Christmas Song #14

NewSong--The Christmas Shoes



Perhaps the Rudolph Santa isn't the most dick-ish rendition of Santa, if you happen to consider the Grinch to be the complete inversion of your typical Santa character. I mean, he totally is.

Anyway, some people (including some others whom would be considered significant) would consider Dr. Seuss' How The Grinch Stole Christmas to be THE greatest Christmas special of all time. But I'm going to let them down by saying that it's merely... OK. I mean, it's totally unrealistic. Of course the Whos would be pissed off that all their presents were stolen. And there's NO WAY that the Grinch's heart would suddenly grow three times its previous size... and if it did, it'd probably kill him.

Actually, the only reason I'm not as fond of the Grinch as I am of Rudolph and A Charlie Brown Christmas is mainly because I didn't grow up watching it. And it probably took me until I was 15 or 16 or so to actually watch it, back when I had access to cable and multitudes of VHS tapes and tried to tape every single Christmas special known to man. And... it's perfectly good. I just kind of prefer the scruffiness of Rudolph and A Charlie Brown Christmas.

One main difference between Grinch and the other two is that the soundtrack is fairly limited--Charlie Brown Christmas had an entire jazz soundtrack with various songs throughout the entire special, and Rudolph had a bunch of songs (albeit they were all extremely short). I can only think of two songs from the Grinch special--the one we're listing above, and the Who song that goes something like "dabu-doore dabu-doore". Or something like that. I'm going completely on memory here.

But You're A Mean One, Mr. Grinch makes up with quality what the rest of the special's soundtrack lacks in quantity. I mean, you've all heard it, and so really... I don't *need* to link it up there for you. But there's also been a lot of cover versions of this particular song, but like always--the original is the best.

Of course, you should know that the person behind the vocals is one Thurl Ravenscroft, who aside from having a great name, also was the voice behind Tony the Tiger. And I dig his deep, gravelly voice for this song. It really gets across the true villainy of the Grinch almost better than anything else.

Also, for the record... the song above really isn't called "The Christmas Shoes." That was a joke, in case you were confused.