How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1966)

Chuck Jones and Theodor Geisel brought their adaptation of How the Grinch Stole Christmas! to CBS on December 18, 1966, with Boris Karloff narrating and voicing the title misanthrope. The special runs a scant twenty-six minutes and has returned every December since, which is either a testament to its craft or an indictment of the American television calendar. Karloff's reading is immaculate, the songs are durable, and the whole enterprise carries the calm confidence of men who knew precisely what they were making. It holds up. That is not the same as saying it has anything urgent to tell us.

The governing sentiment is that Christmas survives the theft of its presents, its trees, and its trimmings. This is a spiritual observation about the holiday's real character, and it registers as a faint anti-consumerist murmur, the sort that predates any organized critique of wealth and its distribution. The Whos are an undifferentiated Seussian populace, defined by their noise and their cheer, with no engagement of race, gender, or identity. Cindy Lou Who exists for one scene and one line of dialogue, a witness and nothing more. The Grinch's solitude is staged as misanthropy and comic villainy, not as a condition deserving of understanding or accommodation.

The moral arrives warmly and without a raised finger. Nobody lectures. Nobody is scolded into virtue. The Grinch's heart simply grows three sizes, the sleigh is saved, and the town sits down to carve the roast beast, an outcome a modern sensibility would find insufficiently systemic. There is no reckoning, no apology tour, no restructuring of Whoville's economy. Max gets the first slice, which is the closest the special comes to a policy proposal. Classification: a benign artifact of the mid-century holiday canon, spiritually earnest, ideologically weightless, and unlikely to trouble anyone's syllabus.