Children's Movies from Books - Random Trivia Answers

• A1) Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. The Alice series, which began with The Agony of Alice in 1985, follows Alice from sixth grade through senior year in high school, although three prequels that aren't in the movie each cover a lower grade.
• A2) C.S. Lewis. Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia, published in 1951, is the second book in the Chronicles of Narnia series.
• A3) Darren Shan. The Vampire's Assistant, published in 2000, is the second book in the Vampire Blood trilogy.
• A4) Jeanne Duprau. The City of Ember was published in 2003 but took three years to win the Mark Twain Award from Missouri's fourth through sixth grade readers.
• A5) Judi Barrett. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, published in 1978, was illustrated by Judi's husband Ron. Given the success of the movie, I'd expect a sequel based on the 2000 follow-up Pickles to Pittsburgh sooner than three decades from now.
• A6) Neil Gaiman. Coraline, published in 2002, won Hugo and Nebula Awards for Best Novella and a Bram Stoker Award for Best Work for Young Readers.
• A7) Philip Pullman. The Golden Compass, published in 1995 and the winner of the U.K.'s Carnegie Medal in Literature the following year, originally referenced a circle-drawing compass but now refers to Lyra's alethiometer, which is a sort of truth-detecting compass.
• A8) Cornelia Funke. Inkheart, published in 2003, was followed by Inkspell in 2005 and Inkdeath in 2007.
• A9) Wendy Orr. Orr first sketched out some of the ideas that became Nim's Island in a story called "Spring Island" when she was only nine years old. Kerry Millard provided the illustrations for the 1999 book.
• A10) Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black. The Spiderwick series began with The Field Guide in 2003 and reached five books in less than a year and a half.
• A11) Kate Dicamillo. The Tale of Despereaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup, and a Spool of Thread was published in 2003 and won that year's Newbery Medal.
• A12) Stephenie Meyer. The Twilight series began with the novel of the same name in 2005 and was followed by New Moon, Eclipse, and Breaking Dawn in one-year intervals.

Children's Movies from Books - Random Trivia Questions

As great as a lot of children's movies are, the books they come from are usually even better. Reading allows you to go at your own pace. Reading stimulates your imagination in ways a movie can't. Reading gives you time to look up words you don't know. Reading simply makes you think more.

In the last couple of years, quite a few excellent children's books have been made into movies, like J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Dr. Seuss's Horton Hears a Who!, and Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. How many authors can you identify for the following dozen recent movies?

Children's Movies from Books Questions

• Q1) Alice Upside Down
• Q2) The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
• Q3) Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant
• Q4) City of Ember
• Q5) Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
• Q6) Coraline
• Q7) Golden Compass
• Q8) Inkheart
• Q9) Nim's Island
• Q10) The Spiderwick Chronicles (2 authors; take 1 point for each)
• Q11) Tale of Despereaux
• Q12) Twilight

Dr. Seuss - Random Trivia Answers

• A1) Sam. You can also take credit for Sam-I-Am, although the rhyme isn't really part of his name.
  
• A2) Sally. The little boy narrator identifies his sister but never himself.
  
• A3) Stars (on their bellies). The Star-Belly Sneetches air of superiority over the Plain-Belly Sneetches gives Slyvester McMonkey McBean an excellent entrepreneurial opportunity.
  
• A4) Zax. A highway is eventually constructed around the stubborn locals of the prairie of Prax.
  
• A5) They're monochromatic. The first drawings are black and resemble shadows, but others are gray, white, orange, yellow, green, blue, and brown.
  
• A6) 23. In one of his numerous Wizard of Oz sequels, L. Frank Baum's hen Billina dubbed all her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren Dorothy and Daniel (around 400 of them).
  
• A7) Pants. The pale green pants wander around although nobody is wearing them.
  
• A8) Mr. Brown. The brown-hatted, blue-tied man can also imitate a bee, rooster, or owl, a train, a clock, or thunder, and a cork, a shoe, or a horn.
  
• A9) Mount Crumpet. The narrow, nearly two-mile-high peak overlooks Whoville from the north.
  
• A10) Lorax. He succeeds in convincing the capitalist of the long-term folly of his ways, saving the last Truffula tree seed.
  
• A11) Horton. The elephant, who debuted in Horton Hatches the Egg in 1940, rescued tiny Who-ville fourteen years later in Horton Hears a Who!
  
• A12) Theodore LeSieg. This moniker combines his given first name with the reverse of his real last name. For example, In a People House identifiably rhymes like a usual Seuss work, but was illustrated by Roy McKie, and The Tooth Book was drawn by Joe Mathieu. Also note that Dr. Seuss pronounced his last name to rhyme with "voice" not "loose".

Dr. Seuss - Random Trivia Questions

Is there a doctor in the house? Dr. Seuss definitely deserves a doctorate in early reading, and his books are scattered all over our house. How's your Seuss sense?

Dr. Seuss Questions

• Q1) Who convinces Dr. Seuss's protagonist to eat Green Eggs and Ham?
  
• Q2) What little girl is befuddled and bemused by The Cat in the Hat?
  
• Q3) What body marking gives grief to The Sneetches?
  
• Q4) What North-Going and South-Going characters refuse to step to the side for each other?
  
• Q5) How many sons does Mrs. McCave have in Too Many Daves?
  
• Q6) What is special about the drawings in The Shape of Me and Other Stuff?
  
• Q7) What Was I Scared Of? in the Seuss story?
  
• Q8) According to the Dr. Seuss book, who can moo?
  
• Q9) On what mountain peak does The Grinch Who Stole Christmas live?
  
• Q10) What environmentally-conscious Suess character defends the trees against the greedy Once-ler?
  
• Q11) What character repeatedly declares, "a person's a person, no matter how small"?
  
• Q12) Under what name is Dr. Seuss credited for books that he wrote but did not illustrate?

Children's Picture Books - Random Trivia Answers

• A1) Pickle. The total carnage consists of several fruits (apple, pear, plum, strawberry, orange, and watermelon), a few desserts (chocolate cake, ice cream cone, lollipop, cherry pie, and cupcake), and assorted other items (Swiss cheese, salami, and sausage).
• A2) Aphids. The grouchy ladybug refuses to share, is too scared to fight, and has an amazing 12-hour adventure.
• A3) Purple. A red bird, yellow duck, blue horse, green frog, white dog, black sheep, and a goldfish also visit the classroom. The sequel Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear? takes place at the zoo.
• A4) Mouse. The little gray rodent attempts to befriend a horse, an alligator, a lion, a hippo, a seal, a monkey, a peacock, a fox, a kangaroo, and a snake before finding another mouse to play with.
• A5) He took off his shell. Unfortunately, his desire for speed leaves him unprotected from predators, the sun, the rain, and the cold. Richard Buckley cowrote the story.
• A6) Turkey. The fowl fouls up by standing in a hat, wearing a shirt as pants, putting pants on upside down, donning a jacket backwards, using socks as gloves, and placing shoes on his head.
• A7) Rabbit. His bed is in a huge room where his mom sits knitting in a rocking chair, a fire is burning in the fireplace, and a bowl of mush is still out on the table.
• A8) Hopping. The female kangaroo tried to climb with the koalas, swim with the seals, and waltz with the wallabies.
• A9) Olive. The dog was convinced by a mondegreen from the song "Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer", mishearing "all of the other reindeer" as "Olive, the other reindeer".
• A10) Mice. Lucy Cousins created Maisy (Maisy's ABC in 1994), and Leo Lionni introduced Frederick in 1967.
• A11) Wolf. Maurice Sendak's imaginative boy is banished to his bedroom for chasing his pet dog with a fork.
• A12) Boston. The duck family lives in a pond in the Boston Public Garden. Bronze statues of the mother and her eight ducklings were installed in the northeast corner of the real garden in 1987, and the book is now the official children's book of Massachusetts.

Children's Picture Books - Random Trivia Questions

In 1999, then-Texas governor George Bush answered a questionnaire that asked for his favorite book when he was a child with The Very Hungry Caterpillar. An excellent book indeed, except that it was published in 1969 when the younger Bush was studying hard at Yale University. I know every college has its gut courses like "Rocks for Jocks", so he must have been enrolled in "Literature 001 - The Early Years"*.

The following questions are about illustrated children's books. Some may have been read to you as a child, and some you may have read to your own children.

Children's Picture Books Questions

• Q1) What is the only vegetable that The Very Hungry Caterpillar eats besides the leaf?
• Q2) In Eric Carle's The Grouchy Ladybug, what are the friendly and grouchy main characters eating?
• Q3) What color is the cat in Carle's Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?
• Q4) What lonely animal asks, "Do You Want to Be My Friend?" in Carle's book?
• Q5) What did Carle's The Foolish Tortoise do that was so unwise?
• Q6) In Sandra Boynton's Blue Hat, Green Hat what animal can't wear his clothes properly?
• Q7) In Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd's Goodnight Moon, what animal is going to sleep?
• Q8) What was John Lithgow's Marsupial Sue trying to avoid doing?
• Q9) According to J. Otto Seibold and Vivian Walsh, what dog wanted to join Santa's reindeer?
• Q10) What type of animal are Maisy and Frederick, who were separately featured on Favorite Children's Book Animals U.S. postage stamps in 2006?
• Q11) What does Max dress up as in Where the Wild Things Are?
• Q12) In what city is Robert McCloskey's Make Way for Ducklings set?

* Bush's aides claimed that he misunderstood the question, excusing his memory and blaming his reading comprehension skills instead.