PBS series brings wonders of the natural world to preschoolers

The Cat in the Hat is back — again — with his red
bow tie and rave-ready stripey soft topper. This time he comes not, as
he did in the first book to bear his name, only to make “fun that is
funny” but rather in the name of science: “The Cat in the Hat Knows a
Lot About That,” an American-Canadian-British co-production that began
Monday on PBS, designed to teach the wonders of the natural world to
preschoolers lulled into believing they are just watching a cartoon.

Press materials trumpet that this is the first
animated series in which the Cat has starred, but he has appeared over
the years in animated specials and Jim Henson’s Muppeted “The Wubbulous World of Dr. Seuss,” which was a wubbulous
series indeed. It’s also been stressed that the show, being made under
the watchful eye of Mrs. Dr. Seuss, Audrey Geisel, is in the spiky spirit of her late husband’s original — which it only sort of is.

“The Cat in the Hat,” after all, is the story of a
home invasion, during which a fish is terrorized, a rake is bent, and
twin Things wreak havoc “with hops and big thumps / And all kinds of
bad tricks.” The Cat does clean up his substantial mess, finally, but
neither we nor the child-narrator nor his sister have any way of
knowing this in advance. It is a tense time meanwhile. (It is also a
book that illustrates lying to mom.)

There is silliness here but no danger, and little
children Sally and Nick ask their mothers’ permission before flying off
with the Cat (and Thing 1 and Thing 2 and the ever-fretful Fish) in his
super-convertible Thinga-ma-jigger. It is always a little sad when a
wild thing is tamed, but that is not a thought liable to distract this
show’s intended audience — and the Cat was about incidental education
anyway. The Flash-animated images are suitably Seussian, replicating
his line and shapes and happily rendered in the flat planes of a
picture book and not in the “three dimensions” of “Mickey Mouse
Clubhouse” and its computer-inflated ilk.

Martin Short, star of screen and stage, gives the Cat his voice, following in the pawsteps of Allan Sherman and Henry Gibson. Short seems a logical choice: He has a history of playing sweet-faced troublemakers, and if there is some small trace of Ed Grimley in his delivery, there are also notes of Ed Wynn, who was Disney’s Mad Hatter (a role Short has also played). He’s a singer too, and there are songs.

I borrowed a couple of children from next door to
watch the show with me, to see if they would be entertained or
educated. They were entertained, although they see so little television
that practically any cartoon would have kept them interested; they are
also polite and probably would have told me they liked it simply
because I had shown it to them.

The subjects of the opening episode were bees and
birds (but not, I should say, the birds and the bees), and while my
subjects claimed to already know all about them, I found that it
clarified a few things for me about how nectar becomes honey. And
though I was pretty clear on the concept of migration, I had never
considered that birds go south in the winter not (or not just) because
they’re happier where it’s warm but because that’s where the bugs are.

So on the whole, time well spent.

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