Hey, everybody! I was invited to pay a visit to Bill Childs’ marvelous Spare the Rock, Spoil the Child radio show, and now you can hear the results. Two hours of family-friendly fun, featuring tracks by some of my favorite “grown-up” artists (John Hiatt, De La Soul, John Lee Hooker) and plenty of Dadnabbit favorites, too (including songs from Dog on Fleas, the Flannery Brothers, Readeez, and many more).
If you’ve been reading Dadnabbit for any length of time, you know how much we love Readeez — and with the debut of Omneez, a new line of Readeez for your computer or mobile device, we decided now would be the perfect time to sit down for a chat with Michael Rachap, the voice of “Julian Waters” and the mind behind all that bite-sized educational goodness. Here’s a look back at where the series came from, where it’s headed, and more…
I think we should probably start by talking about Readeez.
One of my favorite topics!
What gave you the idea to take this approach to creating children’s media?
I wish I knew. There was an evolution. I’ll tell you the way it didn’t start — with me saying, “I’d like to teach children to read.” It actually had to do with one of my poems — I’ve been a musician all my life, but I hadn’t really recorded anything that was worth putting out there, so it started with words. “In the beginning, there was The Word.” (laughs)
I found a tape of myself playing music on a cable access show that my friend did, and I read a couple of poems and mentioned that I really love the way words look on the page — typography, you know, playing with the prosody, the form. I guess it really started from there — from visualizing poems. It didn’t take long to get from that to visualizing music.
Around ’99 or so, I walked away from my career in copywriting and went to the Berklee College of Music, and now this is what I do: I write and record songs. One of the things about Readeez is that they’re stealth delivery mechanisms for my songs — I’m a studio guy more than a live performer, and this is another way for me to get my music out there. Continue reading
If you’re burned out on all the traditional children’s holiday fare, Shout! Factory has a cure for what ails you: 110 minutes of yuletide adventures from everyone’s favorite Parisian kid-lit superstar.
Aside from a few random samplings of the books, I’m not all that familiar with the Madeline franchise, but my daughter is currently deeply in love with Madeline’s Christmas and Other Wintery Tales, and I’m totally okay with that. From a technical or storytelling standpoint, there’s really nothing special about any of these five segments, but the Madeline cartoons have a quiet, medium-paced charm that’s hard to resist; they aren’t loud or in your face, they’re just pleasant stories about pleasant girls who occasionally face relatively minor obstacles. That may sound dull, and really, Madeline isn’t for everyone. But for kids like my daughter, who loves musicals and dreams of living the life of a princess, they’re pretty perfect, and I really appreciate the decaffeinated storylines, which hew closer to the cartoons of my youth than the Day-Glo CG nightmares running 24 hours a day on Nick Jr.
Like the DVD case says, these are all holiday-themed stories, four culled from the more recent New Adventures of Madeline and one from the original series. There’s an obvious difference in the animation quality, but it isn’t jarring, and the overall tone of the stories is consistent — basically, Madeline and her schoolmates face a Christmas problem at the beginning of each episode (No snow!
Quelle horror!), and 20 minutes or so later, everyone’s happy.
Madeline gets snowed in, she meets Santa, she wants to be a champion ice skater…it’s all pretty mild stuff, but utterly absorbing for kids in the right demographic, and if you’re anything like me, you’ll welcome their calm cheer with open arms.
