The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T

A year or so ago, I reviewed Frederick Hollander's score to The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T, and while I made a mental note at the time to put this in our NetFlix queue, I had pretty much forgotten about it ever since. That is until Friday when I stumbled upon the soundtrack in a huge stack of unfiled CDs, and I decided to use a song from it on a birthday mix I was making for two friends. Coincidentally (didn't Jung and subsequently the Police call it Synchronicity?), the following night Ovation aired the movie, so I finally got to watch it in its entirety. While old musicals aren't my cup of tea, this one is strangely surreal for a Hollywood film made in 1953, and at times seems almost psychedelic. Maybe that's not so weird, however, when you consider that the screenplay was written by Theodor Seuss Geisel, yes...Dr. Seuss. The plot is based on a boy's nightmare, where he dreams that he is trapped in the kingdom of his tyrannical piano teacher, Dr. T, who has enslaved 500 boys, forcing them to relentlessly practice on a gigantic piano. While The 5000 Fingers isn't as strange as, say, the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory which came out two decades later, you can imagine that the kids who did see this in the day were probably freaked out, especially by the elevator ride down to the dungeon.