What's wrong with Nabooti?: a Choose Your Own Adventure news bulletin

ITEM: Lean Forward Media is developing The Abominable Snowman (Choose Your Own Adventure #13) into an animated interactive DVD featuring the voices of William H. Macy, Frankie Muniz (Malcolm in the Middle), and Mark Hamill. The LFM website mentions "Fall 2005" and "Winter 2005" release dates for the DVD, but a company representative has just told me to expect a March 2006 release. I'm looking forward to this DVD. Will it be fun?

"Disney-lite" visuals and the idea of "remote control as joystick" inflame skepticism. Here's a fairer question: Could CYOA on DVD possibly be funner than the 20-year-old Apple II/Commodore 64 adaptation, which features not just engaging and colorful graphics but also live swordplay (and reading)?

IN RELATED NEWS: Eighteen titles from the original Choose Your Own Adventure series are back in print thanks to ChooseCo. The company (whose staff includes CYOA author Shannon Gilligan, wife of prolific CYOA author R.A. Montgomery), has just started listing them for sale, one copy at a time, on Amazon. Quaint given CYOA's sales history: 150 million copies sold in 34 languages between 1981 and 1998 (or so). (UPDATE!: Ms. Gilligan told me on the phone that the launch date for these books is February 1, 2006. The Amazon one-at-a-timing is probably temporary, then.)

BUT ALSO: Education publisher Sundance Publishing is offering an exclusive CYOA curriculum megapack, "fully revised and updated with reading, writing, and critical thinking activities." The MEGAPACK (emphasis mine) includes all 18 reprinted books, plus the forthcoming Abominable Snowman DVD, plus a 48-page Teacher Guide, plus a 32-page Writer's Guide featuring "motivating writing tips from series author R.A. Montgomery" and "compelling mini-lessons to guide students toward writing their own adventure stories."

MISCELLANEOUS FACTS:

• ChooseCo's reprint selection doesn't contain any titles by CYOA founder Edward Packard. Kind of disappointing! Packard's books used to include the fun anecdote that he got the idea for CYOA while co-inventing bedtime stories with his kids.
  
  
• Looks like ChooseCo has re-numbered the books in favor of the re-release AND the forthcoming DVD(s). R.A. Montgomery's The Abominable Snowman was originally book #13 in the series. Now it's book #1. (The original book #1 is The Cave of Time by Edward Packard.)
  
  
• The Lost Jewels of Nabooti (originally book #10, now book #4) has been re-titled, inexplicably, The Lost Jewels of Nafouti. What's wrong with "Nabooti"? Bantam Books apparently had a problem with that word, too. In the late 1980s, when they updated the cover graphics on a bunch of the early books in the series, The Lost Jewels of Nabooti lost the "of Nabooti," viz:
  
  
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• The original series featured dozens of authors, but 15 of these 18 ChooseCo reprints are Montgomery titles. This authorial lopsidedness — combined with the quiet re-numbering of titles — makes Montgomery's reprint enterprise seem a tad revisionist? I don't want to be a negative thinker/journalist. Maybe the reprints explicitly address and apologize for this lopsidedness. They should. I don't know all the facts!
  
  
• The 18 reprinted titles are: The Abominable Snowman by R.A. Montgomery, Escape! by R.A. Montgomery, Beyond Escape! by R.A. Montgomery, The Brilliant Dr. Wogan by R.A. Montgomery, The Case of the Silk King by Shannon Gilligan (nb: in 1992, this book was made into a TV movie, unseen by me, starring Soleil "Punky Brewster" Moon Frye and Noriyuki "Pat" Morita), House of Danger by R.A. Montgomery, Journey Under the Sea by R.A. Montgomery, The Lost Jewels of Nafouti by R.A. Montgomery, Lost on the Amazon by R.A. Montgomery, Mystery of the Maya by R.A. Montgomery, The Mystery of Ura Senke by Shannon Gilligan, Prisoner of the Ant People by R.A. Montgomery, Race Forever by R.A. Montgomery, Return to Atlantis by R.A. Montgomery, Secret of the Ninja by Jay Leibold, Space and Beyond by R.A. Montgomery, Trouble on Planet Earth by R.A. Montgomery, War with the Evil Power Master by R.A. Montgomery
  
  
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• A college professor of mine, John Woodcock, once lent me a copy of Trouble In Space, the book he wrote for the CYOA "Younger Readers" series on R.A. Montgomery's invitation. In this book, you (the reader) are a kid astronaut accompanied by Xmax, a squat alien who "helps" you decide how to pilot a ship through the be-starr'd noir. Eminently DVD-able. ***1/2

Comments

[Publicado por: na booty]

dude the sword in the lost jewels of na booty totally looks like it's going to make that kid lose his jewels!!!!! haw natch haw haw haw natch haw natch haw

[Publicado por: stevee]

the answer to the adjusted spelling may just have something to do with Sheik Yerbouti.

[Publicado por: alex]

Thank you SO MUCH for the info! The CYOA site is not working for me. I sell kids books for a living (a meager retail slave almost-living, that is) & have been saying for years now that I wished I had the means to put CYOA back in print.

[Publicado por: Julien Peter Benney]

Good point that the original CYOA series featured dozens of authors, only a few of whom have had books reissued by ChooseCo. Edward Packard is by no means the only CYOA author whom ChooseCo has totally ignored: there is not a title by Richard Brightfield or Louise Munro Foley or Ellen Kushner in ChooseCo's roster, for one.

If you read the site at "http://www.angelfire.com/ne/jackfrost/cyoa.html", which remains the most comprehensive CYOA review site on the web though written over a decade ago just after the last original books were published, you will see, as I knew from my admittedly limited reading of the series as a young child in the 1980s, that CYOA was a lot more than Packard and Montgomery. The other writers may have been less prolific but they made no attempt to clone Packard or Montgomery as some have said.