I’ve been thinking about that Grinch movie idea and little bits of dialogue have been popping into my brain, and I’m pretty sure I’d have at least one small line where the Grinch references his “cousin Onceler,” just to canonize the “The Onceler and the Grinch are the same species” idea.
OOO! OOOOO! And the Cat in the Hat could be Cat Z, the infinitesimally small Cat in the Hat from The Cat in the Hat Comes Back! Because Whoville exists on a speck of dust, so it would follow that its Cat in the Hat must be the super tiny cat!
Tag: dr seus
How would handle a feature length Grinch adaptation if you had to? Like, “gun to your head” had to. You can do it any way you want, but you can’t not-do it, and it must be at least 70 minutes long.
I’d make an Anthology film called Seasons of the Grinch. Each would tell the story of the Grinch’s relationship with Who-ville. Spring would be when he moves into Mt. Krumpet, and the whos attempt to make friends with him (it doesn’t go well, but he does reluctantly keep the dog one of them gave him as gift). Summer would be a faceoff between the Grinch and the Cat in the Hat, who briefly enters Who-ville to do his normal bit of light mischief, and the two end up competing to see who’s the better trickster scourge. Fall would be an update of Halloween is Grinch Night, and Winter would be “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”
It would keep the Grinch as a sort of inexplicable monster in the folkloric vein – a creature that isn’t to be slain, but rather out-smarted and perhaps eventually redeemed. We’d develop his character slowly without giving him a reason or excuse to be a grouch (since the lack of a clear reason for his grouchiness is a key character trait of his – removing it destroys the Christmas story’s potency), and hopefully by the end you’d get a story where the Grinch is a very complicated character whose redemption feels very earned. He’s a fuckup, but he’s a fuckup you want to see get his shit together, and that desire is what connects the four separate stories of the anthology – the overarching plot, the true story of the entire film, is of the Grinch finally getting his shit together.
I’d find ways to work in Eucariah and Cindy Loo Who into all four seasons, since they both play important roles in the Grinch’s story (one of the things I don’t hate about the adaptations is their expansion of Cindy’s role in all of this), and the Grinch’s relationship with Max would be fleshed out as well.
Every line of dialogue would be poetic – rhyme, meter, alliteration, assonance, consonance, all the good shit from Dr. Seuss’s books that adaptations inevitably cut because it would be too hard to reproduce and possibly be off-putting to people because it’s “weird”. And I’d find a good actor with horror credentials to play the Grinch – off the top of my head, I’m thinking either Ron Perlman, Keith David, or Robert Englund.
It would be very weird and experimental and it would never get funding, but hopefully it would do right by Dr. Seuss.
Monsters and Stuff 