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| Billie Silvey |
| Top Pop Cats |
| January 2007 |
| If you’ve ever watched a cat, sprawled seemingly bonelessly in the warmest patch of sunshine, gliding silently through the grass stalking a pigeon, or leaping with incredible grace to a narrow ledge, then carefully placing paw after paw to walk that ledge, you know how fascinating these animals can be. Apparently people have always been fascinated by them. |
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| The Egyptians even had a god, Bast (or Bastet) with the head of a cat and the body of a woman. Cats mentioned in the Bible include lions (a symbol of strength) and leopards (possibly cheetahs, a symbol of speed). |
| In the Middle Ages, cats were associated with witches. |
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| Cats came into our popular culture through Rudyard Kipling’s short stories in The Jungle Book (1894). The Jungle Book is a series of fables set in the jungles of India which uses animals anthropomorphically. Eight tell the story of Mowgli, a man-cub raised by wolves who is befriended by a black panther, Bagheera, and opposed by the villainous Bengal tiger, Sheer Khan. The Jungle Book inspired five live-action movies from 1942 to '98 and a Disney animated feature in 1967. |
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| There were two film versions of Cat People: a 1942 version, a low-budget horror classic, one of the first to explicitly link horror and female sexuality, and a 1982 version starring Nastassja Kinski. |
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| The poet T. S. Eliot wrote a collection of poems, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats. One features the mystery cat, Macavity, “the bafflement of Scotland Yard, the Flying Squad’s despair: For when they reach the scene of crime, Macavity’s not there.” The long-running Broadway musical Cats was based loosely on Eliot’s poems. |
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| The seven books of C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, published in the early 1950’s, feature three children who reach a magic land by going through the back of a wardrobe. The majestic lion, Aslan, is a Christ figure who dominates the series. The first book in the series, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, came out in 1950. Then came Prince Caspian (1951), The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952), The Silver Chair (1953), The Horse and His Boy (1954), and The Magician’s Nephew (1955). The series climaxed with The Last Battle (1956). |
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| In 1962 and 1970, two full-length animated features about cats, both set in France at the turn of the century, came out. Gay Purr-ee is the story of Mewsette, voiced by Judy Garland, as a housecat bored with country life who runs away to Paris. There she is exploited by the suave Meowrice, who plans to sell her to a wealthy American cat. It features a delightful series of portraits of Mewsette drawn in the style of famous French artists of the time. |
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| In The AristoCats, Duchess and her three kittens are kidnapped and left in the country by Edgar, the jealous butler. Rescued by Thomas O’Malley, an alley cat, they make their way back home, encountering Scat Cat and his band of jazz musicians on the way. |
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| Cats figure prominently in children’s stories and nursery rhymes, from the legend of Puss in Boots to the nursery rhyme, “Hey, Diddle Diddle, the Cat and the Fiddle.” |
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| Dr. Seuss's The Cat in the Hat (1957) was written to make stories for beginning readers more entertaining and fun. Written in anapestic tetrameter, the 1626-word story includes only 236 different words. A 1958 sequel, The Cat in the Hat Comes Back, helps teach the alphabet. |
| The next big animated feature was The Lion King (1994), the third highest-grossing animated feature film ever released in the U. S. It became an award-winning Broadway musical in 1997, featuring actors in animal costumes and giant hollow puppets. Nominated for 11 Tonys, it won six, including Best Musical and Best Director. |
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| C. S. Lewis |