Trivia / Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats

• Outlived Its Creator: Faber & Faber unexpectedly turned it into a franchise in 2018 when they decided Eliot's proposed companion volume with the dog poems should exist after all, and comissioned Christopher Reid to write Old Toffer's Book of Consequential Dogs.
• Referenced by...:
  • English folk rock band Mungo Jerry, best known for their One-Hit Wonder "In The Summertime," took their name from "Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer."
  • English novelty song band Bombalurina, known for their Two-Hit Wonder covers of "Seven Little Girls" and "Itsy-Bitsy Teeny-Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini", likewise took their name from "The Naming of Cats".
• What Could Have Been
  • Originally planned (and marketed) as Mr Eliot's Book of Jellicle Cats and Pollicle Dogs as Recounted to Him by the Man in White Spats, with a storyline running through the poems that would end with Jellicles, Pollicles and Man in White Spats all ascending to the Heaviside layer, before Eliot apparently decided mixing cat poems and dog poems was a mistake (although the Pollicles still get a mention in one poem). Some elements of this would be used as the plot of Cats.
  • Grizabella the Glamour Cat originated in a poem Elliot wrote for the book, but was never actually published due to being "too sad for children".
  • Some time before Andrew Lloyd Webber got the green light to do Cats, Disney approached T.S. Elliot's estate about doing an Animated Adaptation of the book, but were turned down because Elliot's family didn't want it to turn out like Winnie The Pooh.

---