IMAGE OF THE WEEK
Curious George, from Curious George Takes A Job.
Curious George, the creation of Margaret and HA Rey, was a favorite of mine when I was a kid, and we’ve managed to pass it on to our daughter. This little monkey’s adventures are always surprising and fun, with a delicious sense of “What wonderments are lurking around the next corner?” on every page. Even when things turn out badly for a time — George breaks his leg, George swallows a puzzle-piece, George gets locked up in jail — the overall desirability of curiosity is never eliminated. The bad stuff can just lead on to even more good stuff, which is, I think, a valuable lesson these days.
Since the original books were written many decades ago, it’s interesting to note the sensibility of those times as contrasted with our own. Just the very first book, where the Man in the Yellow Hat spots a monkey and, suddenly wanting a pet monkey, decides to trap him and toss him in a sack for the boat-ride back to America is less than “p.c.”, but somehow we accept it. Of course, these days the Man in the Yellow Hat would use his money to establish a wildlife refuge in the jungle so that George can always live in his normal habitat…but then, we’d never get to see what happens when George takes a job as a highrise window washer, or what he’d do if he spilled bottled ink all over the floor, or how he’d apply his new-found knowledge after his friend teaches him a bit of spelling.
There have also been newer Curious George books, written and illustrated in much the same style as the Rey’s. We have one of them out of the library just now. I can’t remember the title, but part of the story involves George falling asleep during a movie and dreaming that he’s really big. At the end, when the Man in the Yellow Hat wakes George up, we can see on the TV screen the movie’s final frame — which the illustrater has depicted as an old-style “The End” card with the RKO Pictures logo and radio-tower icon, like RKO did in the 1930s and 40s. Now there’s a little bit of throwaway detail that no kid is going to appreciate — hell, few enough adults would appreciate it — but I sure loved it.
