Customer Reviews

Make Way for Ducklings... and More Robert McCloskey Stories (Scholastic Video Collection)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

What a great compilation! The books are terrific and to have them come to life on screen is magical for our children and us!

Robert McCloskey is one of my favorite children's books writers. I loved his books as a child and love them now. I am a teachers and use them often in my ESOL classroom. While they are children's books, they are a bit more complex than many kids books and I often use them with students who are understanding English at an intermediate level rather than a beginning level. The illustrations are great and help quite a bit. They stories are timeless and haven't really aged. Kids enjoy them now as they did when he first wrote them. Highly recommended.

As with many Scholastic Books video adaptations, this is a fairly solid offering -- intelligent, well-produced and suitable for smaller children.

This DVD collection gathers video versions of several of Robert McCloskey's classic children's tales, notably "Make Way For Ducklings" and "Blueberries For Sal," which were written in the 1940s and '50s, and adapted into short films in the late '60s. The format is simple, but effective. The films are not animated: the original text is read aloud (nicely, in resonant male voices) as a camera pans across the original artwork. Although the production values are simple, they are well suited to the stories, and the overall effect is rather quaint, but not so much that modern kids won't still get a lot out of them. Bonus material includes short adaptations of "Lentil" and "Burt Dow, Deep Water Man." Wish they'd had time to do "One Morning In Maine" as well.

Make Way for Ducklings and More

Dear Sirs,
What a delightful surprise to find the McCloskey video available in DVD format! It is my sister-in-law's granddaughter's favorite! When they got a new TV there was no way to attach a VCR and everyone was very disappointed. These are wonderful old stories, told as if one were reading a book. Their family is all very happy with this gift--and your service was excellent. Thank you.

I thought this was a movie. It's just screens of the pages from the books along with a narrator reading it.

These Schlastic DVDs of storybook classics are a mixed bag. A few are live action features, more are fully animated, and some are just old filmstrips with still pictures reworked for the DVD format. Most of the stories on this DVD fall into that last category.

Make Way for Ducklings was published in 1941, and the illustrations used are directly from the book. Everything from the cars to the policeman's uniform are quaintly out of date now. Even sex roles are traditional, as Mr. Mallard goes off to explore the world while Mrs. Mallard stays home to raise eight babies by herself. I find it charming, but honestly, this book usually just sits on the shelf at the library where I work, except if there is an assignment to read a Caldecott award book.

Story of Ping is another classic about a duck in China who gets lost. This is also based on an old filmstrip so the pictures are still. The narrator does a good job, and it's a nice story.

The Ugle Duckling is familiar to us all. Again, there are still pictures from the book and filmstrip with a good narrator.

Angue and the Ducks features live footage of a little dog romping around, but he doesn't really act out the story.

Cat and Canary is again a revamped filmstrip.

Wings may well be the one story on the DVD that will appeal to modern children. This is fully animated with a cast of actors doing the voices. It's a story of two chickens, one sensible and one very silly. The silly one gets herself into trouble and almost ends up as the fox's lunch, but is saved by her sensible friend. It's clever and funny.

I think this DVD may appeal to adults who loved some of these books as children, but will have less appeal to modern children who are used to lots of special effects. This DVD may work for children who have been introduced to these stories and encouraged to enjoy them by an enuthusiastic parent or grandparent, but most children will want more action.