‘Ham’ on ROM : Deal Will Put Dr. Seuss Books on Computer Discs

Audrey Geisel had one requirement for the multitude of multimedia firms vying to license her late husband’s work over the past year: “That cat had to be that cat. Down to the last whisker.”

Wednesday, the 72-year-old widow of Theodor Geisel--known to generations of children as Dr. Seuss--said she had granted the rights to create interactive versions of such classics as “The Cat in the Hat,” “Green Eggs and Ham” and “Horton Hatches the Egg” to Living Books, a joint venture between Geisel’s longtime publisher, Random House, and Broderbund, the leading publisher of children’s software.

In the scramble among multimedia developers to gobble up rights to intellectual property for translation to the new medium, the Dr. Seuss books were among the most hotly contested. The author’s 48 children’s books, which began in 1937 with “And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street,” are among the best-known literary properties ever licensed for multimedia and will probably help drive future deals.

“It was not an easy negotiation,” said Random House Chairman Alberto Vitale, who had long yearned to turn the Seuss books into CD-ROMs. Terms were not disclosed, but a source familiar with the deal said it was “well into the seven figures.”

Orchestrated by the ICM talent agency, a parade of software firms including Microsoft, Paramount Interactive and Activision trekked out to visit Geisel near her La Jolla home last year, armed with personal computers, CD-ROM drives and the best multimedia pitch they could muster.

They found no pushover. Since the author died in 1991, Audrey Geisel, who as chief executive of Dr. Seuss Enterprises owns all rights to his work, has been a fierce guardian of its artistic integrity.

“I worried that the quality would hold up . . . and that it be absolutely line-proof to the books,” she said. But Geisel said she was never uncertain about whether to enter the brave new world of CD-ROM with her husband’s much-beloved rhymes and illustrations. “This is a new form of communication that never existed before. And that was what Ted was all about.”

After producing a prototype, Living Books nearly lost out, despite Geisel’s desire to honor her husband’s 50-year association with Random House. “They had a bad hair day, a bad CD-ROM day, who knows,” Geisel said. But she gave them a second chance and, Geisel said, they came through.

Living Books come on CD-ROMs, which look like music compact discs except they hold text, video and animation in addition to sound. Played on a device hooked up to a computer, CD-ROMs hold 400 times the data of a typical computer floppy disk.

In the Living Book titles already on the market, such as “Just Grandma and Me,” each page of the book is displayed on the computer screen. Each character has a voice, and when children click on different objects, the objects respond. Living Books won’t say which Dr. Seuss book it will do first, but the first is scheduled to go on sale early next year. Will Dr. Seuss’ immortal rhymes be altered to suit the children of the Information Age?

“I think the children would say, ‘That’s not the way it goes,’ ” Geisel said. “ ‘I meant what I said and I said what I meant . . .’ ”

When she couldn’t remember the rest, a listener filled in: “An elephant’s faithful 100 percent.”

“See?” Geisel said. “You don’t mess around with that.”