Orchestrated by Greg Jamrok and Andrew Kinney

Conducted by David Newman

Songs Composed by Marc Shaiman

Release Date: November 18th, 2003

              Decca Records
 

     With the success of How the Grinch Stole Christmas (way back when in 2000), it seemed inevitable that more films along the same line would follow. Well, three years later we have an adaptation of The Cat in the Hat, with Mike Myers playing the title role. Like The Grinch, the film will probably succeed on its ability to draw in the kiddie audience, regardless of whether or not director Bo Welch has delivered a satisfying full-length version of a story that didn’t take up much room in book form to begin with.

     Taking over from James Horner’s role on The Grinch, David Newman would seem to be the most logical choice for scoring a film of this nature. His work on such movies as Galaxy Quest, Ice Age, and Scooby Doo has shown just how adept he is at scoring these types of quirky, cartoony films. With that in mind, I felt rather relieved that he had been picked to score this one (I never got around to listening to Horner’s contribution to the Seuss franchise). Ultimately, while quirkiness abounds in this score, none of it is constrained to pull together into a satisfying experience and the music stands as an almost random conglomeration of different styles and attempts to pull off the closest thing to Carl Stalling since the original Looney Tunes shorts.

     The music follows the same tone of Ice Age, though only slightly pulling back from its heavy tongue-in-cheek approach. However, where Ice Age excelled because of Newman’s wonderful thematic usage, it is all but completely avoided here. None of the cues seem to be related to each other in any way, and with the all the jumping around style-wise that Newman does in the score, it gives the music a very disjointed feel. It is obviously well in keeping with the whimsical nature of the title character, and as such I’m sure it works well enough in the film, but isolated on disc it tends to fall flat.

     There are also three tracks that consist of songs from the film. The first is a Smash Mouth rendition of the Beetles’ tune, Getting Better. It works well enough, but given that the other two songs are more in keeping with the musical nature of the score, it tends to stick out, to say nothing of what Beetles purists may think about it. The other songs performed by Mike Myers are really nothing special, even given that Marc Shaiman lent his talents to composing them. Fun, Fun, Fun is probably the best…if you don’t mind the tasteless jokes (for a film of this type at least) of almost using profanity in front of kids. Given that it’s almost a staple of these films, it tends to drag down the song. The last one is hardly even worth mentioning, since it lasts all of twenty-two seconds.