Halloween is Grinch Night is a 1977 TV special. It’s a “prequel” to How the Grinch Stole Christmas, though some people insist it is intended as a sequel, since it never really establishes when it is meant to take place. It doesn’t matter much, though, since Grinch Night works best when you take it as its own thing, as it makes no sense as a sequel or a prequel to the Yuletide classic for a number of reasons.

The plot is extremely simple. Basically, the Whos in Who-Ville are going about their business when bad weather awakens several noisy creatures in the land, and as we all know, old Grinchy has very sensitive hearing. This motivates him to take his wagon to do….something. It’s never really explained what. Like, he seems to simply want to scare the Whos to blow off steam, I guess? Also, it’s unclear what is in his wagon, but it appears to be…harmless? Like is it just a hallucination (Who-lucination)? I suppose that would make sense. It is the 70s.

But that brings us to one of many weird aspects of this thing. The Grinch is now magical. He can even turn fucking huge (at least during one of many songs), something which would have probably come in handy when he committed the greatest and simultaneously stupidest night of burglary in Who-history at Christmas. Why steal all of the decorations when you can just stomp on them all?

But I’m getting ahead of myself. There’s this little Who-boy called Ukariah (his name, by my estimation, is mentioned like 50 times throughout the special), and when he goes outside to “use the euphemism” (okay, okay, that’s a good joke), he gets blown away and right smack in front of the Grinch. There he also meets a morbidly depressed Max (he gets whipped by Grinch, by my estimation, like 50 times throughout the special). Grinch is annoyed at first, but when Ukariah refuses to leave him alone, he opens up his wagon…and that’s when all Who-Hell breaks loose.

This honestly does kind of catch me off-guard, even when I watch it as an adult. Up until this point, the special has been very uneventful. The Grinch is traveling ever so slowly in his wagon, and there’s a character in charge of “tracking the Grinch” (which sounds like it should be illegal) who is literally only here to narrate to the viewer what he is doing…even if it is something that has just happened! So yeah, you could make a fair case that a lot of this is filler, with Grinch Night struggling to fill its very short runtime. But then this scene happens, loaded with imagery which is legit creepy and even unnerving, and suddenly it turns into some good old Dr. Seuss nightmare fuel. It does leave an impact, but once it’s over the story just sort of…ends.

Halloween is Grinch Night featured almost none of the talent from the first special. Boris Karloff had passed away by the time it was made, though animation fans will get a kick out of hearing Hans Conried (best known today as Captain Hook in Disney’s Peter Pan) lend his pipes to Mr. Grinch. The songs were done by Joe Raposo (whose name was misspelled in the original press release), famous for doing literally hundreds of songs for Sesame Street, but here there are so many numbers that some of them kind of blend into each other. And Chuck Jones had no involvement at all, as this was given a much lower animation budget, which may explain why the Grinch keeps changing colors!

I should finally mention that Halloween is Grinch Night never references, you know, Halloween. In fact, during some airings and home video releases, it got re-titled It’s Grinch Night! or simply Grinch Night. I guess calling it Winds Are Bothering Mr. Grinch would have been too on the Who-nose.

Have a GRINCH NIGHT, y’all!