THE CAT IN THE HAT ON THE TV

The Cat in the Hat, the wrecking-ball feline created by cartoonist Theodor Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss), debuted on public tv September 5. "The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That!” kicked off a the fall season for juvenile viewers, reported Rick Bentley at the Fresno Bee, adding: “Geisel wrote The Cat in the Hat in 1957 because he believed American children lagged behind the world in literacy. Taking the characters from page to screen eliminates Geisel's original literary intentions but the author was thinking about other ways to use the Cat in the years before his death.”

 

So this perversion of Dr. Seuss’s purpose is therefore okay? Robert Lloyd, tv critic for the Los Angeles Times, notes that “the show, being made under the watchful eye of Mrs. Dr. Seuss, Audrey Geisel, is in the spiky spirit of her late husband's original — which it only sort of is.”

Lloyd continues: "The Cat in the Hat, after all, is the story of a home invasion, during which a fish is terrorized, a rake is bent, and twin Things wreak havoc ‘with hops and big thumps / And all kinds of bad tricks.’ The Cat does clean up his substantial mess, finally, but neither we nor the child-narrator nor his sister have any way of knowing this in advance. It is a tense time meanwhile. (It is also a book that illustrates lying to mom.)

 “There is silliness here [in the tv adaptation] but no danger, and little children Sally and Nick ask their mothers' permission before flying off with the Cat (and Thing 1 and Thing 2 and the ever-fretful Fish) in his super-convertible Thinga-ma-jigger. It is always a little sad when a wild thing is tamed, but that is not a thought liable to distract this show's intended audience — and the Cat was about incidental education anyway.”

On the same day, reports Hero Complex contributor Noelene Clark at latimes.blog, Mad debuted on the Cartoon Network. "Spy vs. Spy" and other Mad magazine classics will join a host of new animated sketches—such as "CSiCarly," "2012 Dalmatians" and "Batman Family Feud"—in "MAD," a new 15-minute animated series based on the irreverent humor magazine.