If The Muppet Christmas Carol (reviewed five years ago here at borg), is a favorite for your family as it is for many, you may have a new item for your wish list. What many consider the most spirited and faithful adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol on film is also available in a storybook edition. Adapted by Brooke Vitale with illustrations by Luke Flowers, The Muppet Christmas Carol: The Illustrated Holiday Classic features an abridged version of the movie in a large, full-color hardcover edition for kids of all ages.
Check out a look inside the book courtesy of Insight Kids:
A new book is bringing classic projector and transparency technology to 21st century kids. It’s Batman Flashlight Projections: Heroes and Villains, a new interactive activity book from publisher Insight Kids. For generations boys and girls used flashlights for night-time fun. Who hasn’t made animal silhouettes with their hands with lights and shadow, with sun through a window, or via the light from a campfire at night?
Years ago, Kenner’s Give-a-Show Projector was among the most sought after toys for kids, allowing you to place slides in a viewer, backed by a powerful (and sometimes not-so-powerful) light source. Star Wars, Doctor Who, Yogi Bear, Tom & Jerry, Speed Racer, Fat Albert, Jonny Quest, Popeye, Disney movies, and yes, Batman, all were available in projectable slide form for kids. Beginning in the 1970s virtually every TV and movie franchise was available for similar viewing via View-Master’s battery-powered projector. The same effect can be found using the transparent images in Batman Flashlight Projections: Heroes and Villains.
Simply use a flashlight to read along and project Batman scenes from the book onto any wall or ceiling. It works shone against nearly any surface. If you don’t have a flashlight–and even if you do–you may be better off with your mobile phone flashlight, which probably packs more light power than a standard home flashlight. With a strong light the images appear with even greater clarity than pictured above, even at 6-10 feet away. And one page has a transparency that is blank, so kids can make their own scenes by using their own non-permanent, dry-erase marker.
Here is a preview of some of the images you’ll find in the book, courtesy of the publisher:
Originally self-published via Kickstarter as With Kind Regards from Kindergarten, a new steampunk children’s chapter book arrives at bookstores this month from Insight Kids, renamed The Clockwork War. Bookended by a grandmother trying to persuade a hesitant granddaughter to give kindergarten a try, in the style of William Goldman’s The Princess Bride, Kline creates a fantasy tale about an orphanage, two friends, and a giant oak tree to nudge the granddaughter along. Addressing those time-honored angsts of childhood: bullies, advertising, commercialism, roaches, the lack of monsters under one’s bed, plastics, progress for progress’ sake, soot and smog, and henchmen, author Adam Kline assembles a clockwork fantasyland in a fable style pointing young ones to the inevitable lesson that at some point everyone must “rise to the occasion.”
Karlheinz Intergarten and Leopold Croak begin their story under the tutelage of Miss Understood and her orphanage, both fast friends with active imaginations. Miss Understood will be likeable for kids, full of mixed-up (but apt) sayings like “the early nerd gets the worm,” “all’s well that smells well,” and “money can fry happiness.” While playing in the giant oak tree during a storm, Leopold is struck by a lightning bolt, and loses his imagination. Lonely when Leopold no longer wants to play, Karlheinz (Karl) leaves town to become apprentice to a clockmaker, whose companion is a clockwork mouse named Pim. Many years later Karl becomes a brilliant clockmaker in his own right, and when his mentor dies he returns with Pim to the town of his youth to find it dying and polluted, driven into the ground by the richest man in town: his old friend Leopold, who has lost sight of fun and friendship and focuses only on his corporation and his moneymaking, popular line of electronic toy girl dolls. He has seemingly forgotten the needs of his real daughter, who is perched above town away from all others, allergic to everything but cucumber tea.
“Some rats are evil, Pim,” sighed Karl. “I won’t argue that. But they’re almost never born that way.” And this is true–of rats, of cats, of dogs, and everything else. It’s especially true of people.
A clockwork fly and mouse, a hungry dog, cats’ fear of any loud noise, a giant thug, a pirate ship, and a dragon all come together under Karl’s guidance to teach lessons to both Leopold and the granddaughter at home hearing the tale. Kline pulls themes and styles from a variety of classic and modern sources, from Pinocchio to Edward Scissorhands, from Aesop’s Fables to the Grimm television series and Mouse Guard, and from The Invisible Man and Hugo to Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.
