I actually saw this in school! I would have been in second or third grade, which would have been mid-eighties in Charleston; so it got at least as far as South Carolina.
And you’re dead on about not seeing it all. In fact, I remember asking the librarian if she could make a copy of the whole thing for me if I brought her in a blank tape, both because I wanted to see how it ended, and because I genuinely loved it. I honestly think a lot of my lifelong fascination with post-apocalyptic stories probably started with this. (Though my interest was probably already piqued; I’m not sure if all elementary schools were still doing drills to teach kids how to hide under your desk in the event of nuclear attack, but mine definitely was. Might have been because it was adjacent to an Air Force base and filled with military brats like me, or just to make sure we adequately fearful of communists, or maybe just that South Carolina has always been a state filled with paranoid lunatics.)
I don’t remember much else about it, other than parts of it being, as you suggest, absolutely terrifying to an eight year old. After seeing it, I remember being mildly nervous about getting on a bookmobile afterwards, for fear that a weird hooded specter might put me into a hundred year sleep.
As a librarian who learned this shit post-card catalogs, this seems pretty accurate. They should go in the back and see if there were any notes for the Pages about shelving mistakes.
Oh my god that was my elementary school art class with The Phantom Toll Booth. I happened to catch it on TV one day after school in like, high school? And I was like, “oh shit, this movie continues past the first 20 minutes?”
I remember catching this on PBS some random afternoon in the mid-90s. It must have been pretty well into the run, but basically a guy was lost in the woods and describing things around him to Bookhart over a radio. He finds a watermelon and needs to know if it’s edible so he describes it over radio and Bookhart looks up his description and tells him it sounds like some kind of nut and he can eat it. He tears into the watermelon and says “What a fantastic nut!”
1-900-HOTDOG
Unlock with Patreon
4 replies on “Learning Day: Tomes And Talismans”
I actually saw this in school! I would have been in second or third grade, which would have been mid-eighties in Charleston; so it got at least as far as South Carolina.
And you’re dead on about not seeing it all. In fact, I remember asking the librarian if she could make a copy of the whole thing for me if I brought her in a blank tape, both because I wanted to see how it ended, and because I genuinely loved it. I honestly think a lot of my lifelong fascination with post-apocalyptic stories probably started with this. (Though my interest was probably already piqued; I’m not sure if all elementary schools were still doing drills to teach kids how to hide under your desk in the event of nuclear attack, but mine definitely was. Might have been because it was adjacent to an Air Force base and filled with military brats like me, or just to make sure we adequately fearful of communists, or maybe just that South Carolina has always been a state filled with paranoid lunatics.)
I don’t remember much else about it, other than parts of it being, as you suggest, absolutely terrifying to an eight year old. After seeing it, I remember being mildly nervous about getting on a bookmobile afterwards, for fear that a weird hooded specter might put me into a hundred year sleep.
As a librarian who learned this shit post-card catalogs, this seems pretty accurate. They should go in the back and see if there were any notes for the Pages about shelving mistakes.
Oh my god that was my elementary school art class with The Phantom Toll Booth. I happened to catch it on TV one day after school in like, high school? And I was like, “oh shit, this movie continues past the first 20 minutes?”
I remember catching this on PBS some random afternoon in the mid-90s. It must have been pretty well into the run, but basically a guy was lost in the woods and describing things around him to Bookhart over a radio. He finds a watermelon and needs to know if it’s edible so he describes it over radio and Bookhart looks up his description and tells him it sounds like some kind of nut and he can eat it. He tears into the watermelon and says “What a fantastic nut!”