Halloween is Grinch Night is not going to appeal to everybody, people will find it hugely entertaining and others will find it bizarre. I do belong in the former category, but I can certainly understand the latter opinion as well. It is not as good as How the Grinch Stole Christmas, but is still very impressive. The animation is very good, it is full of colour and the Paraphanelia Wagon sequence is memorably trippy. The music is wonderful, I love the jauntiness of the incidental scoring and the songs are very catchy. Max also sings and his song I found touching as a child and still do at 20. There are more faithful Dr Seuss adaptations out there, but the rhymes that form the dialogue are witty and elegant at the same time, while the story is briskly paced and bewitchingly oddball. The characters are ones you engage with, The Grinch himself will live long in the memory, and the voice acting is superb especially the soothing then terrifying narrator/Grinch of Hans Conreid, a worthy successor to Boris Karloff. So all in all, a great and underrated special. 9/10 Bethany Cox

The Grinch meets Halloween. This does sound like an actually pretty good premise. The involvement of Dr. Seuss, Gerard Baldwin and Friz Freleng as well as many talented (voice) actors certainly offers more hope, but the outcome is a bit of a disappointment I must say. The main problem for me was that, unlike the title suggests, these 25 minutes felt a lot more about an annoying little kid with glasses (and his family) than about the Grinch. This movie here was made roughly 10 years after the very famous Christmas-themed short film about the Grinch and the latter will have its 60th anniversary soon. It is also superior to this one here. It has a bit of everything: comedy, drama, horror, family movie..., but sadly, it does not really deliver in one of these genres. The animation is pretty similar in terms of style and level to the 1966 movie I mentioned earlier, so it's not exactly a modern work for the late 1970s. Then again, this decade was fairly disappointing in terms of animated (short) movies anyway. This one here is no exception. Not recommended, not even during Halloween.

Right after Dr. Seuss died, I saw an interview with him. He stated that of all his characters, the Grinch was his favorite. His most famous work starring that green misanthrope is of course "How the Grinch Stole Christmas", but another one is the Emmy-winning "Halloween Is Grinch Night". Once again, the Who-hating villain targets Whoville. A noticeable difference between the more famous special and this one is that this one is darker. The previous one was all about the Grinch being a jerk and trying to steal everyone's happiness, but this one depicts him as more evil than just mean. The scene where he lets Euchariah see what's inside the Paraphernalia Wagon might be a little extreme for the tykes (even assuming that it's an allegory for facing one's fears).

But don't get me wrong, this is still a fun short. It was good to see that Dr. Seuss hadn't lost his cleverness. For the record, I have no desire to see the feature adaptations of his works; I only read negative things about the live-action adaptations of "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" and "The Cat in the Hat" (as well as the computer-animated features). Seuss's recently deceased widow Audrey refused to allow any more live-action adaptations of his work after "The Cat in the Hat".

Anyway, cool one.