Television review: ‘Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That’

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 beginning 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 are 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.

robert.lloyd@latimes.com