Saturday, April 26, 2014

MCS #12: Belle's Tales of Friendship

Belle’s Tales of Friendship (1999)

[IMDB blurb = non-existent]

Yes, believe it or not, this was a thing. It was a thing I owned on VHS (you know, those things that are now practically in museums). It was a thing I enjoyed watching, though now I don’t remember as much of it as I once did. So far as memory serves, there were two mini stories. One was about a bird that the beast wanted as a personal music-provider. The other included conflict between Lumiere and a chandelier (that may have been named Chandeleera) over providing light.

Lots of providing.

Well, friends provide and compromise and such. And the entire point of these two shorts was to teach friendship lessons. I’m sure they did. Just don’t ask me to say exactly what they were.

If anyone was wondering, these had none of the original actors. I’m not sure I knew that at the time (at least not for all the characters). If there’s one thing Disney is usually great at, it’s providing replacement actors that sound similar to the originals.

And finally, related to this, does anyone remember the live-action Belle’s story time show that was on the Disney channel a while ago? It reminded me of Out of the Box.

Because why not?

Also, yes, this show partially inspired the name of this blog.

Writer’s Lockbox

Side novellas are a big thing right now, especially in ya. Take almost any popular ya series and look for the “.5”s—the stories between stories, often from different characters’ perspectives.

Belle’s Tales of Friendship is like the .5 novella before .5 novellas were a thing. Regardless, .5s need to be relevant to the main books, stories in their own right, and, perhaps most importantly, not repeated in one of the main novels. They shouldn’t be necessary to the main storyline because not everyone will read them.

Take this information and run with it (not into oncoming traffic, please).

Last week: Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas

And join me next week for The Black Cauldron.

Thanks for reading.

Mary
@desantismt on Twitter

Follow My Blog With Bloglovin

-Kit ‘N Kabookle
My book blog

Wednesday, April 23, 2014

No Rest for the Wicked

Hello folks,

Two weeks it was working on thesis. Last week the thesis was due. This week I have a giant paper of doom.

As this title says, no breaks here.

Hopefully this will be the last week of nonsense blog posts about my life being busy for a while. Contrary to how I’m feeling now, I really do enjoy exploring writing and other stuff on here.

Saturday will be up and running, though. So I’ll see you then.

Cheers