The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T

When I first saw “The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T”, I was 7 years old. My grandparents owned a copy of it at their cabin in Pine Valley, Utah. And I watched it. A lot. It reinforced my childhood beliefs that the piano is the greatest instrument and that all other instruments should be locked away in a dungeon. It spawned an interest in conjoined twins, and a sadness when I learned that people could not be joined by the beard.  It instilled in me a love for elaborate, crazy musical numbers whose absence would not affect the plot in any meaningful way. Now, some of that is a little facetious, but I truly loved how imaginative the film was.  It didn’t matter that the plot made little sense. It didn’t matter that the acting ranged from extremely wooden (Mr. Zabladowski) to insanely over the top (Dr. T).  What mattered was the creativity of the designs, the situations, and the over the top character choices.  I loved, and still love, the crazy art design that was like a literal representation of a Dr. Seuss book. Even the main kid looks like the default boy character from multiple Seuss stories. 

Casting call for the role just had this drawing.

And boy, did they find him.

If we’re going to analyze the film on a technical level, it fails in both its editing and directing. Continuity is thrown out the window for parts of it, and the editing is jarring and off-putting all throughout the film. But in a way, that just adds to the charm of the film, and it definitely adds to the surreal dreamlike quality of the film. If our dreams are chaotic, nonsensical, and jarring, then the film’s editing style merely reflects that.

As we read in class, Freud said “Might we not say that every child at play behaves like a creative writer, in that he creates a world of his own, or, rather, rearranges the things of his world in a new way which pleases him? It would be wrong to think he does not take that world seriously; on the contrary, he takes his play very seriously and he expends large amounts of emotion on it.” To the protagonist, it IS all serious business. This isn’t playtime; for Bart, the stakes are extremely high, which only adds to the surreal, dreamlike nature of the film. It also emphasizes an important aspect of childhood, which is that most things that matter to a child are often overlooked or ignored by adults. The adults in the film have an incredibly hard time listening to Bart and his problems/concerns, and this rings true for any child that wonders why parents won’t listen seriously to their concerns about monsters in the closet or how mean your brother is being. 

After we screened the film in class, Ben asked me if I knew, even as a kid, that this movie was weird. I said yes, of course. Even as a child I could tell this movie was crazier than most. But on further reflection, that's exactly why I loved it. It showed me that a film doesn't have to make sense to be enjoyable. Like Willy Wonka and Disney, Dr. T showed me the joys of pure, unbridled, nonsensical imagination.

Plus, now I can never think of Captain Hook the same way again.