the CATS movie trainwreck & the weird mind of TS Eliot | full documentary

So Cats was a weird movie, huh? Join me, Maggie Mae Fish (and my alternate cat personality), as I explore the weird origins of Cats in the poetry (and warped mind) of TS Eliot.

Friends who contributed their lovely voices & other talents:

Special Thanks:
Tanis Ridley for help with terminology
Daniel C Gogolen: Associate Director of Doing Crimes -- @AntifaNimorph / @iwriteokay

[chalk]

Most of the Internet: "Cats" is awful! It makes no sense!
More nuanced Internet: The play was pretty strange too, maybe this shouldn't be surprising.
MMF: The original poetry (and poet) are so F'd up that the madness of the movie is the best quality.

[SFtheWolf]

your at-home makeup produced a more convincing, more aesthetically pleasing cat person than all their millions and cgi

[dannybeeblebrox]

Honestly, this makes Lindsay's video so much funnier, since she recounts the history that when ALW approached Elliot's widow about adapting the poems into Cats the musical, she claimed that "he would have loved it". This is blatantly false and was clearly Elliot's widow having the last laugh after what was probably a really fucked up marriage.

[petrelli]

*sees Maggie dressed and acting like a Weberian Cat*
I hope this doesn't awaken anything in me

[Novur]

Expectation: "lol cats bad, look CGI, editing, acting"

Reality: Hour long T.S. Eliot call-out post with receipts

[dylanchouinard]

17:30 to play devils advocate, the motif of Saint Sebastian being shot with arrows was mainly painted so that renaissance masters could get their boyfriends to do sexy poses and be paid by the Catholic Church for the pleasure.

[evansuggs]

Nabokov once observed that T.S. Eliot is an anagram for toilets

[samfromcadott]

No one has ever misunderstood a book more than T. S. Elliot misunderstood Animal Farm.

[luketfer]

When I was younger I, being a Brit, was often on 'historical railways' (aka steam railways) and one of my favorite memories of them was the fact that one of them had a Skimbleshanks. It was a cat that got off at a station, walked around for a bit, got fussed by passengers, occasionally stole someones unattended food and then would clamber back onto the train once the whistle blew and then would follow the ticket inspect up and down the train. Being young I thought THAT was what the whole basis for the Skimbleshanks thing was about, assuming that was how things were back in those days, like naval ships had a ships cat, I just assumed railways always had a railway cat.

[zd]

In a vast majority of the "making of" documentaries, Andrew Lloyd Weber likes to always recount a story of how he got the rights from T. S. Eliot's widow, Valerie, to adapt "The Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" into a musical. In it he assured her (because she was worried that Weber and co. would butcher Eliot's work by turning the cats into cute cartoonish kitty-cats) that he intended the Cats to be portrayed in the vein of the Hot Gossip dance troupe. Her response to it was: "I think Tom would've liked that."



And after watching this video essay and hearing about Eliot's views and also considering how Hot Gossip was mostly made up of women dancing in skin-tight body suits, I am honestly starting to wonder if Valerie Eliot said this and agreed to such an adaptation being made, just to spite her dead husband.

[UltimateKyuubiFox]

Andrew Lloyd Webber, while he was busy preparing his new Broadway play in 2015, left New York in order to fly back to Britain for a single day to cast his _second vote at all of the decade_ in favor of tax credit cuts which would make poor British families even poorer, so something tells me he looks at T.S. Elliot’s royalist views very favorably.

[mathieuleader]

I have an interesting yarn to tell you Maggie its that Eliot and Groucho Marx where penpals regularly sending letters back & forth and eventually T.S Eliot arranged a dinner at his London home, and both men prepared for the greatest night of their lives. They couldn’t have been more disappointed.

When Groucho arrived, Eliot was horrified to discover he only wanted to discuss books and poetry. In turn, Groucho was mortified to find out Eliot only wanted to talk about the Marx Brothers’ movie Duck Soup. Rather than reach an agreement, the two simply chose to live out their dream evening regardless: Eliot doggedly cracking awful jokes while Groucho tried to impress him with his literary theory on King Lear.

When dinner finally ended, neither man wanted to ever speak to the other again. They stopped writing, and Eliot never mentioned the evening to anyone. It’s since gone down as one of the worst meetings in history.

[LaurasBookBlog]

Why does Maggie's description of TS Eliot make me think of a slightly more socially successful HP Lovecraft?

[HoneyTheFracking]

Reading Animal Farm and asking for more "public spirited pigs" is the 40s equivalent of getting mad about Rage Against the Machine for being "too political"

[amiefortman]

And this is why "Cats" belongs to the theater kids, the furries, and the LGBTIA+ alliance, and T.S. Eliot can keep spinning in his grave until his head falls off. Thank you so much for this video--it gave me a lot to think about!

[WaferNegresco]

I just love how the readings of T.S. Eliot's quotes sound snobbish like he probably did. The guy read animal farm and sided with the pigs!

[lillydollaghan]

Let this forever be my mark. Pegging was invented by the gods.

[antoineaublin]

This was really good as always...
Just one thing... the "erotic" st sebastian paintings were really kind of a thing for Renaissance italian painters, many of whom were gay or bisexual. St Sebastian nowadays is kind of a gay icon (in the literal sense)
I dont think Ts eliot's interpretation of the paintings as carrying eroticism are completely off

[ts_babyjayne]

i keep being like "OMG I LOVE TS ELIOT'S POETRY." and then i realize im thinking about E.E. Cummings. guess i don't really care about modern poetry.

[bluejay]

Maggi called be as an asexual “dope” my life is complete everybody I can finally ascend. Be well my friends, be well.