We're all VERY familiar with How The Grinch Stole Christmas!
It's a beloved Dr. Seuss story that later became a famous 1966 animated Christmas special. The movie continues to play yearly, but there is one far more sinister special that seems to have disappeared all together.
Yep, I'm talking about Halloween Is Grinch Night, now named Grinch Night.
It's a largely unknown Emmy-winning prequel to the How The Grinch Stole Christmas! that aired October 27, 1977 and frankly, it's real weird.
The special starts off in our beloved Whoville, where a "sour-sweet" wind begins to blow. The wind signals to the town that Grinch Night is ready to commence, and everyone begins to lock themselves indoors for their own safety.
AKA, this is basically the plot of The Purge with less murder.
We're then taken to the top of Mount Crumpit, where the Grinch talks about his eyebrows for some reason.
He then orders his poor dog Max to "ready the paraphernalia wagon." AKA, instead of stolen presents, it's a wagon full of literal nightmares used to terrorize Whoville.
And while Max is forced to walk the wagon down the mountain, he sings possibly the saddest song to ever exist in a Dr. Seuss film.
The Grinch then runs over a bunch of flowers, notices one is still alive, and runs back over it as it makes ACTUAL dying noises.
Then, for seemingly no reason, he forces Max to run faster and attempts to hunt Whoville's very last Wuzzy Woozoo.
And after all this, our protagonist Euchariah says he needs to leave his house to go to "the euphemism," (AKA the outhouse). Smart, right? Nopeee.
The wind blows Euchariah up to Mount Crumpit (because of course it does), where he then encounters the Grinch and is attacked by his, you guessed it, his eyebrows.
everyone talks about the trippy monster sequence in "Halloween is Grinch Night" but no one ever talks about the part where he attacks a kid with his eyebrows
And in an attempt to distract the Grinch and save Whoville, Euchariah challenges the Grinch to scare him. And because of that, the world got this iconic acid-trip-gone-wrong of a scene with a song fit for a horror movie.
Halloween Is Grinch Night, 1977 🎃
Long story short, Euchariah eventually survives the nightmare and distracts the Grinch long enough for the winds to die down. This convinces the Grinch to retreat back to his home...until Christmas that is.
For those who did watch this as kids, many were either afraid of it, or felt like it was all a fever dream.
Thinking about “Halloween Is Grinch Night”, a very strange cartoon that, until recently, I wasn’t entirely convinced I hadn’t imagined
@41Strange I think you jogged that memory not five seconds before it slipped permanently from my mind.
And while I already thought the Grinch was dark enough, this only makes me want to dive into the Grinch-verse that much more.
If you wanna see this all for yourself, here's the special in its entirety:
