It may have snuck up on you, but the holiday season is in full swing already.  For me I started getting an inkling something was happening when my in-laws insisted we show up for Turkey dinner, but as a child we knew Santa would soon be on his way when one of the three major networks (at the time, and yes I’m still that old) started putting the holiday specials on the air.

This was before the days of VCR’s.

This was before the days of 3000 channels.

If you missed a Charlie Brown Christmas that season, you were totally out of luck for a whole year.

It seems hard to imagine in a world where we carry large libraries of media with us just about everywhere and Hulu has made even the DVR seem like an medieval torture device we no longer have to wrestle with to record what we otherwise might miss, but here we are on the verge of holiday 2016, and it happens to be the 50th Anniversary of one of the most beloved of all animated holiday specials, Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

Now disclaimer, I don’t believe there is any finer example of a holiday classic than this 1966 TV special and like many things in life it is a synergy of many things I love that I couldn’t fully appreciate until I was an adult.

What do I mean?

Well it was directed by Chuck Jones.  If you are younger and you have no idea who Chuck Jones is, then imagine most anything truly hysterically funny that from just about any cartoon ever made, and there is a high probability that it was created and perfected in a Chuck Jones, Loony Tunes cartoon way before either you or I were born.  He literally invented most of the cartoon physics gags that still read as timelessly funny even if they have been long banned from current children’s programming  because of excessive worry about violence in cartoons.  And they are still the gold standard from which modern animators “borrow” nuggets of humor gold.

Need an example…OK here is a scene from Pixar’s Monsters Inc.

Now compare it with the blender scene from this classic Loony Tunes Cartoon Feed the Kitty:

http://dai.ly/xjw9ms

Look similar enough?  It’s kind of simple in animation.  When the timing of something works.  You reuse it.  You don’t have to improve on perfection.   So I have always said that I wanted to be an animator because I learned my storytelling from Disney, but my cartoon comedy physics from Loony Tunes.  I grew up on this stuff, and loved my afternoons spent in the company of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck,  but if I’m honest all of my favorites were very much from the hand of Chuck Jones.   His Road Runner and Wylie Coyote cartoons are some of the funniest things ever made…ever…period.

What most people don’t realize is that Dr Seuss and Chuck Jones worked together originally creating a series of World War II training cartoons for a character named Private Snafu, which were military secret shorts intended to teach recruits the importance of topics like: secrecy, and disease prevention. And writing for these educational, yet entertaining short subjects actually were the imputes of how author Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss) would approach his successful postwar children’s books when he published The Cat in the Hat in 1957. And you see Chuck Jones hand in bringing the wild and abstract style of the Dr. Seuss characters to life on the Television screen.  It’s in the comic timing of Max, inability to support a full set of antlers tied to his head, or how he ends up on the back end of the out of control Santa sleigh he was supposed to be pulling, or even how the Grinch triumphantly lifts the sleigh above his head as he saves the gifts from certain destruction at the top of Mt. Crumpet (Ala Bugs Bunny’s  Super Bunny.)

All of this cartoon magic was built upon the literary bedrock of of the original story (also originally published in 1957), which to this day still ranks highly in the top 100 picture books ever created, and according to Geisel himself, was “the easiest books of his career to write, except for it’s conclusion.”  See it wasn’t easy finding a way to get the Grinch out of his hatred created mess, and Geisel examined “thousands of religious choices” before the shining meaning of family and unity and Christmas coming without any of the trimmings finally simply came to him 3 months later.

So you had the source material from one of the greatest Children’s authors who ever lived, and animation directed by one of the greatest animation directors who ever lived, but it lacked one additional element to make the television special truly monstrous…Boris Karloff, better known as the famous Universal Monster incarnation of Frankenstein’s Monster.  (though strangely I think most children know him as the voice of the Grinch and the narrator of the special, rather than the famous horror icon he originally was)   And strangely is credited with singing the iconic song “Your a Mean One Mr. Grinch”, despite the fact that it was actually the voice of Tony the Tiger, Thurl Ravenscroft, that sang the song.   Reportedly Dr. Seuss was so upset when he found out Thurl was uncredited in the special that he wrote a note to personally apologize for the oversight.  

So as you watch How the Grinch Stole Christmas this year on cable, or apple tv, or dvd, or blu-ray at your leasure remember this special has true horror pedigree:  Born out of preparing soldiers for the horrors and dangers of war, featuring the vocal talents of one of the greatest horror icons in cinema history, and preying upon every child’s fear that someone will steal away the treasures that Santa has carefully placed around the tree, and a treasured part of my childhood because it always signaled the beginning of the season of hope and love and roast beast.