Half a Loaf is Better Than... Cardboard

I've always kept a tally of the few books which were improved by a movie version, such as The Princess Bride and The Lord of the Rings. Ha, ha, did I blow any fuses? Of course not LOTR, although the loss of Tom Bombadil in the film version wasn't exactly soul-wrenching. As it happens, it's a quarter till twelve right now and I can't remember any of the other books on my tally (Princess Bride still stands). But that's really not my point, merely my introduction to get to my point. Which I now come to.

I've now been exposed to the world of children's books and videos, and have made discoveries. There are amazingly clever children's books. Some of these books have been translated into very enjoyable videos. The Magic School Bus and Charlie and Lola are two hits in this household: the books are fun to read, and the videos are fun to watch.

But since this is America, where our unspoken motto is "As long as you can make money off it, beat that dead horse!", the companies who produce the videos then turn around and base books on the videos. And these books are almost invariably worthless. For one thing, the shows necessarily have to distill the book into an easy-to-grasp structure. So the Magic School Bus class goes from fifteen or twenty anonymous children saying funny things and writing informative reports in the margins of the book, to six children with fixed personalities. That works great for the video: there's so much moving action going on that you like having a handle on the kids, and you don't really need the extras from the book. But when these characters reappear in print, in books with broad-stroke illustrations and none of the original marginal discussions, they're like Sprite without the fizz. The books completely fail in their original purpose, to educate children about science. They just make money.

Charlie and Lola is a new discovery for me. Both the books and videos portray very good sibling relations, and the videos in addition have the most charming British accents. I came across the videos first, so set out to find the books. The first one I read was just as entertaining as the videos (well, almost. You couldn't hear the accents.) I was disappointed with the second one. It wasn't clever, just tedious. It took the original ideas and recycled them, but didn't do anything new. And then I realized: this one had the Charlie and Lola logo on it. It was commercialized. It just made money.

I find this practice utterly despicable. (Had you guessed that?) It's like serving children fresh-baked bread, and as soon as you see that they like it, substituting cardboard in the shape of bread. Children learn to like a book for the characters pictured inside, not for the actual story. As they get older, they're not likely to wander from familiar characters to explore new, un-logoed worlds. Basically, they'll read just to extend their video fix.

I suppose all I can do to fight the trend is make sure that my children get the original loaf, not the cardboard substitution. We'll still watch videos and we'll still read books -- we'll just take care not to mix the two.

-- SJ

(The same thought goes for the Baby Einstein series. The first few are charming and just a little unpolished. Then Disney bought it out, and produced slick and polished in-the-manner-of videos, as well as a spin-off series, whose only charm is what they borrow from the first ones. Make money or die!)