12/22/22: A 39-AND-A-HALF FOOT POLE
12/22/22: A 39-AND-A-HALF FOOT POLE
The Drawl on "How the Grinch Stole Christmas!", with Liner Notes
Hey y’all,
Here’s another episode of THE DRAWL. If you don’t want to hear me sing, the transcript is below the video. A set of LINER NOTES (with extra facts and insights) round things out.
Published in 1957— Dr. Seuss’s “How the Grinch Stole Christmas!” is the tale of a disheveled, paranoid hermit—driven mad by the neighboring town and its love of Christmas.
But as Seuss’s book climbed the sales charts, the golden age of animation saw a rapid, seismic shift away from the silver screen. With theatrical animated shorts doomed, the Looney Tunes all-time winningest coach, Director Chuck Jones, made the jump to television.
Spurred by the surprise success of “A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS”, Jones was eager to adapt the work of his old Army pal and “Private SNAFU” collaborator, Dr. Seuss. But Seuss, however, needed serious convincing. His experiences had gone so poorly that he’d sworn off Hollywood altogether. Besides, the expected requirement of any adaptation would involve music— and Seuss questioned how Chuck Jones could pull that off without overtly religious or commercial overtones.
But Jones argued that carols sung in Suessian nonsense made just about as much sense to modern ears as Latin, and went so far as to have renowned composer Albert Hague create them. The result was so reassuring, that Seuss even sat down and penned the lyrics to “You’re a Mean One Mister Grinch”himself.
(Continued below image… )
Now working closely together with the author, Jones storyboarded and expanded the Grinch to fit a proposed half-hour special. That small sample of what could be— turned Television Network executives so ravenous, that CBS eventually dished out a budget of $315,000. Making it the most expensive half-hour of television ever produced at the time.
With Boris “Frankenstein’s Monster” Karloff as the narrator and Grinch, and Thurl “my voice sounds like my name” Ravenscroft singing— the half-hour special, garnered 38 MILLION VIEWERS in its debut showing, and went on to become a perennial network classic.
LINER NOTES:
A few things that didn’t make the cut of the episode:
- As I said Chuck Jones and Dr. Seuss (aka Theodore Geisel) worked together on a series of animated movies for the propaganda wing of the US Army back in World War 2. Jones as a director and animator and Seuss as a writer. Their big collaboration was a cartoon called PRIVATE SNAFU, which is of course an acronym for “Situation Normal, All Fucked Up”.
-The Hollywood experience that soured Suess was a film he created and scripted called “The 5,000 Fingers of Doctor T”. It’s apparently about a boy who dreams himself into a fantasy world ruled by a diabolical music teacher, who enslaves children to practice forever on a giant piano. Dr. T sounds like the Darkseid of sheet music.
-After leaving Looney Tunes and Warner Brothers, Jones was actually at MGM making TOM AND JERRY cartoons for television. A likely Drawl ep on that one day.
- After a viewing of the complete color storyboards, famous advertising exec Leo Burnett wrote an effusive letter to his clients calling it “The best thing ever seen in this line”. That letter no doubt drove up the already steep asking price for the production rights.
- The Grinch was not originally green. That change was made by Jones as a way to take advantage of the popularity of color television sets.
-Max the dog was fleshed out by Jones to fill out the role of observer/victim, a mainstay he’d so successfully mastered with characters like PORKY PIG.
-After the success of Grinch, Seuss gave Jones the right to adapt all his books. Their next and only follow up project was “HORTON HEARS A WHO!”.
-In some real Mandela Effect kinda shit— there are two traditionally animated Grinch sequels written by Dr. Seuss, both made without Jones (At MARVEL PRODUCTIONS of all places).
-The first, “Halloween is Grinch Night” (1977), sounds like the title of a direct to VHS knock off of THE PURGE. There’s also an Into the Seuss-verse style crossover with “The Grinch Grinches the Cat in the Hat” (1982). Both of these are so vague and weirdly ephemeral that if you’d told me I’d dreamed them into being, I’d believe you.
Anyway, I hope y’all got as much enjoyment out of that as I did making it. Chuck Jones in particular is a huge influence on my art, and storytelling and sense of humor. So expect a lot of DRAWL coverage on him down the road.
More soon…
-j