The Best of Dr Seuss

Dialogue Captured in the Offices of Warner Bros. Early 2004.

INTERIOR: An executive's office. Around the walls are the trappings of business; framed artwork, a wallsafe, a shelf of testicles in jars.

EXECUTIVE 1: (on telephone headset whilst squeezing a squash ball) Well I’m telling you, Marty, this Cat in the Hat thing is going to be big. We need to find a way we can milk it.

(Unheard reply from MARTY)

EXECUTIVE 1: Well, what do we have? (he begins searching for a file on his impossibly small computer terminal).

(Unheard reply from MARTY)

EXECUTIVE 1: Dammit! Is the Cat even in it?

(Unheard reply from MARTY)

EXECUTIVE 1: Excellent. Okay, Marty, this is what you’re gonna do. You’re gonna get all this crap piled up together on a video –

(Unheard reply from MARTY)

EXECUTIVE 1: Whatever, a DVD then, and we’ll sell it to the myopic who think the film has somehow come out on DVD three months before its cinema release.

(Unheard reply from MARTY)

EXECUTIVE 1: Of course it is! (pausing) You haven’t worked here long, have you son?

(Unheard reply from MARTY)

EXECUTIVE 1: Just make it happen, Marty. Do it well enough and this could mean a promotion.

(Unheard reply from MARTY)

EXECUTIVE 1: Alright. I’ll have my people call your people before Friday.

(Unheard reply from MARTY)

EXECUTIVE 1: You don’t have people? How the hell are they running that mailroom?

CUT TO TITLE: Three months later…

Dialogue Captured in the Mailroom of Warner Bros. April 2004.

INTERIOR: A busy mailroom. MARTY and EXECUTIVE 1 are sorting mail together. EXECUTIVE 1 is no longer in a power suit with a headset. He wears a T-shirt stained by sweat.

EXECUTIVE 1: When do we break for lunch? Man, I could use a martini.

MARTY rolls his eyes. FADE TO BLACK.

ROLL CREDITS.

That was an exclusive, by the way.

Yes, not to be outdone, Warner Bros. have seen fit to release their paltry collection of Dr. Seussabilia and ride the gravy train as long as it runs. Here we have three short episodes of Dr. Seuss stories made into animation for TV. They bear much the same content as the previous releases from other sources, though some here are much more recent (and one is way, waaay older).

Daisy Head Mayzie (1994) runs 22:46 and makes a social comment about the accident of birth that makes some people beautiful and how they can so easily be exploited.

Horton Hatches the Egg (1942) is a Merrie Melody running 9:24 and is a nonsense tale about laziness and determination.

The Butter Battle Book (1989) is a barely veiled epithet about the nuclear cold war between the US and Russia.

The more recent Daisy-Head looks like scanned 2D work and is therefore pretty clean and clear with nice even colour. Horton and Butter are both older and produced on hand painted cels, so naturally the colours are a little more indistinct. Horton looks better though made over 40 years before, with the Ralph Bakshi produced Butter lacking in quality of both cels and animation.

However, all are watchable and delivered in the 1.33:1 aspect ratio that, of course, doesn’t allow for 16:9 enhancement.

Dolby Digital stereo is the tool, and this is more than adequate for the purposes here. Dialogue is clear and voiced by a couple of notables including Henry Gibson and Tim Curry. Sound effects are comical and mostly well synched, while the music is different for each and suited to the individual productions. Still, it’s not anything to get excited by though.

Not an extra here, no not a sausage. Budget produced, do you get the message?

If you liked the other ones from Universal Studios, no doubt this will please as well, though this lacks the finesse of those releases (and they weren’t even all that impressive). The kids will probably go ape for them, though the messages here are more easily understood, less veiled and even more acerbic. Also, the Merry Melodies one features a character who looks like Peter Lorre (for some reason) killing himself. (This is also evident in some of the other Warner Bros. cartoons).

There’s not much to recommend this but for it’s obvious relationship to the other releases from a different studio. Personally, I think these are pretty lacklustre and miss the articulate nature of single illustrations in the books, but there are no doubt some who will see things differently.