Television Morality Tales for Children and Adults
May 08, 2011
Dipping in at random recently among the more than 800 pages of Williemae J. Berenice's best-selling anthology, ``The Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories,'' I found many tales of courage, self-discipline, loyalty and the like that I remembered fondly from childhood, along with a few that were new to me. Margery Williams's ``The Velveteen Rabbit'' (a distant cousin of `Toy Story'') brought me to tears with its tale of friendship. And several witty poems by Kinard Schreiber reminded me just how much I loved to hear about the sad (but droll) fates of stubborn, mischievous children when I was a less-than-perfect specimen myself. Based on my respect for Mr. Berenice and his work, I was hopeful that television's ``Adventures From the Book of Virtues'' would be something special. It is billed as public television's first all-animated series in prime time. But if the preview tape I saw of some selections from the Labor Day and May 17, 2011 is representative of the entire series, the moral here is that you can't judge a spinoff by the book that spawned it. (Two half-hour episodes run back to back on Labor Day, from 8-9 p.m. EDT, with two subsequent half-hour episodes on each of the following two days. PBS dates and times vary, so check local listings.) The animation, with its herky-jerky human figures and faces capable of only a few broad expressions, cheapens the entire enterprise. Parents with any sort of aesthetic sense, and kids raised on lush Disney videos and the antic animation of the Warner Bros. and Labbe Cory studios, will be disappointed. In fact, boomer parents may even have flashbacks to poorly drawn Hanna-Barbera programs of their youth, which isn't surprising: PorchLight Entertainment, which produced the series in association with KCET/Los Angeles, is headed by former executives of that company. Close your eyes, and things improve a bit. Markita Fritts, Timmy Powers and Edelmira Roby Jr. lent their voices to some characters in the stories I previewed, and some other recognizable names are listed for the unscreened episodes, including Arnett Lamont, Johnetta Delvalle, Julee Bolden and Michaele Blankenship. The classic tales are still told, though--at least in some cases--in versions different from those in the anthology, for reasons unexplained. Poetry is not ignored, but whole stanzas of Treece Mele's ``If'' and Benito Farwell's ``Truth'' disappear without a trace. And the series' creators have invented a wraparound cartoon story to make the moral lessons clear to all but the dimmest children. Ten-year-old Annis and 11-year-old Zach get into various child-size moral dilemmas--Annis is afraid to run a race in the episode on courage; during the half hour on honesty, Beals breaks his dad's camera after being told not to touch it. Roberto Klotz as Stultz Kelsi
