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In 1961, Chuck Jones moonlighted as a writer on the UPA feature Gay Purr-ee.

When Warner Bros. distributed the film the following year, they discovered that he had contributed to the film in violation of his exclusive contract and fired him.

Jones teamed with Les Goldman to form Sib Tower 12 Productions to work with MGM on the Tom and Jerry series in the mid-1960s ; his shorts were not as popular as the Hanna-Barbera originals but more so than the Gene Deitch shorts produced overseas in the early 1960s.

Jones then began producing a number of successful animated TV specials.

His most famous special was How the Grinch Stole Christmas !, a 1966 CBS adaptation of the Dr. Seuss story that still remains popular and has been released on video and DVD several times.

Jones also produced three animated adaptations of short stories from Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book, a full-length MGM feature film entitled The Phantom Tollbooth, and the 1970 TV version of Horton Hears a Who!