Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Movie Deputy Reviews Interrogating movies for plot and content.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: Hello, my friends, and welcome back to Movie Deputy Reviews. We are talking about the one, the only, Cat in the Hat.
Now, my generation, my son's, our son's generation, probably your kids generation, maybe you yourselves grew up with Dr. Seuss and just the love and the pleasure and everything you got going out of that. And it was just so much fun just to participate and go into all of this and just really look into all of these details.
And it's just the nonsensical stuff of it. And just the books are supposed to be tongue twisters. Fox and Socks was one of my son's favorites. I don't know why they've never tried to make that into a movie that would be hilarious, but not if the movies keep going in this type of direction. I miss the innocence of Dr. Seuss.
They were mischievous, they were silly, they were kind of all over the place. But one thing they weren't is woke.
And you probably already figured out where I'm going with this, but stick around, stick around. We're doing things a little bit differently here than what we've done in the past. I. As you've probably noticed with some of my recent reviews, I'm running into some issues with the trailers and sharing the trailers as part of the review.
So what I going to start doing is I'm going to do trailer reactions where it'll be a completely separate video that I'll be sharing the trailer and talking about just the trailer by itself.
And so I'm going to start doing that. I know a lot of people do that already. There's a lot of creators that do stuff like that already. But you know me, I don't ever try to mimic anybody else because come on, I'm the deputy. I interrogate them. I interrogate movies for their plot and content. And part of that is going to involve interrogating the trailers for their plot and content, or at least what is what is shown to us, based purely on the trailers that I had seen in the theaters for the Cat and the Hat, the new one. I was actually really looking forward to this because like I said, I've always loved Dr. Susan. I grew up with the Grinch Stole Christmas and just kind of all of those. And then the very first book my son actually learned to read was Go Dog, Go. Okay, that one. Okay. It's really simple.
And honestly, he probably memorized it because that was kind of our routine is every night we'd read a book and nine times out of ten, he chose Dr. Seuss. At least once he was past a certain age, we did Little Monsters, we did a bunch of the other characters, but he loved Dr. Seuss and he loved, like I said, the Cat in the Hat was part of that rotation.
So we were. I was familiar with teaching him about the mischief of it and everything, but mind you, he was just a munchkin, just a little guy.
And I don't mean that in like the negative sense. I mean, that's like an endearing term.
But the books were safe to teach to kids, and reluctantly, I have to say that I am going to give the Cat in the Hat a tentative username, that word, tentative innocent rating. I would not recommend this movie for anybody without parental supervision.
And I would probably say nobody under the age of 10.
You're like, wait, it's Cat the Hat. The target audience of this is likely 8 to 12 year olds, which is kind of right in that ballpark. But it's Dr. Seuss. It should be safe for even the littlest of kids.
And unfortunately it's not. We get. You get a very heavy, not directly political, but more political leanings. There's a lot of biasness against the family moving into the apartment building.
There's a lot of negativity with that. Then you have a very heavy LGBTQ presence in the. In the movie itself.
And then you. It's got a near. Same sex kiss.
Yeah, I said near. I mean, it does. There. There's something that happens, almost give that away, but it nearly happens.
And then you've just got a bunch of characters that really kind of push the boundaries maybe a little bit too far.
Now, this does have the nonsense of Dr. Seuss. It does have the silliness of Dr. Seuss. You have the cat that's coming in to this broken down family trying to raise their spirits and causing absolute chaos. I mean, which is the story, which is the Cat in the Hat.
But once they're in their Seuss type world, that's where everything goes astray. And that's where you lose a lot of what the story should be. And then there's even parts of it that get a little dark that are going to be a little scary for some of the youngest audiences.
And even when it gets towards the end and is revealed exactly what that character is, you know me, no spoilers ever.
Even that is going to be a heavy thing for the youngest of audiences to process.
Even as an adult, I'm like, why? What was the point of putting that in there and addressing that from that perspective, I don't know. I don't know why they did it. And then in the credits and stuff, I was trying and I was kind of seeing who was responsible for making the movie and I'm like, okay, that adds up.
Because the people that were involved in making this movie were very much on that side of Holly. What? If you get my drift.
So with the Cat in the Hat, it's just. It's not the innocence that it should be. It's not the simplicity that it should be. Is there a lot of heart to the story?
Absolutely. But you have to be able to get past the rest of it to get there. And that's the hard part.
What does that mean?
There's going to be people that love this story, People that hate the story. People hate.
I wouldn't say I hate it, but I'm going to have a very, very hard time recommending this as it strays from the original.
I don't mind creative license with pieces of the story. I don't mind them adding pieces to the story or doing this or doing that to the story if it's adding a creative bit to it. But when you're adding things in to try to influence the way the kids think based on quote, unquote, how the world is nowadays, we don't need to be shoving this stuff down kids throats. We don't need. We. Kids don't need to learn about certain. Some of these subjects. Kids don't need to be exposed to this. Kids don't need to understand why this color doesn't like this color or that this person doesn't like this person for this reason.
Why are we basically encouraging bullying except from an adult standpoint that's aimed at kids?
Like I said. Are there lessons to be learned here? Yes.
Is it enough?
No.
Because what should have been something simple and cute and wholesome and chaotic became something much more.
So as much as this tries to be family friendly and as much as it tries to be down that narrow focus, I honestly can't say it's either family friendly or safe for the youngest of audiences.
And yeah, there's just too many things. But like I said, there is amazing heart to this. And towards the end, even I was emotional because of just some of the things that are happening to me. No spoilers ever.
But it just wasn't enough to save what was going on with the story.
Why did they do it?
Hollywood does that excuse it? No.
But I can say, let's do better.
They can definitely do better.
This stuff, this should be simple and it was anything but.
So where did I end up with this?
Not gonna surprise you a whole lot on this one. That I came in at a 3.75 out of 10 on the Deputy scale.
You may be thinking why?
But like I said, even though it's got the good stuff to it and it's got the things that that matter, it's mixed in with all of the other stuff. It'd be like having this amazing recipe and having this amazing thing and then you're adding like one thing really gross or that tastes really awful into it and it just spoils the whole batch.
That's what you get here.
So I hope that this has helped a few of you at least, or more of you. Especially if this is one that you've been considering taking your little ones to, or if you're even adult that loves the D Dr. Seuss series. It's like you're going to be this and you'll be disillusioned with what the presentation of this is here.
So as always, I hope that you're enjoying these reviews. Like I said, hit those buttons and stick around because there was actually a short before this movie and that review is going to be coming up here in just a little bit. So I'll see you soon. Bye.
[00:09:25] Speaker A: Thanks for joining us.
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