Backwords Dude and his reversed "Green Eggs And Ham" reading have escaped the Red Room
Somehow, with great imagination, Netflix is going to get 13 episodes of television out of Dr. Seuss’ beloved children’s book, Green Eggs And Ham. While an official synopsis shows some of the plans for how, exactly, this will work, a video of the story being read backwards suggests another, Twin Peaks-ian method for interpreting the story: Take the familiar and turn it on its head.
As the title makes clear, the clip consists of a YouTuber called Backwords Dude reading the book, um, backwards and then reversing the video so it sounds like he’s a ghostly vision escaped from Twin Peaks’ Red Room.
Though the bizarre secrets he’s come to whisper in our ear are innocuous ones about discolored breakfast food, the video has the same sense of menace that pretty much everything does when the logic of time has been messed with. Backwords Dude proclaims himself “Sam-I-Am,” then smiles directly into the camera before shooting backward up a water slide, uncracks an egg while asking his cat if it likes green eggs and ham, and, with a sinister frustration, washes a car in reverse while exclaiming “I! Do not! Like green eggs and ham!”
As if the whole thing wasn’t bizarre enough, the video description includes ominous sentences like, “Here in the reverse world, we don’t have ordinary physics. Here things that go down go up!”
It’s an impressive display and a great stylistic foundation for Netflix to consider if it wants to make sure its adaptation sets itself apart by deeply upsetting any child who watches it. Really, the only way to improve the video is for Backwords Dude to give us a little backward dance during it, swinging his arms around to Angelo Badalamenti tunes as electric lights flicker all around him. Maybe he’s saving that one for a particularly apocalyptic reading of The Lorax.
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