Dane Cook

There’s a moment in Planes: Fire and Rescue where one of the sentient vehicles is prompted to “drop the needle.” The request is followed by a series of quick cuts: a small anthropomorphic forklift pulls out a record from its sleeve, slams in onto a turntable, and lowers the tonearm. Then, the unmistakable infinite-hammer-on riff to AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” appears on the soundtrack, accompanying a getting-ready-to-slay-a-fire montage sequence.

The story goes, per a five-part PBS documentary back in the early 2000s about the history of the Broadway musical, that when Andrew Lloyd Webber was shopping around Cats to be performed and produced in the United States, he reached out to iconic producer/director/Stephen Sondheim collaborator Harold Prince. Webber pitched Prince on Cats, inspired by T.S. Eliot’s book of feline-centric poetry, and when he was finished, Prince admitted to not grasping the deeper metaphor. Were the cats representative of the English class system? Was one of the cats a member of the royal family? What piece had Prince not figured out yet, he wondered. Webber paused, then said, “Hal. It’s about cats.”