The Grinch was not green until a 1966 cartoon made him so
In Dr. Seuss's 1957 book, the Grinch was drawn without his famous colour. Green arrived only with Chuck Jones's 1966 television special, when Jones and Seuss agreed it was the one shade that made sense. Even the name had a false start, first belonging to a bald bird and then a salesman.
Seuss first used the word in 1953, in Scrambled Eggs Super!, for an exotic, bad-tempered bird with a beagle beak and a bald head. Two years later a Redbook poem, The Hoobub and the Grinch, gave the name to a fast-talking huckster who has almost nothing in common with the later character. The familiar Grinch arrived in How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, published by Random House and in Redbook in 1957.
The plot is simple. A misanthrope living on a cliff above Whoville, with a heart the Whos say is two sizes too small, dresses as Santa, drafts his dog Max as a reindeer and strips the town of its presents on Christmas Eve. On Christmas morning the Whos sing anyway, happy just to be together. The Grinch grasps that the holiday means more than its trappings, his heart swells threefold, and he brings everything back. Scholars have compared him to Dickens's Scrooge; one cardiologist, David Kass, joked that a heart that grows like that suggests the physiology of a Burmese python.
The 1966 special starred Boris Karloff as narrator and Grinch, but because Karloff could not sing, Thurl Ravenscroft performed You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch. Seuss later wrote two more specials, one for Halloween in 1977 and a 1982 crossover with the Cat in the Hat; both won Emmys, though neither matched the original. The Cat in the Hat special pinned the Grinch's bitterness on grief for his mother, while Ron Howard's live-action film of 2000 invented a childhood of abandonment and schoolyard mockery.
Since then the role has passed through many hands and voices: Jim Carrey in Howard's box-office hit, Benedict Cumberbatch in Illumination's 2018 animation, Matthew Morrison in an NBC live musical, puppeteer Anthony Asbury on Nick Jr., and Stefán Karl Stefánsson touring the stage show for years.
Source: Grinch
