A nasty, wasty skunk
December 13, 2010 at 10:09 PM by Dr. Drang
I was a little kid when the great Christmas TV shows were first shown. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer came out when I was four years old, A Charlie Brown Christmas a year later, and How The Grinch Stole Christmas a year after that. I think I’ve watched them every year since.
The Grinch, which was on last night, is my favorite. There’s the song, of course, and the beautiful melding of the Dr. Seuss and Chuck Jones styles, but it’s the small, perfect details I really love: how the Grinch tap-tap-taps the candy cane out of the hands of one of the sleeping Who children; how he licks his fingers just before unscrewing a hot light bulb; how the snowballs grow as they roll past him when he’s stretched out, trying to keep the sleigh from sliding down Mt. Crumpet (this is just before his heart grows three sizes and he gains the strength of ten grinches plus two).
But mostly I love the way he solves Max’s overbalancing problem. The Grinch’s instinctive understanding of leverage would have made him a great engineer.
(Ignore the captions about the missing piece of antler—what kind of small-minded twat points out a continuity error in a cartoon? Unfortunately I couldn’t find a clean version of this clip.)
