Fuse 8 n’ Kate: Moo, Baa, La La La by Sandra Boynton

Initially, this was supposed to be an entirely different episode altogether. I had somehow managed to convince myself that we hadn’t done The Three Pigs by David Wiesner on this podcast before. In truth? We did that precise book on May 13, 2024 (so, yeah, not actually all that long ago). My bad, folks. My bad. In a pinch we had to find a replacement and, because Kate is now mother to a small child, we had title on hand that (A) I love and (B) we’ve never done before. We discuss this teeny tiny board book which, we would like to point out, ALSO has three pigs on the cover! It was fate to do this title.

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Show Notes:

Since we couldn’t do this book in the end, Kate (who was mid-critiquing it when I burst in and told her we’d done the book before, just with a different cover) wanted to point out how interesting the original cover is. Most pigs, apparently, have brown eyes. One study said that some blue eyes in pigs are due to a disease. So why do most of the pigs on this cover have baby blues?

This book came on at #69 on my Top 100 Picture Books Poll results back in 2012.

Here’s the nice lady singing the song to the tune of Bad Romance in, clearly, the most expert manner.

I was trying to figure this one out. How would you typify the outfits that these pigs are wearing? I’m thinking they’re from a distinct era. Vaudeville?

Note these pigs. Their fun has been stripped away. They were having fun and now they are forced into this situation. This… is their lot now.

We started talking about how this book has been translated over the years. In my old files, I found this cover:

Kate has become a real typography fan recently. She really did appreciate how big the font was for the big dogs on “Bow Wow Wow.”

Kate also suspects that because one of these dogs has no nametag, there’s something special about that dog. Perhaps it is based up on a real dog? Hard to say.

Kate Recommends: Murder in the Dollhouse by Rich Cohen

Betsy Recommends: The film Blue Moon, available on AppleTV

Filed under: Fuse 8 n' Kate