Video Sunday: Monkey on the Lam

Now the bit is remarkably short, but it’s a start. At any rate, one of these days another New York morning show is going to steal The Today Show‘s thunder by giving these author/illustrators a full half hour. Then the line will be drawn.

I do a fair amount of videos in a given Sunday, but former co-worker Warren of the blog Kids’ Music that Rocks puts me to shame.  With his focus on hip children’s entertainers, the artists of the children’s music industry are finally making great music videos with kids in mind.  For example, Warren’s recent post Monkeys and Squirrels showed a music video by a Corey Jenkins (a.k.a. Jenks) and paired it with a short film about a park ranger scared of squirrels at the same time.  Here’s the monkey music video, which Warren called "Part National Geographic, part Jack Johnson, part ‘Runaround Sue’."

Thanks to Kids’ Music that Rocks for the link.

Lisa Yee alerted me to the fact that Scholastic has been putting together and organizing a nice series of interviews with some of its authors.  Everyone from Jeff Smith to Philip Pullman to Brian Selznick. Each question to said author gets its own separate video.  They’re rather nice bite-sized pieces ideal for library or classroom consumption.  For example, let us say that your class is doing a unit on Shaun Tan’s The Arrival and there is a question about one of the pictures.  Well here is Shaun Tan talking about the image of the giants which he considers "the most violent" in the book.

Easy to embed. Easy to find. I’ll probably rely on this on weeks when the video offerings are few and far between.  And here, as a companion piece, is Ms. Yee herself talking about how her first book got published. People who were pulled out of the slush pile should have a name, shouldn’t they? Slushies? Seems insulting. Slush Survivors? S.L.U.S.H. = Society of Literary Uber-Authors Surviving the Horror? A bit much.  I’ll just call ’em slushers.

Thanks to Lisa Yee for the link.

Not that Scholastic’s the only one playing this game.  They were just clever to split the interviews up into individual questions.  But these days every publisher is getting in on the multimedia game.  Harper Collins has its own studio, for crying out loud.  And Simon & Schuster does pretty well too.  They’re still concentrating too closely on adult authors with too little attention to the children’s side of things, but they do produce nice stuff.  Here, for example, is Jon Scieszka who takes the standard flying vs. invisibility debate and instead says that the two powers he would choose between would be flying vs. x-ray vision.  Huh.  Not invisibility?  I mean, seriously.  Who wouldn’t want to know how not to be seen?

Thanks to Michelle Fadlalla for the link.

The author of Bird, which recently won a John Steptoe Award for best new illustrator, has a timeslip teen novel coming out involving Brooklyn.  The video points out that there are remarkably few fantasy or time travel novels starring African-American kids.  Of course, there were Andre Norton’s novels (I love Lavender Green Magic), but I think she was definitely the exception rather than the rule.

Thanks to Dr. Elliott for the link.

And finally, the video unrelated to children’s literature that will make you smile.  I wish I could tell you what was going on.  All I can say is, it was created in all seriousness and it proves that I really do have German roots.  I mean, if you saw me dance it wouldn’t be too different from this:

Thanks to Swiss Miss for the link and the laugh.