Down Memory Lane: Reviews

My husband and I visited our local Friends of the Library bookstore today. Usually I'm the one coming out with handfuls of books...and often nostalgia items. Today was no different...but my husband also spied a couple of "Big Little Books" sitting among the comic book display. He grabbed up Donald Duck: The Lost Jungle City and Batman: The Cheetah Caper and we brought them home. As an added bonus, the Donald Duck book is a flip book with those cool little cartoons in the corner that make it look like Donald's moving when you flip the pages. I had some of these books when I was little (I definitely remember a Road Runner book and a Bugs Bunny book). Well, I decided that I just couldn't resist the trip down memory lane, so I just read the newest acquistions.

Of course, these are geared for children and they're picture-oriented...so the plots and the story-telling aren't very complicated. But they were a lot of fun.

In The Lost Jungle City, Uncle Scrooge has been backing an inventor who lives near the Amazon River. He receives a letter telling him that the inventor has nearly completed his work, so he rounds up Donald and the nephews and they head to South America. He's worried because the letter also mentions a "new partner" and he's afraid that he may lose the profits on the invention. When they arrive, the inventor is nowhere to be found. He's packed up and left with the "new partner." A very angry Uncle Scrooge is ready to just up and leave, but the nephews make friends with a lost Indian boy who says that there is an evil "Great One" terrorizing his village and making everyone work as slaves for him. The duck family decides to help the boy get back to his village--of course, this leads to an adventure involving valuable crystals, an ancient city, and the discovery of what happened to Uncle Scrooge's inventor.

Meanwhile, in The Cheetah Caper, Batman & Robin get involved in a strange string of crimes--the theft of 20 cases of peanut butter and the release of deadly cobras and dangerous cats (lions) from the zoo. All clues point the return of one of Gotham City's foes--the Cheetah! The Cheetah is the fastest man on earth and extremely hard to catch. It's up to the dynamic duo to trip up his speeding feet.

Of the two, I enjoyed the Uncle Scrooge story more. It was a fun, straight-forward Disney story. The nephews save the day using their Woodchuck Scout book and all is well. The Batman story is full of incredibly bad puns and metaphors...something that might well appeal to young kids (I remember loving the live-action Batman show when I was small and it was really silly). But, all in all a fun, quick evening's read.