Let the wild rumpus start!
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"Let the wild rumpus start!"
You want wild? I'll show you wild.
Parents who grew up with Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are" (1963) have no doubt read the author's first book to their own children. It's a classic picture book about a child named Max who's sent to his room for "making mischief." We've all been there, but Max uses his imagination to escape. So his parents think he's wild, do they? They don't know the meaning of wild! With the line, "That very night in Max's room, a forest grew," the book and Max's world radically expand. Soon after he "sailed in and out of weeks," breaking the bounds of time and space, Max lands on an island "Where the Wild Things Are." And because he wins a staring contest (and fulfills his parents' sense that he's wild), he ends up being the creatures' leader.
But I'll tell you where the wild things aren't. They're missing from the first draft of the book, which was originally titled Where the Wild Horses Are. In fact, the "things" might not have made it into the book at all if it weren't for one small but significant detail: Sendak, who at the time was working at Disney studios and having a hard time with their style, couldn't draw horses. We learn this on a short clip from the film "Sendak," which shows the author in his yard and house, talking about his first few books. Though the feature is just a teaser, really, at roughly five minutes, parents will still enjoy having this unexpected bonus feature on a Scholastic Storybook Treasures title in a series that usually doesn't feature anything except additional stories.
Parents will also appreciate that, as with other Scholastic titles, this DVD from Weston Woods/New Video uses original illustrations as the basis for animation, and that this is an all-Sendak DVD. In addition to the title story, there's also Sendak's second book, In the Night Kitchen (1970) and four short Sendak tales featuring The Nutshell Kids from the Nutshell Library, with singer-songwriter Carole King performing the sung narratives.
Be warned, though, if you haven't seen Sendak's second book that it's a little wilder than "Wild Things." In fact, when the book first came out it caused its own rumpus over the little boy in the story, who appears nude throughout, with his little dangling penis as plain and obvious as the nose on his face. The book was banned in a number of states, including my own--Illinois. But when you add all of the elements together, it might add up to a weird story but certainly not an obscene one. In fact, the boy at times appears to be so young that he's nearly a baby's age. And even naked, he can't really compete with three bakers who bear a strong resemblance to Oliver Hardy.
On the bonus feature, Sendak talks about this book in a room in his house that's filled with Mickey Mouse collectibles, which explains a lot. Sendak says he envisioned this as a variation of a Mickey Mouse cartoon, based on an ad for Sunshine Bakers he saw in 1939 which had the bakers saying, "We cook while you sleep." In this story, a boy named Mickey gets up in the middle of the night and finds another wild rumpus, as three rotund bakers bake up a storm. As with "Wild Things," the imagination strips him of all vestiges of reality (symbolized by the lack of clothing) and puts him into a dream world that looks like the inside of a Salvador Dali painting. He falls into the baker's mixing vat and protests, before being put into the Mickey oven, that he's not the batter's milk. Then he proceeds to replace himself with the milk, all in dreamstate fashion, so that when dawn comes and the little kid crows like a rooster and slides back into his bed, it's as if the whole thing never happened. And of course, a lot of parents who don't care for the nudity wish that were the case. But especially on this video, which has a robust energy and constant music, the nudity is just one strange element in a very strange music-video style story for kids. On tape, Sendak says that this book, not "Where the Wild Things Are," is his all-time favorite. And it's easy to see why. It's a much more expansive story, with wilder illustrations and all sorts of free-association, and yet the structure really does resemble a Mickey adventure like "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" dream segment.
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[release]24663[/release]