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I'm Stephen Metcath, and this is the Slate Culture Gab Fest, Dana's Power Alley edition.

It's Wednesday, March 7, 2012.

On today's program, Hollywood adapts Dr. Seuss yet again with the Lorax.

Good Christian, fill in the blank, the new show on ABC from Darren Starr, most famous, I would say, for sex in the city.

And finally, the fascinating pedigree of Dutch wax prints with Slate's own Julia Felsenthal.

Joining me today are Slate's deputy editor, Julia Turner. Hello, Julia. Hi, Steve. Hey, and of course our film critic, Dana Stevens. Hey, Dana. Let me dive in right away with you. But first, let me just say that the Lorax is a computer-animated 3-D adaptation of the well-known Dr. Seuss book. It stars Danny DeVito, who voices the title character, the Lorax, and it includes

Zach Efron and Taylor Swift, a variety of other well-known stars. It's a very famous, or the book

is very famous for being an environmental parable, and having a little degree of medicine to it,

nonetheless it went, and conservatives were up in arms, Lou Dobbs, most prominently among them, about its environmental message.

Nonetheless, the movie went on to make $70 million at the box office, and to put this in perspective, not only is the largest amount of money for a Seuss adaptation, it's also the largest opening, as I understand it, for an animated film that's not a sequel.

That's a remarkable amount of money for this movie to have made. We'll get to that and why it did. But first, Dana, what did you think of the Lorax? Yeah, I guess it was very surprising to me that it won the box office for the weekend and was such a huge, it really outstripped all the expectations for how well it would perform. And maybe that's partly just because it's a couple weeks after the Oscars and there's nothing new at the box office.

Maybe, but it made twice as much as Rango did in the exact same weekend last year. Something else is at work. It blew by people's expectations. Yeah, I don't know exactly what is appealing to people about this movie. I can't say that I went into it with high expectations because I don't think Dr. Seuss has ever been well adapted except for the animated TV Grinch You Stole Christmas. I think every other adaptation of Seuss that I've seen has been an abomination, and that was why I avoided reviewing the Lorax. I really didn't want to review it. Then I started to see in reading different reviews of it that I'm glad I didn't because I would have unintentionally plagiarized a lot of people who made the point that I think I would probably have

used as a lead myself, which is that this movie itself is a need, right? I mean, this movie itself is

sort of a piece of pollution on the cultural landscape. It's just one more piece of junk out there

that's ostensibly purporting to be about ridding our lives of junk.

Right. I mean, Julia, this is obviously a children's bedtime story. It's meant to be read in one very quick sitting in order to extend it out to 90 minutes or whatever it was and make it a big seeming cultural pseudo event. It needs to be, you know, it needs to be larded up with noisy, extraneous

action sequences. It can't remain what it was. What were your feelings about the book?

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