According to a friend, their child (2ish) enjoys The Monster Overhaul. They toddle over to the bookshelf, get it down, and flip through it looking at the pictures. Most of the time, they skip straight to the Strange Water chapter and look at the deep-sea fish. "Oh, scary scary!" they say. Then they flip the page. "Oh, scary scary!"
The kid will do this even if no one is around.
This is the best review my book has ever received.
Children's author and illustrator Dr. Seuss also understood that children sometimes like to be frightened. People point out that The Cat in the Hat is an unsettling home invasion, that Horton Hatches the Egg is full of anxiety and obligation, and so-on.
Dr. Seuss' unsettling landscapes aren't noted as frequently. "Seussian" often refers to a certain kind of whimsical organic design, but there's an argument to be made that it's drawing from the same well as "Gigeresque".
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| The Terwilliker Institute, The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. |
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| The Once-ler's home, The Lorax |
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| Ga-Zair, Did I Ever Tell You How Lucky You Are? |
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| Oh The Places You'll Go |
Halloween is Grinch Night (1977)
It's unclear if this film takes place before How The Grinch Stole Christmas or after it. Probably before, but it's intriguing to consider the alternative. The Grinch seems less openly hateful and malicious. He's a slightly different character, a sort of worldly-wise trickster devil. Gruff, but not misanthropic. Does the Grinch see himself as Whoville's sinister judge, deliberately unsettling the social mores of a twee surveillance state?
On Grinch Night, the Grinch is (apparently) capable of magic, a sorcerer-king from the mountaintop, come to test the Whos and sort the wheat from the chaff... and have a good time doing it. The root cause of the trouble isn't the Grinch's temperament. It's the weather. Just a natural, inevitable, uncontrollable event. It's something Whoville can mitigate, but it doesn't have a moral dimension. Sure, the Grinch could choose not to be irritated, but the story frames him as something like a hurricane or (given the era) an incoming nuclear warhead.
The Grinch transports his phantasmagorical terrors in his "paraphernalia wagon". "Paraphernalia" is generally used to mean "junk" or "regalia", but its technical definition is "property a woman brings into a marriage over and above her dowry." This sort of trivia will win you many friends during your long digressions about the obscure works of Dr. Seuss. Therefore, one could argue there is (or was) a Mrs. Grinch. We see her photo on a dresser in 1982's The Grinch Grinches the Cat in the Hat (unless that's his mother; it probably is, given the whole warped Freudian psychology angle of that film). Is the Grinch literally carting his emotional baggage into town? According to internet lore, Tony the Tiger (the mascot of the American breakfast cereal Frosted Flakes) may have been involved.
One justification for Halloween is Grinch Night taking place post-Christmas is that Max the Dog runs away at the end. It's possible that the Grinch's heart grew three sizes on Christmas... but three sizes might not be sustainable. If it's a prequel to Christmas, then Max's return to the abusive and tyrannical Grinch is tragic; if it's a sequel, then at least Max gets away. Max is also a much more human character in Grinch Night; in Christmas, he's just a dog. Must a dog always return to its vomit?
Some of the imagery recurs in 1990's Oh The Places You'll Go, which could indicate that Halloween is Grinch Night had a deep roots in Seuss' imagination.
The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T (1953)
The film opens with a small child pursued by grey-clad figures wielding coloured nets or wind socks. This nightmarish swooping motif is present in several of Seuss' films, including his WWII propaganda work. An amorphous blobs diving at a person's head is easy to draw, but it's surprising how well it works as choreography. Someone had a clear vision and executed it.
A film like this could only be made under the studio system, where choreographers, dancers, costumes, set designers, etc. could be pulled off the shelf and used without starting the entire process from scratch. It's a '50s full-colour musical, just a bit weirder than normal. And "normal" was still fairly weird.
The shadow of WWII lies over this film. There's a level of casual militarism. The plumber, August Zabladowski, wears his outfits like a uniform. Bart's dead father presumably died in The War.
Still, it's a bold film for the McCarthy era. In an era of enforced conformity, it has an anti-authority, anti-conformity message, and therefore (among other reasons) failed to resonate with audiences. Is it good? No, not really, and I'm not convinced the studio's meddling and cuts made it worse. But it is unique and joyful. There's a level of silliness that meshes well with Arneson's The First Fantasy Campaign. The Dungeon Elevator Song would fit in any old-school funhouse.
