Tuesday, August 12, 2008

For reals?

Now, I am all about turning popular movies and children's shows into picture books/early readers and the like, but come on. According to the Slate.com slide-show I snagged from Mo Willem's blog, movies such as The Incredible Hulk, Ironman and The Dark Knight are being turned into early readers. Early readers!!!?!?! In case you haven't heard of these movies because of that huge rock on top of your body that you call home, please feel free to visit the IMDB pages I supplied on each of those movies up there. As you can see, these movies are PG-13. In fact, The Dark Knight traumatized me so much, I refuse to accept that it is rated anything below NC-17. How are you going to turn around and make a children's book about these movies?! An EARLY READER at that. I beg you! Kids are not so oblivious that they don't see the television commercials for these movies. Even if they do not have TV, the posters, action figures and various other advertisements are going to entice them to go further than reading these "kid friendly" books.

In a slightly less incredulous note, the slide-show is both educational (boo, hiss) and enjoyable and totally worth checking out.

3 comments:

Jill said...

My favorite is books that are made into movies, and then back into books. Hence early readers and picturebooks, and oddly even novelizations, of The Chronicles of Narnia! The Lemony Snicket ones at least acknowledge the absurdity here, labeling themselves "books based on the movie based on the book."

Kristi(e) said...

Well that is because Lemony Snicket is the man. I just started reading Adverbs, by Daniel Handler. It's interesting to see how different he writes under his own name, and at the same time, you can tell it's the same guy. It's very refreshing to have someone author such completely separate works.

Anonymous said...

I haven't seen Hulk or Iron Man, so I can't comment on either of those, but The Dark Knight I agree at its core is too dark to be appropriate for children. The theme of the film is kind of the hopelessness of Gotham and of the people who are choosing to protect it. And a lot of dark stuff happens like people getting killed and having their faces set on fire. And it's not as though that stuff could be written out and still have the story make sense. My vote, people are stupid.