Halloween Is Grinch Night premieres on ABC - October 28th, 1977

On this day in 1977, the animated special Halloween Is Grinch Night aired for the first time on ABC.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of I
Heart Radio. Well, Hello and welcome to This Day in
History Class, a show for those who aren't afraid of history,
no matter what day it is. I'm Gabe Luisier, and
in this episode we're looking at the lesser known prequel

(00:21):
or is it a sequel? To Dr Seuss How the
Grinch Stole Christmas? The surprisingly trippy and sometimes nightmarish Halloween
Is Grinch Night. The day was October seventy seven. The

(00:43):
animated special Halloween Is Grinch Night aired for the first
time on ABC. The twenty six minute cartoon short was
directed by Gerard Baldwin and marked the second TV appearance
of the popular character The Grinch. Un Like his earlier special,
the one where he tried to steal Christmas, Grinch Night

(01:04):
is not based on any existing book. Instead, Dr Seuss
himself Theodore Geisel wrote the original story specifically for television.
It's unclear whether the tale is meant to take place
before or after the character's life changing Christmas encounter with
the Who's, or even if it fits in the same

(01:25):
timeline at all. The one thing that's for certain is
that the Grinch in this special does not have an
oversized heart. There were a lot of behind the scenes
changes for The Grinch's second Holiday outing. This time around,
production was handled by Depatty Freeling Enterprises, a small studio

(01:45):
started by Warner Brothers alumni for his Freeling and David H. Depatty.
They had inherited the sous mantle from Chuck Jones and
MGM in the early nineteen seventies and had already produced
several animated specials for primetime television, including adaptations of The
Cat in the Hat and The Lorax Halloween Is. Grinch

(02:05):
Knight was the first SUE special made for a b
C rather than CBS. Sadly, that switch resulted in a
much reduced budget, as evidenced by the specials often underwhelming visuals.
There were concessions behind the microphone as well. Boris Karloff
had famously narrated The Grinch's Christmas Special in nineteen sixty six,

(02:27):
but he passed away just three years later. His replacement
in Grinch Knight is none other than Hans Conride, the
voice of Captain Hook in Disney's Peter Pan. Much like
Karloff before him, Conride narrates the story and also voices
the Grinch, including a few brief moments of singing. One
welcome carryover from the first special is thorough Ravenscroft, who

(02:51):
provides speaking and singing voices for various characters. Another familiar
name in the credits is Henry Gibson, the voice of
Wilber the Pig in the animated version of Charlotte's Web.
Gibson gives a heartrending performance as the singing voice of Max,
the Grinch's poor exploited puppy, but we'll come back to

(03:11):
that sequence a little later. The story of Halloween Is
Grinch Knight is pretty straightforward and somewhat familiar. Once again,
the residents of Whoville find themselves being menaced by the
grumpy green hermit who lives at the top of Mount Crumpet.
Once again, there's a pivotal confrontation between the Grinch and
a stalwart young who, and once again the action is

(03:34):
centered on a holiday, though maybe not the one you think,
because while the official title is Halloween Is Grinch Knight,
the word Halloween isn't actually spoken in the special. Instead,
it's replaced throughout by the term grinch Knight. At the
start of the short, we learned that every autumn, on
a Halloween night, I mean Grinch Knight, a peculiar sour

(03:57):
sweet wind begins to blow, setting off a noisy chain
reaction among the local wildlife. Agitated by the smelly wind,
the Greek grumps started growling, which in turn sets the
hack and cracks a howling, and so forth and so on,
And as we already know, there's nothing the Grinch hates
more than noise pollution. So once a year, when all

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that racket kicks up, he descends from his mountain lair
and vents his frustrations on the innocent who's below. Much
like in the Christmas Special, the Grinch is propelled down
the mountain by his scrawny dog Max. This time though
he's not strapped to a sleigh, but to an enormous
two wheeled cart, which the Grinch refers to as his

(04:40):
quote paraphernalia wagon. Remember it was the nineteen seventies. It's
at this point when the Special really starts to distinguish
itself from its predecessor. The camera zooms in on Max,
and for the first time we hear the dog's internal monologue.
It's delivered in the form of a crushing Lye sad ballad,

(05:00):
and although it feels a bit out of place in
a Halloween special, it paints a clear picture of how
miserable life with the Grinch really is. Here's a clip.
How many times have I send and said? How many
times have I sen in my head? What am I doing?

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Why am I the slave of this grenchy old crop?
And I say, how I wish I could turned. As
poor Max trudges his way down the mountain side, the
who's in Whoville are busy battening down the hatches. Since
grinch Knight is an annual occurrence, Whoville residents notice stay
indoors until the sour sweet wind has passed. However, on

(05:47):
this particular grinch Knight, a young who named Yukariah ventures
outdoors to visit the euphemism that's the word Seuss uses
to refer to the family outhouse since he wasn't allowed
to say bathroom. Unfortunately, for u Karia and for his bladder,
he's swept away by the powerful autumn wind before he
can relieve himself. He eventually lands, as bad luck would

(06:11):
have it, on the same mountain path as the Grinch. However,
their initial encounter is shockingly civil, with yu Karaia even
taking the time to give the Grinch a crash course
and optometry. It's a bizarre exchange, but it establishes Yukariah's
knack for annoying the Grinch, a talent that features heavily
in the story's finale. Take a listen, Who are you, Yukariah? Who? Sir?

(06:37):
You are a small watch? I do the best I can, Sir?
Are you really the Grinch? Am I? The sorry? Sir?
I have a slight A stigmatism, an optical condition in
which parallel rays of light from an external source converge.
You diverge unequally in different meridians. Do you know, sir?

(06:58):
I like you much better with my glasses off. You'll
put your glasses back on and face the fact, am I?
The Grinch? Show him? In order to prove it's really him,
The Grinch proceeds to menace Yukaraiah off the road with
his flying, dancing eyebrows. It's the whole thing, don't ask,

(07:20):
and then continues his ominous descent to Whoville. By now,
the boy knows he's the only thing standing between his
town and whatever the Grinch has in that wagon and
so a stigmatism or no a stigmatism. He determines to
foil the Grinch's sinister plan the only way he can,
by distracting and delaying him until the sour sweet wind

(07:40):
stops blowing. To do this, Yukariah challenges the Grinch to
scare him properly instead of just doing weird things with
his eyebrows. The Grinch obliges by inviting the boy to
climb atop his carriage and get a sneak peek of
the horror he has in store for Whoville. This is
when we learned that the grinches paraphernalia wag and is
basically a Pandora's box. It's loaded with nightmarish creatures and

(08:05):
when it's opened, they're all set free upon the psyche
of whoever looks inside. It's at this point that Grinch
Knight really earns its stripes. As a Halloween special, the
lid of the wagon is lifted and yu Kariyah is
given a spookstour of a bizarre and frightening landscape. Lost
in a black void, He's menaced by all manner of monsters, ghosts,

(08:27):
and specters, as well as by abstract shapes and impossible architecture.
It's hard to do the sequence justice in words, but
if you've ever watched the Psychedelic Pink Elephant scene and Dumbo,
it's a lot like that, but even weirder and way
more threatening. These mind bending visuals are accompanied by arguably
the best music of the special. My personal favorite is

(08:50):
Grinch Is Gonna Get You by a claimed sesame Street
composer Joe Riposso. It really sells the danger facing the
young protagonists, plus it's super creepy. Check it out. Despite

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the Grinch's best efforts, Ukariah endures every terror thrown his way,
and by the time the nightmare ends, the sweet sour
wind is gone, leaving the Grinch no choice but to
slink back up the mountain until next year. This is
where the chronological setting of the story gets a little hazy,
since the Christmas Special ended with the Grinch reformed Grinch

(09:43):
Night what seemed to be a prequel since it both
begins and ends with the Grinch being an unrepentant jerk. However,
Dr Seuss throws a wrench in that theory at the
very end of the special, after watching Ukariah stand up
to the Grinch, Max is emboldened to finally break free
of his abusive master and returns to Whoville to live

(10:04):
with the boy in his family. A happy ending for
Max is a welcome treat for viewers. But if this
story really is a prequel, that means Max eventually returns
to the Grinch and helps him steal Christmas, which is
kind of a bummer right. The alternative, however, is only
slightly less depressing. It would mean that Grinch Night is
a sequel to the Christmas Special, and that sometime after

(10:27):
learning his Yule Tide lesson, the Grinch reverted to his
old ways and began terrorizing Whoville on an annual basis.
That interpretation does square with some other aspects of the story,
like the fact that residents are so on guard against
the Grinch, showing that he's already an established threat. Of course,
the third option is that Dr. Seuss didn't overthink any

(10:49):
of this like I'm doing, and that he didn't intend
the Grinch stories to connect one way or the other.
That's probably the safest assumption, especially since there is a
third animated Grinch speci show that you'd then have to
try to make sense of that's right, Halloween Is. Grinch
Knight was so successful that it actually spawned a follow up,

(11:09):
Two's The Grinch Grinches the Cat in the Hat, a
crossover between Seus's arguably most famous characters. Neither of those
specials are as well regarded or as well remembered as
How the Grinch Stole Christmas. But before you write them
off entirely, consider this. Both Grinch Knight and it's follow
up one Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Children's Program. The

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original Grinch special did not, so take that Christmas Fans,
Halloween Forever. I'm gay, Bluesier and certainly you now know
a lot more about Grinch history today than you did yesterday,
And if you're up for it, you can learn even
more about it by following us on Twitter, Facebook, and

(11:54):
Instagram at t d I HC Show And if you
have any comments or suggestions, feel free to send them
my way at this day at iHeart media dot com.
I'd love to hear your own thoughts on the SIUs
Cinematic universe, but be warned, I'll probably respond with more
of mine too. For now, though, thanks to Chandler Mays

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for producing the show, and thanks to you for listening.
I'll see you back here again soon for one more
scary day in history class. For more podcasts from I
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