The Children's Literature Podcast

Why do some stories work when they play around with the race, gender, or location of a story and its characters, and why are others an annoying mess? It has to do with the basic split between how story adaptations for stage and screen are framed — either the story will be rooted in an immersive realistic setting, where every little detail matters, or it takes place in the Land of Make-Believe, where only the story and the performance matters and an immersive replication of a world and its characters isn’t needed.

Too easily the people on both sides of this debate resort to name-calling, focusing on things that don’t matter like debates over race, when what this is really about is whether or not the adaptation makes overall sense and follows its own rules.

10 Things I Hate About You was an instant teen classic, adapting Shakespeare’s play The Taming of the Shrew for a 90’s audience. The film’s title comes from a bit of bad but sweet teen poetry written by the shrew herself, Kat Stratford. Julia Stiles’ moving reading of her character’s reinterpretation of the poem is the emotional peak of the film, showing us how love finds a way through even the thorniest paths. Let’s take a look at Sonnet 141 by William Shakespeare as well as Kat’s poem, which is oddly named because she seems to hate more than 10 things about Patrick Verona.

Do your own version of this homework assignment! I would love to read your own re-write of Sonnet 141.

My friend Miguel Lopez returns to the show, taking a break from his Ph.D studies of World War II to help me understand how Animal Farm by George Orwell creates a fictional portrayal of Stalin and Stalinism. We also answer a listener’s question about whether the memes referring to British Prime Minister (for now) Keir Starmer as “Keir Stalin” are making fair criticisms of his policies, or if this is just social media ragebait.

Miguel is from the Los Angeles area and now lives in Oklahoma after retiring from active duty in the US Air Force. He is currently pursuing a PhD in History, focused on WWII in Europe, the Holocaust, and German Military History. Tiffney and Miguel have been friends since college.

This episode was recorded just a few days before the consequential local elections held in Britain on the 7th of May, 2026, which provided an interesting opportunity to see what ideas from Orwell’s book can be applied to present-day politics.

Animal Farm directed by Andy Serkis and written by Nicholas Stoller is an utter abomination.

Here’s my thoughts on three upcoming adaptations of children’s stories. First, the preview trailer for the new Little House on the Prairie adaptation by Netflix looks like it might actually be . . . Good??? Also, it sounds like those rumors about HBO considering turning Lord Voldemort into Lady Voldemort might have some truth to it (ugh). And to wrap up, I react to a new featurette that’s been released about the upcoming Masters of the Universe adaptation and I’m feeling reassured, because they put to rest any idea that He-Man’s healthy brand of masculinity will be smeared as “toxic” in this adaptation.

Human beings are going back to the moon! As I recorded this episode, Artemis II was on its journey to the moon and back again, with four crew members on board the Orion spacecraft. But what do Artemis and Orion have to do with each other? Quite a lot, actually! These two were hunting buddies who loved to explore the wilderness together. There are many twists on the myth, but all of them ended badly for poor Orion. NASA is rewriting the tale so that Artemis and Orion are once more exploring the last true wilderness — space — but with a happy partnership for them this time.

It’s been a long time since I took any time for myself to play video games, and I randomly had the idea that if I can drag myself out of bed early enough, I could revisit Skyrim and chat about the myths and legends that went into its worldbuilding. In this foray into a damp, spooky tunnel, I talk about Grettir’s Saga, one of the sagas of the Icelanders in which the antihero Grettir has two battles with undead creatures that directly inspired the draugr in Skyrim.

There have recently been a bunch of ultraviolent makeovers of classic children’s stories. Some are schlocky horror fun. And some are just dreadful. Pinocchio Unstrung looks like promisingly gory twist on Carlo Collodi’s already scary tale, while THE BRIDE! was a painfully bad attempt to update Frankenstein by Mary Shelley.

Star Trek VI is *so* loaded with literary references that I had to divide my thoughts into two parts. I previously talked about the Shakespeare references in the play, but this time I’ll do a speedrun through ALL of the literary references in this film — and there are a lot! See if you can guess the one I missed, though.

 

When researching the first published books of nursery rhymes, I found some hilariously inappropriate entries. Well, by modern standards, anyway. Please enjoy these silly, violent, and scatalogical poems. If you share them with your kids, don’t say I didn’t warn you if you find yourself in the principal’s office getting told off.

If you’d like to watch the full livestream including listener comments, you can find that here: