Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The Dungeon of all the non piano playing musicians Terwilliker has captured and looked up. As he put it: Scratchy violins, Screechy piccolos, nauseating trumphets etc etc.
Cult Classic: Despite at the time, being as hated as the 2003 The Cat in the Hat adaptation (if not more so), there are people today who think highly of this movie and regard it as a Seuss classic.
The elevator operator, and those eyes! It doesn't help that the elevator itself is swinging like a flag in the wind.
An antropomorphic bust of Terwilliker's head gives Bart this advice: Bartholomew Collins, the years you spend with Dr. Terwilliker will be the happiest years of your life! But if you get homesick, don't try to escape. The barbed wire around the Terwilliker institute, isELECTRIFIED! ELECTRIFIED! ELECTRIFIED. Bart's expression was pretty scared.
Second Verse Curse: The third stanza of the "Dungeon song" was cut out due to increasingly horrific lyrics. (The casual reference to "gas chambers" less than 10 years after The Holocaust did not help.)
THIRD FLOOR DUNGEON! Household appliances. Spike beds, electric chairs, gas chambers, roasting pots, and scalping devices.
Visual Effects of Awesome: One of the few genuinely praiseworthy aspects of the film is the set design, which is incredibly impressive for its time and perfectly captures Dr. Seuss's distinctive, bizarre and whimsical art style in a live-action film setting. Of course, it helps that Seuss himself is involved in the film.
What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: Fun for the family, unless you're the sort of person who has nightmares about nuclear weapons or imprisonment at a summer camp or hearing a kid practice piano scales over and over and over and over...
