The Secret of Kells (Flatiron, 2010) The surprise feelgood story of last year’s Academy Awards, this beautiful tribute to Celtic lore went from small Irish film to Oscar-nominee overnight — and sent scores of American film columnists hustling to Wikipedia to try and figure out who Kells was and what he was hiding. Now, after a successful worldwide run and heaps of glowing reviews, The Secret of Kells comes to DVD and Blu-ray. Synopsis: Young Brendan lives in a remote medieval outpost under siege from barbarian raids. But a new life of adventure beckons when a celebrated master illuminator arrives from foreign lands carrying an ancient but unfinished book, brimming with secret wisdom and powers. To help complete the magical book, Brendan has to overcome his deepest fears on a dangerous quest that takes him
Read More »If you’ve spent any time at all watching the Noggin network (apologies, corporate rebranders, I mean Nick Jr.), you’re familiar with the Dirty Sock Funtime Band, even if you don’t realize it. Like Laurie Berkner, the DSFB pops up in the interstitial music videos that the station runs in lieu of commercials, particularly during episodes of Jack’s Big Music Show — and like Berkner, they’re squarely on the sugary, high-energy end of the kids’ music spectrum. Now, those of you who have been reading this site for awhile may remember that Laurie Berkner is one of my main musical nemeses — there’s just something about the way she’s always bouncing around with that smile on her face that bugs me — so I’m naturally predisposed to dislike any band that includes a pink-wigged man and
Read More »The ever-expanding Scholastic Storybook Treasures library just got even bigger, with the three latest DVDs — Giggle, Giggle, Quack, Runaway Ralph, and He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands — adding 14 stories and roughly three and a half hours to the already formidable stack of books that have been given the “read-along DVD” treatment. If that sentence made you feel a little funny, you’re not alone. Given that some kids already need quite a bit of encouragement to read instead of watch TV, and given that many of the DVD segments in the series don’t do much besides add voiceovers and karaoke-style text overlays to still art from the books, it can be hard not to wonder just what purpose they really serve, other than helping exceptionally lazy parents avoid reading to their
Read More »The resurgence of Walt Disney Animation is usually traced (get it?) back to The Little Mermaid, but as with most pop history, that’s not 100 percent accurate — though its efforts weren’t necessarily rewarded at the box office, the studio started its uphill climb years before Ariel longed to be part of our world. Case in point: 1986′s The Great Mouse Detective, which used a nifty voice cast and some early CGI/hand-drawn hybrid work to bring the Sherlock Holmes classics to kids. Adapted from Eve Titus and Paul Galdone’s Basil of Baker Street books, The Great Mouse Detective uses a neat conceit — a sleuthing mouse named Basil who happens to share an address with Sherlock Holmes — to take advantage of the Holmes mythos without turning human characters into talking animals, a la Disney’s
Read More »I was born in 1974, and my youngest sibling was born in 1985, which means my Sesame Street viewing was at its peak during what I’ll refer to (totally subjectively and sort of crankily) as the golden age of PBS kids’ programming, and fell off sharply around 1983 or so, when Telly Monster was completing his transition from the googly-eyed Television Monster into the annoying worrywart he is today. I didn’t watch another episode until a few years ago, when I decided to introduce my daughter to the joys of playing where everything’s A-OK and the air is clean, only to discover that the sleepy urban burg I remembered from my youth had been taken over by characters I didn’t recognize. Who cares about Baby Bear? Who’s that little fuzzball speaking Spanish all the time
Read More »Aside from Martin & Medeski or the Benevento-Russo Duo, there aren’t many acts a person can turn to if they’re hungry for some stripped down, funky Hammond organ-and-drums action — and in the kids’ music universe? Forget it. With the quasi-exception of Taj Mahal’s songs for children, funk and/or soul is in short supply in the kiddieverse, and if there are two things our children need more than fresh air, exercise, and to leave me alone while I’m trying to write, those two things are funk and soul. After all, like Whitney Houston said, the children are our future. Try imagining a future even less funky than the world we’re living in. Gives you the heebie-jeebies, doesn’t it? I mean, if Karl Rove had been fed a diet of Wilson Pickett and Aretha when he
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