DR. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas! is one of the author’s best-known children’s books. It is written in rhymed verse, with illustrations by the author. It showcases the famous character, The Grinch, and has been adapted to other media, most famously the 1960s animated television special which is now a Christmas perennial.Seuss completed How the Grinch Stole Christmas! in 1957. The mid-1950s was a particularly productive period for Seuss. It was the time when he wrote many of the stories for which he is most admired today, including>The Cat in the Hat<$>, If I Ran the Circus anI>On Beyond Zebra.

The book is one of the purest examples of Seuss’s style. The ink-drawn illustrations make use of only black, red, and pink (the latter being the color of the Grinch’s eyes), and the versification is strict and never skips a syllable. The purity of the verse is increased by the fact that Seuss avoided introducing made-up words intended to fit the meter (for example, “Jill-ikka-Jast” or “Sala-ma-goox”, both from Scrambled Eggs Super).

The Grinch, a bitter, cave-dwelling creature with a heart “two sizes too small,” lives on snowy Mount Crumpit, a steep, 10,000 foot high mountain just north of Whoville, home of the merry and warm-hearted Whos. His only companion is Max, his faithful but dim dog.

From his perch high atop Mount Crumpit, the Grinch can hear the noisy Christmas festivities that take place in Whoville. Envious of the Whos’ happiness, he makes plans to descend on the town and, by means of serial burglary, deprive them of their Christmas presents and decorations and thus “prevent Christmas from coming”. However, he learns in the end that despite his success in stealing all the Christmas presents and decorations from the Whos, Christmas comes just the same. He then realizes that Christmas is more than just gifts and presents.

His heart grows three sizes larger, he returns all the presents and trimmings, and is warmly welcomed into the community of the Whos.

How the Grinch Stole Christma<$>was adapted to television in 1966 by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s MGM Animation/Visual Arts studio as an animated TV special. The Grinch was directed by Seuss’s friend and former colleague Chuck Jones, whom Seuss had worked with on the Private Snafu training cartoons for the US Army during World War II.

The special starred Boris Karloff as both narrator and Grinch, and (unusual for adaptations) included the actual text of the book in spoken form.

Jones, who served as director, character designer, and character layout artist (as he had done for nearly all of his Warner Bros. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, and the latter-periodM Tom and Jerry films) modified the appearance of the Grinch somewhat to fit the medium, rendering him in green and with a more elongated, frog-like face based on Karloff’s distinctive feature.

But in his 1996 book Chuck Reducks, Jones later said that Seuss thought the animated Grinch looked more like Jones than it did either Karloff or the character in the original book, a fact Jones attributed to the use of his own facial expressions as a model for the Grinch’s.

Maurice Noble, one of Jones’ long-time collaborators, served as production manager, and fellow Warner Bros. veteran Ben Washam served as co-director. The animation was produced by Jones’ MGM animation unit, several members of which had come with him from Warner Bros: Ken Harris, Tom Ray, Phil Roman, Richard Thompson, Don Towsley, and Lloyd Vaughan.

The songs, which helped fill out the story to the length of a television program, were written by composer Albert Hague, with lyrics by Dr. Seuss. One of the best remembered of t, You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch was sung by voice actor Thurl Ravenscroft , later well-known as the voice of Kellogg’s Tony the Tiger. According to an interview with Ravenscroft included on the early 2000s DVD release of the film, a production error resulted in Ravenscroft not receiving screen credit for his vocal performance, leading to the mistaken impression that it was Karloff who sang the song.

Dr. Seuss also lengthened the text with two interpolated verse passages.

The longer one describes the Who children (in the Grinch’s imagination) noisily playing with their Christmas toys. Jones included some additional comedy business with the long suffering Max trying to fulfill his master’s commands, such as pulling the sled, and being less than successful at the task. Seuss also added a few lines to the dénouement, which in the original is laconic, while Max joyfully enjoys his own helping of roast beast.

The TV special has been highly praised by audiences and film and animation fans alike, and it has been rebroadcast innumerable times since its debut, with annual showings continuing to the present day.

The cartoon is typically found on the Internet Movie Databases list of the top 250 films, and is considered one of Chuck Jones’ greatest cartoons made after his departure from Warner Bros. which currently, through several transactions involving MGM’s library, owns the rights to the special.

The Grinch later appeared in a few more specials, although none were as popular as his original Christmas outing. In the 1977 special Halloween Is Grinch Night, the Grinch (now voiced by Hans Conried) sets out to scare everyone in Whoville after being bothered by a chain reaction of annoying sounds caused by the winIn The Grinch Grinches the Cat in the Hat (1982), he attempts to ruin things for fellow Seuss star The Cat in the Hat . Most recently, he was a recurring character on the 1996 kids’ show The Wubbulous World of Dr. Seuss, co-produced by Bermudian Michael Frith who had served as Seuss’ editor at Random House in the 1960s and ‘70s before entering TV and film production as an associate of Muppet creator Jim Henson.

In 1992, Walter Matthau narrated an illustrated storybook version of the story for Random House Home Video, which utilized Seuss’ original artwork.

CBS aired the Chuck Jones special from 1966 until the late 1990s, when the special moved to the WB . In 2006, the WB merged with UPN to form the CW. The special began airing this year on the ABC network, with a 40th Anniversary Edition. Cable airings of How the Grinch Stole Christmas! are on Cartoon Network

After Seuss’s death, a 2000 live-action feature film adaptation was produced.

Directed by Ron Howard, it featured Jim Carrey in the title role and was a major financial success. Although a box-office hit, the film received mostly negative reviews, comparing it unfavourably to the book and the television special.