Camestros Felapton

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Is Cats (2019) a Prequel to Logan’s Run (1976)?

Yes and Logan’s Run is overt about it. I don’t think I really need to explain any more because it is so obviously true.

OK, I’d better explain a little bit more for people who haven’t watched either film recently.

In Logan’s Run, Logan 5 (Michael York) and Jessica 6 (Jenny Agutter) escape from the pleasant dystopia of the City into the post-apocalyptic wilds outside the dome. There they eventually find the ruins of Washington DC and eventually find an old and befuddled Peter Ustinov who is an Old Man. Now if, like me, you had watched the film a long time ago, you probably remember that much. However, what I didn’t remember is that the Old Man lives with a very large number of cats and, I kid you not, they are Jellicle Cats.

You may reasonably object that this is simply that Ustinov’s character happens to have remembered T.S. Eliott’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats and you would be correct. The book of poems even gets a credit at the film’s end. I don’t think that weakens my case because how many films have ever credited T.S. Eliott’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats? I can list them all:

  • Logan’s Run (1976)
  • Cats (2019)

Yes but…surely Cats (2019) is based on a 1980s musical wholly unrelated to a weird seventies sci-fi film about a eugenic dystopia? Perhaps but consider this, Andrew Lloyd Weber began composing his musical in…1977.

So both Cats the musical and the film have a plot arc that was not present in Eliott’s original poems. Wikipedia describes the premise as:

“Cassandra, and Demeter, take Victoria under their wing and show her the world of the Jellicles as they prepare for the Jellicle Ball, an annual ceremony where cats must compete to be chosen to go to the Heaviside Layer and be granted a new life.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cats_(2019_film)

Put another way, the cats all gathered in a ceremony and a cat dies but the cats believe that cat will come back in a new life.

And what is going on in Logan’s Run:

“The citizens live a hedonistic lifestyle but, to prevent overpopulation, everyone must undergo the rite of “Carrousel” when they reach the age of 30. There, they are killed under the guise of being “renewed”.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan%27s_Run_(film)#Plot

This isn’t to say that the plots of the two films are the same any more than the plots of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and Star Wars: A New Hope are the same. The humans in Logan’s Run die before they age, whereas the cats in Cats have aged and look back on their former youth. The humans live a hedonistic life inside a dome where they have everything they want, whereas mostly the cats are street cats. Still, these differences still connect the two films thematically.

The humans in Logan’s Run live lives almost like they are indoor domestic cats never allowed outside. They sleep, eat and have sex and wander about and look pretty. Yet, despite having everything, sometimes they run. Once outside, they find a wild world and the former human world is full of feral (but happy) cats. We are never told what happened but for want of a better explanation we can assume that whatever happened to the world a cat did it.

Youth, death, the price of hedonism and escape run through both films. Both films are weird and sort of not actually that good despite employing some very notable British actors. Think of the two films like Planet of the Apes movies but backwards and with cats and, well, they still won’t make any sense or even be that good as films but it will and a whole other layer to your film experience.

camestrosfelapton

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49 responses to “Is Cats (2019) a Prequel to Logan’s Run (1976)?”

  3. I don’t remember much of anything about Logan’s Run, except that it was very much not worth the time spent outside on a warm day, waiting in line.

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      • Aside from the attempt at being sexy and groovy, it feels like a very 1950’s film. Some of it is the use of models for the shots of the city that just look obviously like models but probably would have looked convincing in a black and white movie.
        The obvious contrast is with Star Wars which comes out not long after but 2001 pre-dates Logan’s Run and looks far more modern.

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      • I contemporarily know Agutter as Sister Julienne in CALL THE MIDWIFE (the series, which I feel should be required watching of at least one season by all students/teens when they start (what the US refers to) as grade 10/starting “High School”). (And at least in the US, I’d like to see watching at least one season of THE WEST WING similarly mandatory for jr/high school agers.) Whether (per Cam’s LRun video clip above) she was inspired to go for this role by LOGAN’S RUN, who can say?

        Agutter has also, I see from IMDB, also been in a buncha comic/sf and mystery/crime/detectiving stuff, inc. Captain America: The Winter Soldier, The Avengers, Midsomer Murders, Dr Who: The Monthly Adventures (podcast), Poirot, Marple, The Inspector Lynely Series, Red Dwarf, Amazon Women On The Moon, Magnum PI, the $6M Man…and as Alice in “A Dream of Alice,” 1982, “A musical version of scenes from Lewis Carroll’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” which I now will go search elsewhere for…

        That said, I’ve love to see Harrison Ford in a re-take of that scene, here/now playing Ustinov’s role. Or as Mr. Mistoffelees, singing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZQ_RgpO2T8

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        • High school starts in 9th grade now, and has for a number of years. That started in the 70s some places. Junior highs are now middle schools — I had a retired teacher explain the reasoning behind it but that was also years ago and I don’t remember.

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          • I grew up in an area where junior high was 7th and 8th, and moved to one where it was 7th through 9th. It’s very much a local thing.

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            • I had the weird experience of going to primary school (K-6) in one school, graduating to the junior high (which was in the same building as the high school, but with the 7 and 8 graders not interacting with the 9-12 graders at all), moving to an area with a middle school (5-8) for 8th grade, and then graduating from there to 9th grade in that new area’s high school. Four different school buildings in four years – in two districts.

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              • I went from a 7-9 junior high district to a 7-8 middle school one. Which meant I didn’t ever get that 9th year at the top (back down to freshman), but OTOH I got to be at high school a year before my old pals, which was cool since of course the facilities, classes, and library was much better. Also somehow I ended up adopted by the varsity football team, which was nice for status.

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                • Oh. The access to the high school library! They had Foundation, and Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and “Adventures in Time and Space” and “Journey to Alpha Centauri” (by John McVey) and a librarian who gave me three Poul Anderson novels that they’d somehow gotten extras of! 

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                  • I’ve come to realize over the years how extraordinary my library was. They had all the classics, of course (I read my way through all the shelves of ERB on the bus), but also kept right up to date with new books, including Hugo/Nebula nominees, and the many anthologies thereof of shorter works. All of Heinlein. Much of Asimov.

                    Also, looking back, I’m gobsmacked that a high school library founded in a conservative district in 1974 had PJF’s “The Lovers” right out there on the shelves.

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                    • Our school district, the library specfic was Asimov, Heinlein and Andre Norton. Though the stark naked woman cloaked only by her ankle length red hair at the end of (IIRC) The Zero Stone was damn intense for a 12 year old to read.

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                    • “Though the stark naked woman cloaked only by her ankle length red hair”

                      Maybe I’m wrong, but that sounds more like the ending of Exiles of the Stars, the sequel to Moon of Three Rings.

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          • Years K (for Kinder) to 6 are known here as primary school, except in places where Years K-2 are referred to as “Infants.” High school starts at Year 7, or as it used to be called, “First Form.” And so on through to Year 12 (or Sixth Form in the old money).

            When someone says they finished school at Fourth Form, it generally means: one, they’re elderly; two, tertiary education wasn’t an option; and/or three, they went straight into apprenticeship or other employment.

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  4. I saw LR in a big theater and enjoyed it fine as a teen. Although it was a little retro even then. And of course WAY toned down from the book where everyone died at 18 and were basically violently feral; very late-60s. It as well as several other movies got No Awarded at the Hugos the next year, since everyone had seen Star Wars by then.

    Still, this is a perfectly logical connection!

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    • Everyone died at 21 in the book. Life divided into three phases, with three colours to your gem. Birth to 7, 7 to 14, 14 to 21. In the movie they just made the three phases birth to ten, ten to twenty, and twenty to thirty. It was a generation gap sort of thing in the book; young people had risen up against the tyranny of the oldsters, which some people int he 60s were afraid would actually happen.

      Oh, and there was no “renew” in the book. It was “sleep”, which was why the enforcers were called “Sand-Men”.

      It frightens me that I can remember all that, even years after I last read the book.

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      • Does the novel explain how this works out economically – who kept society running? And how did how childbirth and -rearing fit into this – did women have (at least two) children before 21, or did they have some sort of incubators? Where kindergartens and schools run by teenagers?

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        • I do not believe it does, no. The political situation is a complete blank. There is a computer — a massive supercomputer hidden beneath a carved mountain somewhere in the former U.S. — but it seems to run infrastructure rather than politics. Things like where do the tube cars Logan and Jessica take them.

          I believe (and I apologize for the vagueness, but we are relying here on my memory of a book I haven’t read for a period of at least a decade. This is usually a mistake, though my memory is better for books than it is for the events of my life) that the first seven years are spent in a creche, which includes education, the second seven are spent wandering the world, and the last seven are your working years — including as a Sandman, such as Logan and Francis. But who ran things, how decisions were made? I don’t remember anything about that.

          It was vaguely capitalist, though. You paid for things by touching certain surfaces with your palm-gem.

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          • Having just read the book, your memory is good. It is creche-raising; as there’s lots of partying and off-page sex presumably teen moms provide the next generation. It’s seven years creche, seven years training, seven years adulting (cop, plumber, doctor, whatever). Computer runs everything and oversees everything.

            While it explains more than the film, it’s not a convincing explanation — I have a hard time buying that even if the computer turbocharges education a world run by teenagers would be this stable. And none of the kids feels like a teenager, even allowing for the differences from our own society. I still enjoyed the book.

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            • I suppose the 14-21 year olds run the creches. I can’t see 7 years of education and 7 years of running around being wild leads to a stable society, though. At least the movie makes a little more sense in that way, with people living to 30 and always in the domed cities.

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    • It’s what I’ve come to call a “youthquake” story, one of many dealing with Kids These Days taking over and running everything.

      Nolan’s assumption that the under-21 population would just keep growing until it was like 95 percent (which is what gave them the clout to take over) was obviously off-base, but as my ecology professor in college once explained, population projection is more complicated than most people realize.

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  6. I liked Logan’s Run when it came out. Years later, I was excited to find you could buy it on DVD for the bargain price of $9.99. Wasn’t as excited when I watched the DVD. Michael York and/or Jenny Agutter maybe the only selling points. Maybe Farrah Fawcett in an early role. I remember liking Roscoe Lee Browne as the robot Box.

    Incidentally, T.S. Elliot is supposed to have written a poem about cows…

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  7. I’ve always had a soft spot for Peter Ustinov, not least for voicing both Prince John & King Richard in Disney’s Robin Hood and despite his views on human rights in China.

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