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The author of rhyming children's books only had to look in the mirror to find his anti-Christmas muse.
You're a bad guy … Dr. Seuss? When the beloved writer and illustrator of more than 60 books (his real name: Theodor Seuss Geisel) gave life to the grumpy resident of Mount Crumpit with a heart "two sizes too small" in his classic vacation of 1957 How the Grinch stole Christmashe did not have to look far to find inspiration. "I was brushing my teeth on the morning of December 26th when I noticed a very grinch mine in the mirror. It was Seuss!" said Geisel in a 1957 interview with Red book. "Something was wrong with Christmas, I realized, or more likely with me, so I wrote the story of my sour friend, the Grinch, to see if I could find something about Christmas that I had obviously lost. "
"How Stole Grinch's Christmas" was Dr. Seuss' easiest book to write
The Massachusetts native only spent a few weeks devoting himself to Grinch, later reformed (but later reformed), who attempted to "prevent Christmas from coming" for "everyone who is in Whoville" . Perhaps because the master of rhymes channeled his own frustrations with the commercialization of Christmas, Geisel's children's book – preceded earlier that year by another of his best-known works, The cat in the hat – was, he said, "the easiest book of my career to write". It is, however, with one notable exception: he struggled hard to find How the Grinch stole Christmas& # 39; conclusion.
"I had a hard time finding a way to get the Grinch out of the mess," Geisel explained about his writing process. "I ended up in a situation where I looked like a second-rate preacher or a Bible drummer … Finally, desperate … without making any statement, I showed the Grinch and the Whos together at the table and I made a pun on the "roast beast" carved in Grinch … I had made thousands of religious choices and after three months, that s & # 39; 39 is revealed like this. "
Dr. Seuss drawing the Grinch
Photo: Universal History ArchiveUIG via Getty Images
In the end, if there had been a debate about whether or not his own identity was the driving force behind the Grinch's mockery, Geisel later dispelled the doubt, roaming around his La Jolla neighborhood. , California, with vanity plates that explained the word "GRINCH." It did however include a much more subtle Easter egg in the story itself. "Why, I've been doing it for 53 years now," laments Grinch in Whos' book of jubilant celebrations, naturally filled with "noise, noise, noise". When the book was written and published – both by Random House as a book and as a feature of Red book magazine – the writer did not have the same coincidence but is also 53 years old.
Geisel was not the only one to correlate either. As his daughter-in-law, Lark Dimond-Cates, recalled during a speech in 2003 in the honor of the US Postal Service, unveiling a stamp of Dr. Seuss: "I've always thought that the cat [in the Hat] was Ted in his good days and the Grinch was Ted in his bad days. "
Dr. Seuss was reluctant to turn the book into a special animated film
Nine years later How the Grinch stole Christmas The cartoonist of Warner Bros. Chuck Jones adapted the children's book to CBS's famous December 1966 animated television show. However, Geisel was notoriously "anti-Hollywood" and reluctant to sell the rights of his book. Jones, after working closely with Geisel when he held the position of commander of the animation department of the first film unit of the US Army during the Second World War, finally convinced his former colleague to confide personally.
Upon seeing Jones' drawings, Geisel thought the animator had taken a page from his book, taking the main character himitself. "It does not look like Grinch, it looks like you!" Geisel told him. In an interview for a TNT television special in 1994, Jones briefly summed up, "Well, that happens."
"How the Grinch Stole Christmas", 1966 TV show
Photo: Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc.
One of the aspects of Jones' small screen incarnation was to give the Grinch its iconic green color, as the illustrations in Geisel's original book were almost entirely in black and white. His idea did not have much to do with his appearance, nor with the classic Christmas colors. Instead, Jones was inspired by a series of fun coincidences: he always ended up renting cars in that particular shade of green.
In the end, Jones was not the only adaptation of Geisel's work to nostalgic children and adults gathering around their televisions or mass-going to the movies every year in December. In addition to a live action film directed by Ron Howard in 2000 and starring Jim Carrey, a new computer-animated 3D version, commented by Pharrell Williams and featuring the voices of Benedict Cumberbatch, Rashida Jones and Angela Lansbury, among others, is scheduled for November Theatrical release in 2018.
Now, whether reading or looking at the screen, How the Grinch stole Christmas, maybe, means a little more.
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