An updated & revised version of the previous edition on the making of Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol featuring new information, over 130 new images and a soundtrack CD.

Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol, The Making of the First Animated Christmas Special is an in-depth examination of the highly unlikely teaming of Mr. Magoo, Charles Dickens and Broadway songwriters Jule Styne and Bob Merrill.

One animation empire was built on a mouse, another was built on a rabbit. This one was built on the unlikely combination of a moose and squirrel. It began in the late 1940's, when Jay Ward and his lifetime friend, Alex Anderson, joined forces to create a cartoon series for the fledgling medium of television with a budget that would make "shoestring" look generous. The result was Crusader Rabbit, which debuted on a local NBC affiliate in Los Angeles in mid-summer of 1950. The cheaply produced and minimally animated series became the inauspicious and unlikely beginning of a TV animation powerhouse with a defiantly innovative-and influential-brand of humor that shaped animated comedy for decades. As the 1950's drew to a close, Ward, with now-former partner Anderson's blessing, took two characters from an unsold series they had developed together, teamed with writer Bill Scott and a couple of freelance UPA artists, and created a short pilot film starring a flying squirrel and a hapless but hilarious moose. That pilot, Rocky The Flying Squirrel, launched an animation studio that turned out the funniest, hippest and most satirical cartoons on television and creating a comic vocabulary for generations of children and their parents. The shows produced at Jay Ward Productions featured the wittiest writing in the medium, some of the best character voice work, and ... some of the worst animation. Assembling a staff of first rate writers and artists, Jay Ward was undermined by the cheapest budgets in what was already a low-budget medium. And it showed. In one of the earliest examples of runaway production, Ward was forced to send the animation out of the country. But what was happening with the art off the screen revealed a fascinating dichotomy of the brilliant draftsmanship on the drawing boards and the crude but effective work that was aired. This behind-the-scenes artwork was never meant to be seen by the general public but was merely a means to an end. Now, for the first time anywhere, we are provided an in-depth look at the comic artistry of a talented group of designers, storytellers and directors who created such fondly remembered shows as Rocky and His Friends, Fractured Fairy Tales, Peabody's Improbable History, Dudley Do-right, George of the Jungle and Super Chicken.

"A brilliant, witty, and altogether satisfying book." — New York Times Book Review The classic work on the development of human language by the world’s leading expert on language and the mind In The Language Instinct, the world's expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution. The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistics Society of America. This edition includes an update on advances in the science of language since The Language Instinct was first published.

Includes summaries of thousands of Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and New Year's themed episodes of TV series, TV specials and made-for-TV movies. Information generally includes year of copyright, director, executive producer, and/or producer credit (if applicable), program summary or synopsis, and special guests.

What do Franklin Roosevelt, Dr. Seuss, the U.S. Navy, and Mr. Magoo have in common? They are all part of the surprising story of the pioneering cartoon studio UPA (United Productions of America). Throughout the 1950s, a group of artists ran a business that broke all the rules, pushing animated films beyond the fluffy fantasy of the Walt Disney Studio and the crash-bang anarchy of Warner Bros. Instead, UPA’s films were innovative and graphically bold—the cartoon equivalent to modern art. When Magoo Flew is the first book-length study to chronicle the complete story of this unique American enterprise. The book features cameo appearances by Aldous Huxley, James Thurber, Orson Welles, Judy Garland, Robert Goulet, Jim Backus, Eddie Albert, and Woody Allen, as well as a select filmography of the best of UPA. Ebook Edition Note: The ebook has three images redacted: figures 1, 2, and 51.

Unabridged collection of four classic Dickens novels: Great Expectations; Hard Times; A Christmas Carol; A Tale of Two Cities.