10 / 10
Official trailer
How the Grinch Stole Christmas! is Chuck Jones’s 1966 American animated television special adapting Dr. Seuss’s 1957 book about a sour green creature who plots to steal Christmas from the inhabitants of Whoville. Boris Karloff narrates the special and provides the speaking voice of the Grinch. Thurl Ravenscroft sings the song ‘You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch’. June Foray voices Cindy Lou Who.
Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel) wrote the teleplay from his own book. MGM Television produced the special and CBS broadcast it on December 18, 1966.
Chuck Jones directed and storyboarded the special with the Warner Bros. animation craftsmanship he’d brought to the Looney Tunes Road Runner and Bugs Bunny shorts over the previous two decades. There isn’t a frame of this special I’d change. Every movement has Chuck Jones’s timing, every line has Karloff’s voice in it, and I think it’s about as close to perfect as television animation gets.
Jones’s adaptation is one of the strongest examples in any medium of a major artist adapting another major artist’s source material with full respect for the original while improving on it where the new medium allows. Jones renders Geisel’s Whos, the Grinch, and Mount Crumpit with his superior sense of animation rhythm and timing.
The drawings remain Seussian but the movement, the comic beats, and the visual storytelling are pure Chuck Jones. The result is a collaboration where both authors are present and neither dilutes the other.
The special is one of the few cases where animated adaptation has produced something better than its excellent source.
Chuck Jones’s Animation
Jones brought twenty-five years of Warner Bros. cartoon-direction experience to the production. The Grinch’s facial timing, his physical comedy, the precise calibration of his cumulative reaction to the Christmas-morning Whos singing in defiance of his theft: every comic beat is shaped with the craftsmanship that the Road Runner cartoons had developed. He’s recognizably a Chuck Jones character within Seussian visual design.
The smile that grows three sizes is one of the strongest single comic-animation sequences in television history. Jones holds the moment, lets the Grinch’s face stretch beyond reasonable physiological possibility, and times the gag against Boris Karloff’s narration with the precision of a Bugs Bunny short. The sequence has been imitated and never matched.
That smile is my favorite gag in the whole special. The Grinch looks like he’s physically wrestling his own face, Jones lets it run a beat longer than seems sane, and I laugh hardest at that extra beat.
For Writers
Adapting major source material requires the adapting artist to bring their own craft equal to or exceeding the source. Jones’s animation craft is fully equal to Geisel’s drawing and writing.
Boris Karloff’s Narration
Karloff was seventy-eight during production and brought the full weight of his classic-horror career to the role. His narration carries the special’s tonal complexity: warmth, menace, comic timing, real sadness, and final reconciliation. The Grinch’s speaking voice is also Karloff, with subtle distinction between the third-person narrator and the green protagonist.
Karloff won the Grammy Award for Best Recording for Children in 1968 for his work on the special, an unusual late-career honor that recognized the performance’s craft. His delivery of ‘Maybe Christmas, he thought, doesn’t come from a store. Maybe Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more’ is among the most beautifully read moments in any animated production.
Karloff is the reason the special has a heart. He’s menacing enough that the Grinch feels like a real threat and warm enough that the ending never curdles into syrup, and I can’t imagine another voice managing both.
For Writers
Late-career performers can bring resources to adaptations that no younger actor can replicate. Karloff’s seventy-eight years of theatrical and cinematic work registered through every line he delivered.
Thurl Ravenscroft’s Song
Thurl Ravenscroft performs ‘You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch’, written by Albert Hague with lyrics by Seuss himself. Ravenscroft’s deep-voice delivery turned what could have been a throwaway insult song into a permanent Christmas-comedy standard. He received no on-screen credit for the performance, a production oversight that Seuss publicly corrected after broadcast.
The song’s lyrics are some of the most inventively vicious lines in any holiday production. ‘Your soul is an appalling dump heap overflowing with the most disgraceful assortment of deplorable rubbish imaginable, mangled up in tangled-up knots’ represents Seuss working in his most pleasurable insult-cataloging mode. Ravenscroft’s performance honors the venom. The song is a delight, and Ravenscroft sounds like he’s savoring every insult. My only complaint about the entire production is that he went uncredited when it aired. A voice that good deserved his name on the screen from the first broadcast.
For Writers
Insult songs in children’s productions work when the insults are inventive enough to delight instead of wound. The ‘Mr. Grinch’ song owes its reputation to Seuss’s pleasurable cruelty.
Craft Note
Jones’s production cost approximately three hundred fifteen thousand dollars, exceptionally high for 1966 animated television but justified by the resulting quality. The special’s annual broadcast on CBS continued through 2014 when the rights moved to NBC. It has held the broadcast since. Live-action remakes followed in 2000 (Ron Howard’s Jim Carrey vehicle) and animated remakes in 2018 (Illumination Entertainment), neither of which has approached the original’s craftsmanship or cultural standing.
Does How the Grinch Stole Christmas still hold up?
How the Grinch Stole Christmas! gets a 10 from me because nothing in it misses.
Jones’s direction, Karloff’s narration, Ravenscroft’s song and Seuss’s own words combine into something that’s only grown in cultural standing across six decades of annual broadcast. It’s the best Dr. Seuss adaptation in any medium, and the remakes only make that clearer. Watch the 1966 original.
