Originally published at: Andrew Lloyd Webber thought the Cats movie was so horrible that he bought a dog. Seriously. | Boing Boing
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Well, I imagine he couldn’t see what they did, and then revoke the license.
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Curious connection to Logan’s Run …nonetheless?
The “plot” is kinda vaguely similar, and Peter Ustinov’s character is constantly reciting T.S.Elliot’s The Naming of Cats from “Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats” (“And there’s better singing and dancing from ‘Box’”)
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Did he also want the butt-hole cut released?
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I would say that for many of us, the original theatrical version of cats was a cloying anthropomorphic horror show. The movie just amplified that theme to such a degree that even Cats fans can recognize it.
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Hearing a little of the music was bad enough, I have avoided the actual play/film, so I know nothing of the story.
Do they really kill off the characters as they grow too old? Where do they wear their lifeclocks? Is this the real secret of the butthole cut?
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Wait until he finds out who wrote the play it was based on.
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I got about five minutes into it and had to shut it off. I don’t think there’s any amount of psychedelic drugs that could fix that movie.
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The butt hole shaming turned me off.
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Well, there’s a possible mash up. Logan’s Cats, or something. Logan’s Run, but a musical, and everyone is a cat… 
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I have also never seen either version, and the synopsis I once read didn’t make much logical sense.
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That’s like the bi-line for my life. Thank you, I think…
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Christ, what an asshole.
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The musical is based on a collection of poems about cats by T.S. Eliot that aren’t connected by any narrative structure so it was a weird choice of source material to begin with.
Apparently it took a lot of strong-arming to convince Eliot’s widow to let Weber adapt his book into a musical because she thought he’d ruin the spirit of her husband’s creation. I guess it’s a bit of cosmic irony that Weber allowed the same thing to happen to his.
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He was in the House of Lords on the Conservative benches for 30 20 years, so he’s pretty much the definition.
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That does explain a lot; thanks.
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Film critic/media writer Lindsay Ellis has a great long-form video essay called “Why is Cats?” that did a very thorough job breaking down the history of the show and how it became… whatever that nightmarescape of a movie was. I never saw any version of Cats but the more I learn about it the more I feel secure in my stance as a dog person.
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But why? When Sweeney Agonistes was right there?
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I loved the play. I wish they’d just left it alone though. It’s meant to be ridiculous, theatrical, and light…silly/stupid even. Making it into something narrative and filmic just kind of breaks it for me because then you have to justify what amounts to a clownish experience otherwise. Like turning a circus act into a novel.
It’s a light musical play about death where actors in clownish cat costumes act out silly cat versions of human mysticism while dancing and doing acrobatics.
Technically it does have narrative. Cats gather for their magic ball and tell stories of the cats who are getting nominated for whatever happens when they transition out of this life. They each tell the story and do a little dance that nominates a character. The ball gets interrupted but then resumes. Then one of them gets picked to do whatever happens when their current life ends. And that’s the story. It’s stupid, flashy, and campy and it needs to be or else it would be painfully boring and depressing.
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