The Subversive, Hidden Message of “Readeez Volume One”
12/06/08
What are Readeez about?
On one level they’re about reading. Each of the thirty-plus short movies that comprise Readeez Volume One puts words center-stage — the written variety and their spoken or sung equivalents. It is devoutly wished that this verbal immersion will nurture happy readers worldwide.
Readeez are also about music and the joys thereof. On the DVD we catch Julian Waters in the act of creating a couple of his songs (”Hangin’ Around,” “Circle and Square”). And there are a dozen or so other smile-inducing tunes included on the disc.
But it’s time to let you in on the real, hitherto unpublicized agenda of the The Readeez Company.
We’re promoting Love.
***
Randy Pausch talks about the “head fake.” It’s when you think the person you’re listening to is going one way and it turns out they were heading in another direction. This week, a reviewer of Readeez Volume One came close to exposing our head fake when she wrote “The adorable characters of Isabel and her Dad are a treat to watch…The love and respect apparent in their father-daughter relationship is the icing on the cake of this really great DVD.”
For me, that loving relationship, and its unabashed expression, IS the cake. The other stuff — the reading, the poems, the songs — that’s icing.
Love. Yup. That’s it. Radical, I know, but it’s something that doesn’t crop up very much in children’s video. Amid the puppets and the cartoon animals and the heroic, orphaned children who populate that crowded, influential world, I thought it would be nice to see a parent and child who care for each other.
Shouldn’t that be the norm, not the exception?
Here’s a nice little riff on love. Feels appropriate for Veteran’s Day. And my Nana’s birthday.
Love,
Michael (who loved making this family in Malaysia happy)
