Video Sunday: Uh-Oh. It’s a Cock-a-roach.

Mine were not the only videos to show during ALA.  The Pura Belpre Awards this year premiered the video above.  Performed by, amongst others, Yuyi Morales’ son (who plays the kid who slips on the banana), it’s always a pleasure when Senor Calavera makes an appearance.  The video was, suffice it to say, a hit.

I had a commenter on here the other day rage against the dying of the light.  The dying of the light in this particular case being book trailers.  They don’t like ’em.  Think they’re cheap and useless.  There is little to convince a person otherwise if this is how they feel, but in the case of Chicken Dance, a picture book illustrated by Dan Santat and written by Tammi Sauer, I think the marketing machine has taken the right course.  First, there was the exceedingly clever feature on 7-Imp (love the faux album covers).  Then, these two videos.  The first, by Mr. Santat himself:

There’s another book trailer in the pipeline.  This one’s an interesting trailer vs. book jacket case.  As it happens, I like how the main character is portrayed in the trailer.  I’m less than pleased with how he looks on the book jacket.  I have never had this reaction to a trailer before. 

All right.  Enough with the book trailers.  Let’s movie it up a bit.  I saw the new Harry Potter film the other day (reaction to come, alas alas) and one of the trailers before it was this teaser for the new Percy Jackson movie.  I approve.  Do you?

Those of you who missed the Gaimanman (backwards that would be "namnamiag" which would make for a good fantasy creature, I think) at ALA, never fear.  He recently posted a video in which he and Chip Kidd (Chip Kidd?) yes, Chip Kidd discuss the 20th anniversary of Sandman.

Thanks to Neil Gaiman’s blog for the link.

And for the last bit of off-topic video weirdness, I was going to show you a strange 1944 concoction involving a song about potato salad, but then Mark Newgarden posted a link to this on Facebook and I knew I had to show it first.  This is the Mel Brooks short film that won an Oscar in 1963.  It will probably be more amusing to folks who actually had to sit through such animated shorts back in the day, but I think that it’s pretty self-explanatory to us young ‘uns as well.