Monthly Archives: February 2013
Bedtime Stories: Mr. and Mrs. Bunny—Detectives Extraordinaire!
Post by Mark T. Locker.
Mr. and Mrs. Bunny—Detectives Extraordinaire! by Polly Horvath.
This is one of the silliest books I have read in a while. It was very refreshing. And it’s not just silly in the random insert-something-arbitrary-and-silly-here kind of book; it was actually, literally laugh out loud funny. Just ask my wife! Polly Horvath is enormously talented at writing subtle humor that children and adults alike will laugh at.
Madeleine is a smart girl with some utterly useless, kinda dumb parents. So when they go missing, she knows she must find them, because they are pretty much helpless without her. Her only clues are a letter signed “The Enemy” and a coded card with reference to rabbits and rabbit by-products. Spoiler alert: it’s foxes.
Luckily, Madeleine meets Mr. and Mrs. Bunny just when they had decided to buy fedoras so they could be detectives. Mr. and Mrs. Bunny have never detected before. Madeleine worries that she may be putting too much faith in them, not because they are new in the game but because they are bunnies. What Madeleine quickly learns is that the Bunnys are the closest she will come to being cared for and loved. And that marmots are very stupid and very fond of the Olde Spaghetti Factory. (These two points are not related. Probably.) Mr. and Mrs. Bunny are charming and adorable. I would love to be adopted by them.
Poignant, funny, action-packed, this book can be read by even as slow a reader as me in just a couple days. It’s well worth it!
Movies in Bed: The Hobbit
Post by Mark T. Locker.
Personally, I don’t know what Peter Jackson was thinking remaking The Hobbit. He must have known that two perfect things came into being in the year 1977. The first being yours truly, the second being the animated musical movie The Hobbit. With music by Glenn Yarbrough and some fantastically hideous illustration, there was no way Peter Jackson was going to be able to hold a candle to this interpretation.
We owned the LP version of the movie (I can’t imagine whose great idea it was to have the entire movie sold as an audio with accompanying book but I loved it) and must have listened to it hundreds of times. You all know the story, Bilbo Baggins, Gollum, Gandalf, dwarves. Adventure, trolls, goblins, spiders!
The animated version, with its 1970s soundtrack, terrifying Gollum rendition, and ugly, ugly characters, is not to be missed. It has some classic voices of the era, including Hans Conried, the voice of Captain Hook, as Thorin. Seriously, it’s so bad/good.
