December 23rd, 2021 
Michael Lyons 
Today, the season doesn’t seem complete without at least one viewing of the iconic Christmas television special, Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas. That’s why it’s so hard to believe that when it was in production, the team bringing the beloved book to the screen couldn’t find a sponsor.
Legendary animator Chuck Jones, who directed The Grinch, had to pitch the story twenty-six times. Jones, who sadly passed away in 2002, remembered this in a 1996 interview. “In those days, the network wouldn’t accept something unless you had a sponsor,” he said. “So, I went to every one of the logical people, like the breakfast food and chocolate companies. I had done the storyboards, there were seventeen hundred drawings, and I went over that thing again and again. It got to the point where I could almost shut my eyes and say it!” Ironically, a sponsor for the anti-commercialism story was found in the Foundation for Full-Service Banks. This holiday season marks a milestone for this wondrous television special, as How The Grinch Stole Christmas celebrates its 55th anniversary.
In the 1950s, Theodore Geisel, better known to readers everywhere as Dr. Seuss, decided to write a book that would speak to the meaning of Christmas. Published in 1957 by Random House, How the Grinch Stole Christmas was a hit and, to date, has sold 7.5 million copies.
Jones had worked with Geisel before, they had met during their tenure collaborating on a series of training films for the Army during World War II. Years after, Jones was eager to bring the story of the Grinch to the screen.
During the early storyboard stages, a friendly argument erupted between Jones and Geisel over the look of the Grinch. “He contended that it looked like me,” laughed Jones, “and he may be right, I don’t know. I know it doesn’t look a lot like his. But what I was looking for was the ‘character.’ Animation to me has always been not a question of what a character looks like, but who the character is; Who is Bugs Bunny? Or Daffy? Or the Grinch? is what I was striving for.”
In the well-known story, the Grinch decides to end Christmas by “stealing it” from the small town of Whoville. He creeps into the Whos’ houses on Christmas Eve, swiping gifts, wreaths, trees, and decorations. When the townsfolk come out the next day, rejoicing and singing “Fah who for-aze, Dah who dor-aze,” instead of mourning, the Grinch realizes that “Christmas doesn’t come from a store” and it’s “a little bit more.”
One of the biggest story challenges during production was how to expand a book, that takes about twelve minutes to read, into a half-hour special. Jones solved this by staging a memorable, pantomime, sleigh ride as the Grinch and his dog, Max, attempt to get from the Grinch’s mountain-top cave to the town below. “I felt that the end of the first act would be the sleigh just starting downhill,” Jones explained. “I got that from when they had serials, and what they would try to do is have a moment in which there was impending action. So, when the Grinch starts down on the sleigh, the sleigh tips over, and then you go to the commercial, which you had to have. Then, I figured there needed to be some action. In the book, he starts and goes down there. When converting it to a screenplay, you need to have some pace, to pick it up, so that people will be happy that they waited through the commercial.”
Max’s actions and reactions in this scene were some of the highlights. One of Max’s other memorable moments is when the Grinch uses the put-upon dog as a dress model for creating a Santa Claus suit, and Max keeps listing to one side.
For this sequence, Jones remembered a moment from his childhood and was inspired by a small fox terrier that his father had tried to train. “Father, who was convinced he could teach any dog, or child, anything, balanced him and said, ‘Sit,’” recalled Jones. “The little dog hesitated and tried to balance, but he wasn’t built to balance, so he tipped over and fell. Father propped him up and said, ‘Sit.’ After a while, we were lying on the floor, watching this, and we couldn’t control our laughter. He said, ‘Go upstairs. I’ll deal with you later.’ We went to our bedrooms, and it didn’t help much because we could still hear father saying, ‘Sit,’ then there’d be hesitation and a ‘Thump!'”
Another inspiration for Jones and the other animators was Boris Karloff. The actor’s immediately recognizable voice, which was closely associated with horror films, was an inspired choice for the narrator and the voice of the Grinch.
Karloff came into the recording studio and read the entire story of How the Grinch Stole Christmas. However, after listening to the recording, Jones decided that the narrator’s voice should be different from the Grinch. He remembered: “We took the soundtrack and with all these miracles that sound men do, he separated all the Grinch’s lines and took all the ‘highs’ out of them, so it left this gravelly voice for the Grinch. But the narrator is Karloff. So, you have the sweetness and lovingness of him and the gravel voice of the Grinch.”
In addition to Karloff, two legendary animation voice actors are featured in the special. Thurl Ravenscroft, most famous for the voice of Kellogg’s Tony the Tiger, performs the now-famous centerpiece song, “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.” His baritone timbre and the “Seussian” lyrics immediately recall the world of the Grinch. Somehow, the singer’s name was omitted from the credits. When Geisel discovered this, he wrote a letter to members of the press requesting that they mention Ravenscroft’s performance.
Another familiar voice heard in The Grinch is one of animation’s most recognizable talents, June Foray, who voiced the innocent Cindy Lou Who.
This character provided a challenge for Jones and the animators. “If you look at the book, she looks like a bug,” laughed Jones of Cindy Lou Who. “That isn’t really what you want. It looks like a little fly character, which is probably all right for the book because he says what a nice girl she is. I had to show what a nice girl she is.” Jones once again turned to his personal life for inspiration and based Cindy Lou Who on his granddaughter, Valerie, to make the character more appealing.
How the Grinch Stole Christmas took Chuck Jones and his team of animators a year just to complete the twenty-two-minute special, as Jones didn’t want the story to be produced using limited animation. Standard television animation utilized approximately two-thousand drawings per show. The Grinch required twenty-five thousand.
Fifty-five years later, How the Grinch Stole Christmas is as anticipated each season as it was when CBS debuted it on December 18th, 1966. A big-budget, live-action version starring Jim Carrey bowed in 2000, becoming that year’s highest-grossing film. There was a popular stage musical that debuted on Broadway in 2006. A feature-length computer-animated version from Illumination entitled The Grinch came along in 2018. And every holiday season has been filled with countless Grinch merchandise, as the mean green one is found on T-shirts, ornaments, slippers, and limited-edition artwork.
From the Illumination feature version of “The Grinch” (2018)
In fact, just the name “Grinch” itself has become a part of our holiday lexicon for someone lacking Christmas spirit.
Reflecting on the enduring popularity of Dr. Seuss’ story twenty-five years ago when the television special was celebrating its thirtieth anniversary, Chuck Jones pointed to the fact that the story contains no mention of religion, allowing it to be “all denominational.”
He cited the lyrics of the show’s finale, “Welcome Christmas,” as an example, “‘Fah who for-aze, Dah who dor-aze’ is just as good as ‘Adeste Fideles,’” said Jones. “People sing ‘Adeste Fideles,’ and they don’t know what it means. So, ‘Fah who for-aze’ is perfectly legitimate. It has nothing to do with religion. It has to do with good fellowship, love, and relationships with your friends and neighbors.”
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