The Little Prince

Last year, I spent six months of my life adapting Antoine De Saint-Exupery's "The Little Prince" into a 16 page comic. I dove into the project head first and never looked back. And since then I've seen references to it surface time and time again. I now own four different copies of the book (paperback, hardcover, paperback in French, and a pop-up book) and have been enjoying pick out references to it in other media.

After I finished the project, I took a trip out into the city with Suri. This was when Union Square's huge Virgin Megastore was closing, so everything was ridiculous levels of cheap. So, while looking around in the children's section, to my surprise and wonderment I found a box set of the entire 26-episode animated series from the 1980's.



I've had it for months now but just haven't gotten around to watching it. But tonight I decided to pop in the first disc and take a swing at it. The first few episodes were separate from the story in the book and was primarily Prince going around to various countries and saving lives or something. He went up in a hot air balloon, got trapped on a grounded ship, went looking for gold, and nursed an injured seagull back to health. All wonderful little stories with wonderful little morals for little 1980's children. And children today. I should raise some kids on this shit.

Then I hit episodes 5 and 6, and they were ones more closely derived from the book. Episode 5 focused on the Prince and the Pilot and was really adorable and was a nice adaptation from the book into the context of the series. The Pilot is also the narrator for the whole series, so we'd heard him talk before and he was incredibly, hilariously French (though it's pretty appropriate, given the book).

But episode six was focused on the Prince and the Rose. Aside from Swifty, who is some kind of space-bird, who kept telling Prince to go travel the galaxy, it actually stuck pretty closely to the story in the book. The whole thing was half an hour of deja-vu for me really, because it matched fairly closely (though was highly expanded upon) to what I'd done for my project. It was a little hard to watch sometimes! But in a good way!



I'm really eager to make my way through the next three discs. I don't get to see the Fox until late disc 3, but the 80's handled this series very beautifully and gracefully and I am so excited to watch the rest.