I’ve seen claims the character is supposed to be female despite the name.
However…
You ought to know Mr. Mistoffelees!
The Original Conjuring Cat—
(There can be no doubt about that).
Please listen to me and don’t scoff. All his
Inventions are off his own bat.
There’s no such Cat in the metropolis;
He holds all the patent monopolies
For performing surprising illusions
And creating eccentric confusions.
He is about as male as Mrs Chippy was female.
But it’s a good point that the director would have to read and actually comprehend the poem to grok the “subtle” clues.
Who’s Mrs Chippy, and can you actually clarify what you’re saying?
Read further:
So what we have here is a cat, whose human family called “Mister” and “him”, who had kittens. What’s the likeliest explanation, here?
Mrs Chippy was an adorable ship’s cat taken on Shackleton’s ill-fated Trans-Antarctic Expedition. One month into the voyage, it was discovered that Mrs Chippy was actually a male. However, by then the name had stuck.
As for what I am saying about the poem, see @Chronos 's post
Human magicians produce rabbits out of a hat without a trace of rabbit in their genetic makeup.
I think you could make a pretty convincing argument that the “joke” of the original TS Eliot poem is that “Mr Mistoffelees” is actually a girl cat. That doesn’t mean that that’s also automatically true of the musical, nor that a production which doesn’t lean into that joke isn’t doing it “right”.
I rented it once, back when that was a thing. I could only watch about ten minutes.
I grew up with the book, am still fond of it, even though I’m a dog person.
Eliot seems to be making a joke there that Mr. Mistofolees was, to the amazement of its owners, female. It’s a series of funny poems about cats; the idea the cat is a magician is a play on the surprise she had in store. That’s something that happens, since it’s not obvious without a vet’s examination if a cat is male or female.
Of course, this joke would not have made sense in the musical.
is happens in real life … Garfield was a huge ball of orange fur and PetSmart said she was male on adoption day so we never checked …12 weeks later when it was time to get fixed the vet informed us it was “ms. Garfield” and going to be about 15$ more for the operation
I’ve always taken it that he knocked up another cat in the house.
I don’t have much trouble once a cat is at least a few months old, but I’ve been dealing with them my whole life. I am not a veterinary professional, just a very experienced cat servant.
I do know of a couple of mixups I was not guilty of:
When I was in single-digit age range, my parents were surprised to discover that one of the toughest toms we had (a very fluffy longhair) was pregnant. Atilla became Matilda very quickly.
A friend of mine adopted a cat believed to be female (I didn’t actually have opportunity to meet this cat), and was informed by the vet who was planning to spay the cat that HE was already neutered. Poor kitty, trip to the evil doctor and a shaved tummy for nothing.
And all of Mx. Mistoffelees’ “magic tricks” are the sort of things that real cats do regularly-- Sounding like they’re in another room when you can see them right there, or hiding things in the unlikeliest places, or whatnot. Anyone familiar with cats would be nodding along with all of that (as, for that matter, with all of the cats of the other poems). So we’re clearly meant to expect that es “trick” of producing kittens was also done in the usual cat way.
I wish MST3K could get permission to give this, Battlefield Earth, and Highlander 2 the full treatment. Skits, jokes, the whole thing. They deserve it.
WAG-might not apply as viewers may be tuning in to watch the movie as well as the savaging.
Parody is also explicitly a factor in determining fair use. But, like most of copyright law, the standards are vague, and left to be determined by courts.
Rifftrax is planning a riff for Kickstarter donators.
MST was limited by copyright law in what films they could show. A lot of their films were public domain, or had lapsed copyrights, but for a long time, you couldn’t get any of the Gamera episodes on VHS or in reruns, because Sandy Frank had gotten wind of how they’d made fun of him on the show, and refused to renew the rights to the movies.
(BTW, ever wonder what Sandy Frank looked like? Here he is!)
Sandy Frank Productions eventually sold their catalog to Shout! Factory, so the Gamera episodes are available again.
“Handy’s suits did not have pockets, as he thought they were a waste of time.”
Huh.
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