Grinchy questions

jayjay, that is the question of the ages! I, too, have pondered this. Alas, I have no answers, only questions…

It is my considered opinion that there was only one Grinch. The travesty that was Ron Howard’s flick would like you to believe that he was a Who that went bad. I think not.

However, others have already answered, so I just popped in to say I have an Original Animation Cel from The Grinch. I actually had one of Max too, but it was lost during a move (1500 dollars worth…)

Just to derail the thread:

Odysseus encounters an island of cyclopes so presumably they have families even if I can’t recall anything specific about Polyphemus having one.

Medusa was human and had two sisters who were transformed like she was.

The minotaur had a human mother.

But I’ll go with the Grinch as a singular being.

I was thinking Yoda and Boris Karloff…but…dear God…

How exactly did the Lorax come to “speak for the trees,” anyway? Was he some sort of tree-related creature, or just a hippie who decided to live in the woods one day and never got a haircut?

And don’t get me started on the Cat in the Hat. Breaking and entering is one thing- why does he keep going into the same house? Some sort of Stockholm Syndrome?

In the live action movie, he was a a different species, delivered by mistake to a who family by stork or baby-parachute or some such device. But that’s not in the book (in fact the whole plot is quite a bit different, although it doesn’t initially seem to be).

In the book, he’s not ‘Mr Grinch’, he’s ‘The Grinch’, but as there are phrases like ‘a sour grinchy frown’, I’d say it’s a mixture of name/title and species.

Only in later mythology. Originally, Medusa and her sisters were, like the other monstrous triplet sisters the Graeae, the children of Ketos the Sea Monster and Phorkys, the Old Man of the Sea. They were monsters from birth.
I sear, Ovid liked making his female characters suffer. He could’ve given Hand Christian Anderson a run for his money. He has lots of innocent women turned into awful things in his Metamorphoses, and his account of Medusa, raped by Poseidon in a temple then transformed into a monster, is one of the first (if not the first) of the “transformed” Medusa stories.

I’ve read a really good book about this stuff.

Was it: Medusa: Solving the Mystery of the Gorgon by any chance? :slight_smile:

That piece of hack work?
Nah. Timothy Ganz’ classic and indispensable Early Greek Myth.

As the Lorax sprang fully grown from the stump of a Truffula Tree, I can accept that he is a variety of bossy nymph, specific and unique to that grove.

Other type of trees may have different Lorax-type guardians, ineffectual as they are.

Hmmmmm. I confess that I haven’t yet ordered my copy. But I was lead to believe that the author really knows his stuff… Of course, you would know better than I.

I always figured he was kinda like Gollum: stared out as a normal person (or whovillian) and then his antisocial ways and unstinitngly miserlyness corrupted his outward appearance.

Then that would mean “The Grinch who stole Christmas” would be used in the same context as “the Hatfields vs The McKoys”, treating a member of a family and the family as one.

I figure it’s “The Grinch” like “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”–you know she’s not the only one, but she’s emblematic. Or like “La LeStrange” (“Cheese it! La LeStrange is coming upstairs!”).