voice, they hired a voice double for him anyway. That was something I hadn’t known until I posted an imdb.com “Trivia” post that said Karloff had done his own singing for the film – and another contributor corrected me and supplied the name of Karloff’s voice double, Tudor Williams.)

How the Grinch Stole Christmas! is mostly quite charming, and among the voice talents used on the soundtrack is June Foray as the two-year-old Cindy-Lou Who. Foray is best known as the voice of Rocky the Flying Squirrel in Jay Ward’s superb Rocky and Bullwinkle show, though she’d crossed paths with Karloff before in the 1953 film Sabaka, produced by a British company but actually shot in India. She played the bloodthirsty leader of a Hindu cult and Karloff was the Indian general trying to catch her and stop her from extorting the local peasants. How the Grinch Stole Christmas! is basically your usual bad-guy-who-hates-Christmas-sees-the-light-and-turns-good-at-the-end story, though there’s an implied progressive political message in that the Grinch and his faithful dog sidekick Max (the Grinch disguises himself as Santa Claus and Max dresses as a reindeer, though in one of the film’s better sight gags the reindeer antlers are too heavy for his head to support them and the Grinch has to cut them down) try to stop Christmas from coming to Whoville by stealing all the presents, toys and decorations, but Christmas comes all the same thanks to little two-year-old Cindy-Lou Who’s finding an ornament the Grinch left behind and all the Whoville residents getting together to sing “Welcome Christmas,” a song written especially for the film by Dr. Seuss, Albert Hague and Eugene Poddany, who conducted. I’d always assumed the opening words to this ditty were “Damu Dores,” and I never really understood what they meant (though, as British comedienne Anna Russell said of the Rhinemaidens’ song that opens Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen, “I won’t bother to translate it because it doesn’t mean anything”). This time around I looked them up on imdb.com and found they’re actually “Fah who foraze! Dah who doraze!” Though one thing I still get irked about in Dr. Seuss’s tales is his use of made-up words (like virtually all the toys the residents of Whoville play with) as well as fictional items like the “roast beast” that’s the centerpiece of their Christmas dinner, for the most part How the Grinch Stole Christmas! is a wonderfully charming and entertaining little film and one of Boris Karloff’s few credits from the last decade of his life (1960-1969) that he could have been genuinely proud of instead of clearly just doing it for the money!