Some Favorite Books That Became Films or TV Shows

This week's Long & Short Reviews question asks reviewers to list favorite books that have been made into films, TV shows, videos, etc.

I spend so little time watching moving pictures, I wouldn't even know if any favorite books had been sucked into the movie monster recently. I remember some books I liked that became Disney movies. I read the souvenir books based on the movies first, then became old enough to find the books in libraries. I may or may not ever have watched the movies... 

1. Mary Poppins by P.L. Travers 

Silly sentimental kid stuff, with an undertone of snark that was aimed at adults and that still pleases me as an adult. The story was a four-volume series. It's worth collecting all four volumes, and yes, though not intentionally racist they are full of silly stereotypes that are part of the time-travelling ride. Deal with it. 

2. The Hundred and One Dalmatians by Dodie Smith 

Animal stories are hard to make into movies. I can see why Disney gave up and made the movie a cartoon...all those animal characters! 

3. Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll 

Anyone can have dreams, and a few unfortunate people even have migraine auras, as goofy as this. The trick is writing it all down in a way that forms a plot. Oh, and it helps to have literary-type friends who crack picturesque jokes and keep them running. The writer known as Lewis Carroll had friends who wrote down the origins of several jokes and plot twists in Alice, in their journals, after the parties and picnics where the jokes were first cracked. (See Anny in Love for samples that have been reprinted in a new book.)

4. The Swiss Family Robinson by Johann Wyss 

Is it boring to read about how they made and did things, or inspiring? Depends on how much camp-type stuff you want to do. 

5. So Dear to My Heart by Sterling North 

Technically people from Indiana are not hillbillies. They are Hoosiers, a different sort of thing. Even to my generation the characters in this book seemed like hillbillies, although they are Hoosiers, because, as a matter of historical fact, the different rural American subcultures all had a lot in common. 

6. Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi 

It used to be easy to find English translations of the whole original book--a great-uncle had one--but by the time The Nephews came along, complete translations were much easier to find in Spanish, and if you consider how hard it is to find anything in Spanish in much of the US...! The whole book is much more interesting than the Disney version, though it also contains a lot of Italian Catholic references that Disney thought would be too divisive.

7. Peter and the Star Catchers by Dave Barry 

The Disney movie was based very loosely on Peter Pan and Wendy by James M. Barrie, which was a dreadful book, though funny in spots. When I was a child libraries pushed children away from Barrie's book by giving us a more recent British revision by some woman author I forget. When The Nephews were at the age to enjoy it most, Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson undertook to do the story justice. I think their series is what the story should have been in the first place. Everyone should read it first. 

8. E.T. the Extraterrestrial by William Kotzwinkle 

If anything I liked volume 2, E.T. the Book of the Green Planet, even better. 

9. The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis 

Both movie versions were desecrations. There's no substitute for reading the books.

10. Matilda by Roald Dahl

Actually I liked all of his children's books, even the worn-out Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory that I always suspected of having been written as a commercial. (The book was printed in the US about the time Willy Wonka brand candies appeared in stores, though the book and the movie have lasted much longer than the candies.) Roald Dahl was not always a perfectly nice man, and his books contain jokes and images that aren't nice, either, which used to be what some children liked about them. If Dahl had chosen to write some less offensive stories for nice little girls, I might have liked those better than things like The Twits, but posthumous censorship is ruder than anything Dahl wrote.