What'd they do to Dr. Seuss?

The movie was shown way, way back, 2003 in fact. My question is: Was there ever a signature campaign to erase the movie from the unsuspecting moviegoers' memory? Let me sign up!

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The other day, I was so looking forward to a blissful sleep owing to a very relaxing spa. Well, I did manage to get some shuteye. It lasted for exactly an hour.

With bleary eyes, I got up from my bed and turned on the tv. I surfed and surfed until I came to HBO. I saw someone who looked like Dr Seuss, one of my all-time favorite cartoon characters, and early teachers, for that matter. I ditched the idea of going back to sleep and fed my sudden and unexpected longing for nostalgia.

Dr Seuss’ Cat in the Hat, that was the movie I was watching. I recognized Dakota Fanning, Alec Baldwin and Kelly Preston. Thing 1 and Thing 2, they were also there, but of course! And was it Paris Hilton in a disco-dancing cameo? Her appearance was so fleeting she was practically gone in the blink of an eye.

I think I caught two-thirds of the movie but I think I didn't miss much.

In one of the breaks, I frantically searched for and found the hardcover book from which the movie was made as I had zero recollection of the story.

What did I see?

Mike Myers was a rather podgy version of the tall and skinny cat I knew. Why, he was a total miscast and too mischievous for comfort. Dr Seuss was so famous and well-loved by kids because of the downright funny and catchy rhymes and the wonderfully nonsensical words. Myers, for his part, kept on blurting out inappropriate and at-times callous lines so totally out of the kids' league. The writers must’ve thought of mom & dad who watch with the kids. FYI Bloggie, the attempt at humor got wearisome in a hurry. (Yup, I'm single, so???)

Fanning and the other kid who played her brother looked so bored and tired that at various scenes they looked like they needed to be roused from stupor to speak their lines. I needn't say more.

The story? It was inserted with needlessly elaborate subplots. The kids’ mother - represented in the book by a slim leg whose foot was shod in a fancy pointed and beribboned black shoe – was fleshed out by Preston and was being pursued by a next-door neighbor played by Baldwin. The movie also sprung an overweight babysitter named Mrs. Kwan. And, not to forget, Preston’s boss who went by the lousy name Mr. Humberfloob - the writers probably thought Dr Seuss’ amazing ability to create very likeable out-of-this-world words rubbed off on them. Not in their wretched lifetime.

What the heck. I thought they needed to stretch the 61-page book of deceptively simple rhymes and eye-catching illustrations into something which was sustainingly entertaining, at the least. The end-product was pathetic, to say the least. The kids' lethargy must've been unconsciouly transmitted to them by the brains behind this lousy movie. The writers could have just as well incorporated other stories in the Cat in the Hat series. See? They could be found in the “I CAN READ IT ALL BY MYSELF" BEGINNER BOOKS. I won’t even discuss the lousy way they rendered the illustrations in the book. These imps messed up real big.

This is a child turning ballistic about the way the masterminds murdered her well-loved character and bedtime companion.

The grownup in me - my brain, I hope - considers Dr Seuss and The Cat in the Hat a classic children’s literature and for it to be rendered with incredible crassness is just so loathsome.

Thank goodness this lousy, lousy movie has not spawned a sequel.

It is really best to follow the advice of Dr Seuss' wise fish:

Make that cat go away!
Tell that cat in the hat
You do not want to play.
He should not be here
He should not be about.
He should not be here
When your mother is out.

The cat, of course, is Myers and the coterie of directors, scriptwriters and cinematographers responsible for this horror of a movie.