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The dark side of Disney
There's no escaping the commodification of childhood.
By Samuel G. Freedman
[08/23/99]

Disney rocks!
Forget the long lines, the schlocky toys and the canned music. Disneyland will always be the Magic Kingdom for this lifelong Mouseketeer.
By Lisa Moskowitz
[08/22/99]

Wild Thing
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[08/20/99]

Wild Thing
Wake up, Sleeping Beauty!
Classic fairy tales get a feminist makeover for parents who don't like their princesses tricked out, locked up or comatose. But were the old ones really that bad?
By Margot Mifflin
[08/20/99]

There goes my baby
Once, I thought my daughter would win the Nobel Prize. Now that she's started college, I just hope she keeps her phone, her power, her housing -- and remembers to wake up for class.
By Stephen J. Lyons
[08/19/99]

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Parents eager to keep the family entertainment bills under control (those $9 tickets really add up) will be tempted to substitute the print version of "The Iron Giant" for the movie of the same name. So will those who hope to guide their children's enthusiasm into literary channels. After all, a mere $16 buys the 30th anniversary edition of the classic chapter book by the late poet laureate of England, its jacket spangled with gushing blurbs from juvenile lit greats, such as Madeline L'Engle and the author of "The Phantom Tollbooth."

The Iron Giant: A Story in Five Nights By Ted Hughes Illustrated by Andrew Davidson Knopf, 1999 The Tiger's Bones and Other Plays for Children By Ted Hughes Illustrated by Alan E. Cober Viking, 1974 What Is the Truth? By Ted Hughes Drawings by R. J. Lloyd Harper & Row, 1984 Moon-Bells and Other Poems By Ted Hughes Illustrated by Felicity Roma Bowers The Bodley Head, 1986 The It-Doesn't-Matter Suit By Sylvia Plath Read by Andrew Sachs, Susan Jameson et al. Faber Penguin Audiobooks, 30 minutes

Parents who push the book, however, should expect protests. Only a copyright lawyer or a folklorist would recognize Ted Hughes' "The Iron Giant: A Story in Five Nights" in the Warner Bros. version. The scriptwriters transposed the action from a vaguely British '60s landscape to the coast of Maine a decade earlier; they invented four of the movie's six main characters, brought in the army, replaced an extraterrestrial villain with general human stupidity and added a dollop of humor to the rather grim original. The giant himself, a cuddly clunker with a conscience in the cartoon, began life in Hughes' book as an impersonal, inexorable force with mysterious origins. Unlike the cartoon character, Hughes' giant is no Tin Woodman. In both stories he splashes down from outer space and runs around eating tractors and train tracks until clever Hogarth leads him to a junkyard, where the giant can gorge on metal until he gets his fill. But when the movie monster saves humanity from self-destruction, it's his love for Hogarth that drives him. In the book, the giant rescues the planet from a very different threat, with a very different motivation: self-interest. Without people to produce scrap metal, he'll have nothing to eat.

The book's most powerful image, which the animated version preserves, is the giant's instinct for self-preservation. Shattered by a fall, he reassembles himself, hunting out his scattered pieces and fitting them back together. In the movie it's a redemptive image, promising him rebirth after self-sacrifice. In the book, though, its overtones are more ambiguous. Readers may find themselves not completely comfortable with a ravenous, indestructible monster whose goodwill, even towards the hand that feeds him, seems tentative.

"The Iron Giant," the only one of Hughes' half-dozen or so kids' books currently in print, is dedicated to his children. They were 6 and 8 at the time he wrote it, five years after the famous suicide of their mother, Sylvia Plath. In keeping with this dark history, Hughes' books for kids tend to tell ominous, sometimes preachy fables about ambition, despair and people's disregard for nature and one another.

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