The Once-ler from Dr. Seuss' The Lorax is Revealed At Last

In Dr. Seuss' book The Lorax, it costs the boy 15 cents, a nail, and the shell of a great, great, great grandfather snail to hear the story of the Once-ler.

Suess never revealed who ... or what the Once-ler was, but soon, you'll be able to see the face of the Thneed industrialist, courtesy of Hollywood:

That elderly, decrepit fellow was similarly depicted in the original Seuss illustrations as a pair of eyes between the slats of a boarded up window, and those scenes in the story provided the single strongest piece of evidence that the seemingly furry-limbed villain was human.

Actually, it was his Snuvv that gave it away.

Snuvv?

This rhyme explains it (as much as any Seussian nonsense verse can.) It accompanied a drawing — seen below — of the Once-ler accepting payment from the boy before telling his tale of woe.

Then he hides what you paid him
away in his Snuvv,
his secret strange hole
in his gruvvulous glove.

“If there was a clear sign this character was something other than human, we would have abided by that,” says Meledandri. “But okay, he’s wearing gloves. You’re not going to put gloves on a monster.”

The Lorax producer Christopher Meledandri went on to explain the philosophical underpinning of making the Once-ler a man instead of a monster. Read the entire story at Entertainment Weekly's Inside Movies: Link - via Buzzfeed


Comments (3)

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I agree with "Heaven Forbid". The Onceler doesn't have a face, for a reason. It's a characterization of the (flawed) collective reasoning of for-profit groups like the US trusts. Putting a face to it makes it an individual that can be reviled and defeated, instead of a dangerous and ever-present facet of human nature.

The movie had better do something damn clever if they want to keep the story in-line with the book.
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Interesting. I always thought the Once-ler was a man because the guy who invented the Thneed (and his entire family) is human; I guess I made the assumption that he was the same guy, only hermitized, and that it was something everyone knew.
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Interesting. Though I think the theory behind imprinting is cultural and culture bleeds together. I don't think blue is a distinctively male color because my parents bought me blue pajamas and a blue blankie, but because the entire culture associates blue with boys and pink with girls.

On another note, women cannot be color-blind and men cannot have super-color vision like some women. Whereas men will be color blind because they lack a third cone responding to the red range, women can have a fourth cone that bisects the red range and gives a richer spectrum of colors. Then there is achromatopsia which is the inability to see color and a really bad name for a baby girl.

Perhaps some of the difference is in the color-opponency cells in the occipital cortex and perhaps the associating of different colors. A part of me suspects women are trained by the culture to recognize a greater range of color names and men are basically not expected to. Wine-tasters also have a wider range of names for flavors, using terms like "earthy" that non-wine-tasters by and large don't use. I doubt the wide range of color names employed by women are innate. But like the wine-tasters, they learn to discriminate.

Even given all that, which is done to be fair, I think there might actually be some innate predilection, but devising a conclusive experiment for that is problematic.
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I don't think forced choice paradigms like making people choose a favourite and least favourite colour has good ecological validity as many adults don't have favourite colours. I know I don't.

@ Ryan S, women can also have colour blindness but it is quite uncommon. Colour blindness is carried on the X chromosome. If males inherit an X chromosome with the mutation it will be displayed in the phenotype. If women inherit 1, she will be a carrier, however if she inherits the mutation from both X chromosomes, it will be displayed in the phenotype.

Also, you have a point about gender differences in the vocabulary of colour:
"Stecklers' study in 1990 concluded that women's ability of naming colors is far more precise than men's and also they have a broader vocabulary for color names such as ecru, aquamarine, lavender, and mauve."
http://www.colormatters.com/news_spring_07/focus.html
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@Muzition and AntDude, the above graph shows females' least favourite colours. Blue was chosen most frequently by both genders as their favourite colour.
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