Books to Movies

I am a huge book fan.  It all started with Green Eggs & Ham (who's with me on that?) and I haven't stopped since.  Books always took me far away from whatever was going on around me, whether that was homework (shhh), music drifting thru the house from the dance studio, and even my diabetes.  I am one of those "fully-immerse" readers and I love it.  The characters and scenes leap right from the page and go directly into my brain and for whatever amount of time I am reading, I am in that book's world.

One of my favorite series of all time is the Baby-Sitters Club by Ann M. Martin.  I had every single book in  this collection- this includes 132 regular books, 15 Super Specials, 26 Mystery books, 4 Super Mysteries, 3 Special Editions and 6 Portrait Collections.

I loved these books more than anything and could not get enough.  I asked for the books for my birthday and Christmas; I saved my allowance so that I could get new ones whenever we'd go to the bookstore.  I remember propping the book behind my cereal bowl in the morning so that I could read a few more pages before school.  My love for these books is real and it's deep.

You can imagine my excitement and pure joy when they announced that they were making a Baby-Sitters Club movie...a MOVIE!  Ohhhh my goodness, I could barely contain myself.  I started re-reading the books and counting down the days until I could finally put a face to the ones I had painted in my head for so long.

The day had come.  I was in the car headed to Hot Springs (the nearest town w/a movie theater) and I was bouncing in my seat, I was so excited.  The movie started and I held my breath.  About 20 minutes (okay maybe I breathed a little in between) into the movie, it came whooshing out of me in disappointment.  It was just all wrong...the baby-sitters didn't look right, the kids didn't look right, Kristy wasn't bossy enough, Stacey wasn't sophisticated enough and the list went on and on.  It was a huge letdown (well, for a 12 year old, at least) and I remember feeling cheated out of my imagination.

I think this caused me to be very wary of book series that are turned into a movie franchise.  Luckily for me, I didn't read Harry Potter or Twilight until AFTER the first movie had come out.  This meant that the character's images were already in my head when I read and the books and that I'm saving myself from the heartbreak of the movie creators' failure to recreate my brain in their films.

On that note, I am very excited for THIS to start:

The bottom line is, books will always be #1 in my heart...no matter what number their movies are in the box office.

Have a great day, y'all!  Now go read a great book!