The bad news is: I’ve lost what was left of my mind. The good news is: I did not lose my will to live, as I’d feared. Au contraire, I would go so far as to say that I’ve been given a wonderful, campy, culty gift of cinema. I have also fallen down a rabbit hole completely separate from the one into which I originally leapt, and it has made something I wrote WAY longer than I anticipated. What else is new?
My original plan was to describe the events of this movie and make fun of them MST3K style, and most of that remains. What I wasn’t expecting as I did my due diligence was the story of how this movie was quite thoroughly ruined before its release. What remains is wonderful in its own way, but I’m not exaggerating when I say ruined. Dr. Seuss himself requested that no mention of this film be included in his official biography. That’s how bad it got. Not that any of the problems with this movie stem from him; I’m fairly confident it was more from crushing disappointment than from any personal feelings of shame.
On that note, let it be known that I have zero intention of mocking Dr. Seuss for his involvement with this film. His vision was not the issue. I'm aware that dredging up a topic he had hoped to forget could be construed as disrespectful, but I don't mean it to be. Quite the opposite. I want to clear his good name of any responsibility for the way The 5,000 Fingers Of Dr. T turned out. The fact that he had to watch his potential magnum opus fall to pieces before his eyes is a devastating thought, and it's even worse to think of him shouldering blame for it.
On that note, let it be known that I have zero intention of mocking Dr. Seuss for his involvement with this film. His vision was not the issue. I'm aware that dredging up a topic he had hoped to forget could be construed as disrespectful, but I don't mean it to be. Quite the opposite. I want to clear his good name of any responsibility for the way The 5,000 Fingers Of Dr. T turned out. The fact that he had to watch his potential magnum opus fall to pieces before his eyes is a devastating thought, and it's even worse to think of him shouldering blame for it.
If I tried to describe everything done to this movie in editing, this essay would go from 'long' to 'too damn long'. I’ll talk about the instances I find most egregious in as much detail as I can, but believe me, there is much more to it than I can stand to write or you can stand to read in one sitting. To quote IMDB:
“Following a poor preview screening, the entire movie was reworked, eschewing much of the social commentary and various Dr. Seuss grotesqueries in favour of family-friendly sentimentality. Nine songs were cut, subplots were eliminated, new scenes were shot and existing scenes were rearranged.”
I find this quote confusing, because what they left in was a whole lot of social commentary and Dr. Seuss grotesqueries, only now they’re out of context and therefore even more grotesque. On an even worse note: it still screened poorly after it had been butchered. There’s a reason it’s not a popular film, and I don’t blame the public for reacting to it the way they did. I believe the blame lies with the producers, who tried to edit it for, and market it to, boring upper-middle class families. This is NOT a movie for them in any of its forms.
Who is it for, then? That’s a more difficult question, one to which I don’t have a satisfying answer. I want to say fans of Dr. Seuss, but as it stands, it’s not quite Seussian enough. I want to say fans of musicals, but I feel like that’s too general a term in this case. And, no, as it turns out, it’s not really for children.
The only thing I can say for certain is that the more you put into this movie, the more you get out of it. Believe me, I recognize how much unnecessary work that is. I can’t in good conscience refer to The 5,000 Fingers Of Dr. T, in its current state, as either ‘accessible’ or ‘good’, and I don’t blame anyone for passing it by.
Researching it for this essay felt a bit like picking up shards of shattered crystal; at first glance it seems someone dropped a glass, which happens every day. No big loss. Most people shrug and move on. But, as I gathered more and more shards, I started to see a pattern, and I realized that someone smashed a Lalique vase. They didn’t just drop it, they threw it to the ground in the hopes of making a profit, which still eluded them in the end. They busted up a work of art for nothing.
I got pretty angry about that.
I began the intro to this essay on July 1, 2018. Coincidentally, since I had no way of knowing at the time, that was the 65th anniversary of the film’s release. My goal is to release this essay on March 2nd, 2019, on what would have been Dr. Seuss’ 115th birthday, because I’m a sucker for stupid coincidences and thought I’d try for one of my own.
The point of all these calendar shenanigans is to say: I watched this movie for the second time in my life but the first time in memory on August 20, 2018; and I was terrified. I sat in a darkened room for, no joke, half an hour, psyching myself up to hit play. I lived in palpable fear of this film for over two decades. My stomach would drop and my skin would crawl any time I thought about the man in the drum.
Add together several months, a dozen viewings, and a lot of research, and here you find me nearly in tears; not because of the man in the drum, but because of the despair I feel at what was lost. Terror has been usurped by bitter melancholy. Never have I had an object of fear in my life become such an object of affection, and I do not say that lightly. You need to understand, if you don't already - there was nothing in the world that scared me more than the man in the drum. Not moths, not the clown from The Brave Little Toaster, not even my own mortality, because at least if I was dead I could not be tortured inside a drum. Yet here I am today, embracing The 5,000 Fingers Of Dr. T like a long-lost sibling.
It breaks my heart that I can’t make this movie better. Columbia Pictures is the only entity that could do that at this point, and if they were to try I highly doubt they’d succeed. What I can do, by explaining what happened to it, is make it more accessible. I can perform this much-too-late autopsy and show you what might have been, had the patient lived. That might sound dramatic, but I won’t lie; it’s truly how I feel. Art being ruined in the name of money is a subject near and dear to my heart, and I’ve come to learn that there’s hardly a better example of it than the case of Dr. T.
The only way I can help is to tell its story, so that’s what I’m going to do, to the best of my ability. I hope I can help you put aside what it is and see what it was meant to be.
Speaking of what it is: I do encourage you to seek out this movie, unless you happen to be a boring upper-middle class family. For such a reviled film, it’s not hard to find. It even had a fully remastered Blu-Ray release, not just one of those 'slap the print on a Blu-Ray' deals. Be warned, though - when they say ‘family-friendly’, they’re playing fast and loose. Screen it before you show it to small chilluns, especially sensitive ones. I am dead serious about this, and not just because of the man in the drum; who, spoiler alert, is still pretty horrifying.
He is not alone.
But we’ll get to him later. Let’s start at the beginning, the only place to start.
Enter if you dare. Click here for Part Three.
