Please join us this Thursday for our virtual “The Making of the Grinch” show co-hosted by Craig Kausen, CEO, and Chuck Jones’s grandson and artist, Ben Olson.

This year we welcome a special guest, artist Sara Karloff, daughter of Boris Karloff to the virtual show.

Time may fly but memories last forever … who can forget that 56 years ago the classic animated adaptation of ‘Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas!’ premiered on CBS. Chuck Jones‘ animated short of the classic “captured both the spirit and personality of Ted Geisel’s whimsical Dr. Seuss fable.” 

All the animation legends (from Chuck Jones, Ted Geisel, Ben Washam, Maurice Noble, Boris Karloff, June Foray, Thurl Ravenscroft, and Eugene Poddany to name just a few) who worked tirelessly on the production, “nursed, cursed, stroked, anatomized, and gentry traumatized the perfect villain into what, at first, seemed to be a reluctant screen life.”

When it came to choosing a narrator for the cartoon Jones recalled a narrated record album he had heard and enjoyed called, “Kipling’s Just So Stories” read by Boris Karloff. For the television special, Jones knew exactly who he wanted for the role. He sought out Boris Karloff to play the Grinch and to also narrate the classic story.

“To me,” Jones later said, “one of the most important things was my getting Boris Karloff … He had this lovely, wonderful voice. Everybody thought of him as a villain. And he was so dear when he read it, you know. He really gave accent to each one and each note, and the narrator was important there.”

The top of the MGM press booklet for the animated television special announced, “About Boris Karloff, the man whose voice tells the story …” and what a story it turned out to be!

By 1966, Boris Karloff was already 79 years old, but even at his age and in poor health, the Grinch earned Karloff a children’s recording Grammy, his only major award.

Jones and Geisel had Boris Karloff read the entire script “in his beautiful, rhythmic, caring voice so that the rhythm would be consistent throughout the film. Then, they had the sound engineers remove the highs out of his recorded voice so that it would sound gravelly like the envisioned Grinch’s voice.

The animated special took 11 – 14 months of production time and cost CBS $315,000. Normally, Jones explained, animators would make three drawings per foot for a children’s TV film. Jones and his team were doing 15 drawings per foot for The Grinch. 

“You have to do this for believability,” Jones commented. “I have done 90 percent of the sketches myself. It’s the only way to evolve things.”

In all, the television special required 15,000 drawings and cels, 250 background layout drawings, 1,200-character layout drawings, and 60 musicians working for 8 hours to finish the special. 

But, as Jones replied, “You have to work on the detail for a show like this to be believable.”

And what about what Chuck Jones had thought about the Grinch in general?

 “How could anyone–how could I–not love the Grinch? I have a section of my heart reserved for villains: for Long John Silver, for Captain Hook, for the Wicked Witches of East and West (I am not prejudiced on the compass points or on wickedness). And finally, for my own tribe of miscreants: Wile E. Coyote, Marvin Martian, Daffy Duck, etc.

“You can say that a Grinch wants to steal Christmas, and you don’t need to know anything more about him–he is just a villainous Grinch who hates Christmas. A human being cannot be that simple. If a human villain–an old man, for example–wanted to steal Christmas, we would have to go deeper into the character, to find out whether he hated Christmas because of his age, because he lived alone on a mountain, or because he loathed kids.”

To learn more about the classic “Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas” and the production of the television special, please join us! It’ll be a festive night of entertainment and reminiscing as we delve into the archives because maybe “The Making of the Grinch” means a little bit more.

“The Making of the Grinch” co-hosted by Craig Kausen, CEO & Chuck Jones’s grandson and artist, Ben Olson virtually on Zoom, December 08, 2022, at 5:00 PM PST

Go to: www.chuckjonescatalog.com for all the Zoom details. 

Learn more about the Grinch HERE