‘The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T’ or — What if Fritz Lang directed ‘The Simpsons’.

Ever wondered what it would be like if Fritz Lang directed ‘The Simpsons’ but with some atomic paranoia and gay pornography thrown in for good measure? Then ‘The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T’ is the film for you!
‘The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T’ is the story of a young boy called Bart who falls asleep at the piano during his lessons and enters a dream-world where his piano teacher, Dr Terwilliker, is an evil dictator who has kidnapped and imprisoned 500 young boys to play the greatest piece of music ever on his massive piano (yep, creepy already). Hence the 5000 fingers. Bart decides to escape this musical hell, but will the adults, his hypnotised mother and a reluctant plumber, help or hinder?
What stops ‘Dr. T’ from becoming a masterpiece is that it is flawed. After a great start it suddenly seems to spin its wheels for a bit, makes some illogical narrative leaps that feels like scenes are missing or cut (they were) and has a deus ex machina moment that is not so much child-like as utterly infantile.
But what makes ‘Dr T’ almost a masterpiece is that it not only manages to shrug off these issues but it is also everything else it brings to this particularly crazy party. The only film written and designed by Dr Seuss means ‘Dr T’ has some of the most eye-popping and idiosyncratic design work going. Everything is at an angle with architectural impossibilities at every turn (i’s like German Expressionism in Technicolor. Even Bart’s beenie hat has a hand on it that reminded me of Lang’s ‘M’). There is a lot of imagination at play here.
And it’s a dark imagination too. A central musical number has Cronenbergian plastic body-horror going on throughout as instruments literally grow out of men’s mouths and there is a truly nightmarish, and stunningly realised, sequence in a lift as it descends to the lowest dungeon. The look and performance of the lift-operator is genuinely frightening as hell and also has some homoerotic bondage connotations. With all these shirtless, oiled, muscular men with various contraptions strapped to various orifices Dr T could make a fortune opening a night-club in Berlin or Soho.
But the camp is really turned up for the song and dance number ‘Do-Me-Do Duds’ which has to be seen to be believed as the evil Dr T, dressed in his green and lavender underwear (“undies” that are “undulating” incidentally) has his footmen and male servants dress him up in all his finery, including a “peek-a-boo blouse”, some “cutie chamois booties with the leopard skin bows” and a “pink brocaded bodice with the floofy fuzzy ruffs”.
What the actual fuck?
It is wonderful and easily one of the most subversively campy numbers I’ve ever seen and I loved every second of it. It’s also glaringly obvious that this was the number that inspired Mr Burn’s ‘See My Vest’ sequence from The Simpsons’ way more than Disney’s ‘Be Our Guest’ (which simply provided a melody to play off). In fact you can really see the influence this has had on Matt Groening and The Simpsons: the names Bart and Terwilliker; the songs and design; the subversion of family and Americana and I’m sure there’s a few I’ve missed.
And if all that wasn’t enough the film ends in full-on nineteen fifties atomic mode. How atomic? “Very atomic”.
‘The 5000 Fingers of Dr. T’ is flawed but has so much imagination and craziness behind it that it becomes something that all the best films seem to achieve — something you can watch and afterwards think “Well, there’s most certainly nothing else like that!”