Cat in the Hat movie controversy

Q: Why was Cat in the Hat 2 Cancelled?

Seusss widow, Audrey Geisel, was also critical of the film and decided not to allow any further live-action adaptations of her husbands works, resulting in the cancellation of a sequel based on The Cat in the Hat Comes Back; all Dr. Seuss film adaptations have since been produced using computer animation.

Q: Is The Cat in the Hat about communism?

Seusss ideas about Communism, anarchism, and the range of other political ideas at play in the late 1950s are smattered throughout the first Cat book, but its The Cat in the Hat Comes Back (1958) thats most responsible for Seusss reputation as a Communist. Thats right—get ready for the sequel.

Q: Is Cat in the Hat appropriate?

Its not right for your 5- or 6-year-old. There is surprisingly rude and crude humor including double entendres and almost-swearing, potty humor, and other bodily function jokes. The Cat picks up a muddy garden implement and refers to it as a dirty hoe and spells out the s-word.

Theodor Geisel wrote "The Cat in the Hat" using just 300 different words. When the film adaptation of the Dr. Seuss classic opens Friday, young moviegoers will encounter some additional vocabulary terms, including hip-hop slang for a prostitute and a four-letter acronym for excrement.

Table of Contents Show

Why was Cat in the Hat 2 Cancelled?
Is The Cat in the Hat about communism?
Is Cat in the Hat appropriate?
What does The Cat in the Hat represent?

Three years after "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" became a runaway box-office hit, Hollywood is trying again to marry a leading comic with a unique voice in children's literature. Where Jim Carrey added broad physical comedy to "Grinch," Mike Myers injects a different brand of humor into "Cat in the Hat," which features sight and script gags about lactose intolerance, castration and erections.

"I really thought we'd have to trim a couple of scenes," says Bo Welch, the film's director and an esteemed production designer, who admits he thought it was "shocking" that the film received a PG rating in its first and only screening before the ratings board.

One of "Cat in the Hat's" most controversial sequences involved the Cat's stumbling upon a muddy garden implement, which he addresses as a "dirty ho."

A number of people who worked on the movie asked that the line be cut for taste, but Myers fought for it. "I had a bet that the joke wouldn't last. But it did," Welch says.

Introducing Myers' particular--and often risque--comic style, popularized in the hit "Austin Powers" films, into a family film was not the only challenge faced by the "Cat in the Hat" filmmakers. Before filming could begin, the film's producer, Brian Grazer, had to make peace with Myers, with whom he had been involved in a nasty legal battle.

Once production started, songs written by Randy Newman were ditched because they were deemed inferior. And although Welch discounts it, several people say Myers had considerable input into the film's directing, telling some of the cast (co-stars Alec Baldwin and Kelly Preston) how to perform their scenes.

"Grinch" held an obvious moviemaking advantage over "Cat in the Hat," in that "Grinch's" lead character changes, and there is an entire world called Whoville in which he evolves from foe to friend. With "Cat in the Hat," Welch says, "Well, there's not a lot there. Mom leaves. Cat comes in and trashes the place and cleans it up before she comes home. That's not much of a movie."

But it was a start. The Writers Guild of America did not give the "Seinfeld" writing team of Alec Berg, Jeff Schaffer and David Mandel credit for rewriting the "Grinch" screenplay, even though director Ron Howard said the threesome wrote almost all of the movie (the film is credited to the original screenwriters Jeffrey Price and Peter Seaman). The threesome immediately started expanding "Cat in the Hat's" brief outline.

The writing trio added a lethargic baby-sitter and also concocted a scheming neighbor (Baldwin) who is courting the mom (Preston), giving the plot an antagonist and a reason for the characters' leaving the house.

While the writers had only five weeks to rework "Grinch" before its cameras started rolling, they had much more time to collaborate with Myers to add gags on the "Cat" script.

"He's very keyed into what's funny, and he knows what he wants," Schaffer says.

After the successful release of How the Grinch Stole Christmas in 2000, with Jim Carrey charming audiences as the curious green title character, it was an inevitability that the equally successful Dr. Seuss’ book, The Cat in the Hat would be next. Plastering several layers of prosthetics onto Mike Myers, whilst undertaking a similar cartoonish style as the previous Seuss outing, Universal assumed little could go wrong with the release of the film in 2003.

This wish couldn’t have been further from the reality, however, with Seuss’s widow, Audrey Geisel, hating the film so much that she banned the company from making any further live-action adaptations of her husband’s works, calling the project a “particular disappointment”. Seuss wasn’t the only one who lambasted the film either, with The Cat in the Hat holding a meagre 9% on Rotten Tomatoes, whilst also being commonly recognised as one of the worst movies of all time.

Quite why the film was so despised remains something of a mystery, with audience members clearly believing the book is some sort of sacred text akin to War and Peace or To Kill a Mockingbird. Read to children across the world, Seuss’ story is a rhyming picture book with little subtext to dig deep into, a direct adaptation would’ve lasted no longer than ten minutes. Instead, what director Bo Welch and writers Alec Berg and David Mandel set out to do is make something far more unique.

Bizarre, puerile and psychedelic, the filmmakers took curious liberties with the adaptation of Seuss’ tale but did well to imbue it with its own idiosyncratic brand of humour that was surprisingly ahead of its time. Coming from the writers of Curb your Enthusiasm, Veep and Seinfeld, The Cat in the Hat toys with comedy throughout, often hitting and sometimes missing, like a sketch show born from the mind of a hyperactive child with blue food stains down their T-shirt.

To watch The Cat in the Hat is to enter into a wormhole of absurdity where time seems to not exist at all, as if you’re experiencing a VR fever dream led by your strangest childhood recurring fantasy. Clocking in at just 82 minutes, the film feels like a hallucinogenic trip that is over shortly after it’s just begun, with the vibrant set design and peculiar character designs absorbing you into a radiant world, before spitting you back onto your sofa at the movie’s close.

‘Did I just see Paris Hilton in an underground nightclub scene?’ you might say as you come around from your daze, ‘and was that The Cat in the Hat making a sexual innuendo about a ‘dirty hoe’’. As you awaken and regain genuine consciousness you’ll realise that indeed everything did happen as you remembered, with the film displaying as much frenetic nonsense as the most psychedelic Saturday morning cartoon.

In fact, when compared to modern cartoons such as SpongeBob SquarePants, Rick and Morty and Adventure Time, the surrealism of The Cat in the Hat seems somewhat commonplace. With all its puerile humour, adult jokes and satirical silliness, you can’t help but think this is exactly what a contemporary adaptation of The Cat in the Hat would be like if it was released today.

Caring little about the ‘grandeur’ of its source material, The Cat in the Hat is a trippy, hallucinogenic ride that treats the retinas to a flurry of colour and chaos, enough to fixate any child. Bizarre and brightly coloured, the film dumps all pomposity at the door in pursuit of simply having “fun, fun, fun!”.

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Why was Cat in the Hat 2 Cancelled?

Seuss's widow, Audrey Geisel, was also critical of the film and decided not to allow any further live-action adaptations of her husband's works, resulting in the cancellation of a sequel based on The Cat in the Hat Comes Back; all Dr. Seuss film adaptations have since been produced using computer animation.

Is The Cat in the Hat about communism?

Seuss's ideas about Communism, anarchism, and the range of other political ideas at play in the late 1950s are smattered throughout the first Cat book, but it's The Cat in the Hat Comes Back (1958) that's most responsible for Seuss's reputation as a Communist. That's right—get ready for the sequel.

Is Cat in the Hat appropriate?

It's not right for your 5- or 6-year-old. There is surprisingly rude and crude humor including double entendres and almost-swearing, potty humor, and other bodily function jokes. The Cat picks up a muddy garden implement and refers to it as "a dirty hoe" and spells out the s-word.

What does The Cat in the Hat represent?

In more than one interview, Dr. Seuss noted that he intended for the Cat in the Hat to represent a kind of revolutionary spirit and scholars have posited that Cat in the Hat represents Geisel himself.