mik100 and I were talking about our childhood reading material (and how apparently I missed out on most of it) - The Egypt Game, Gordon Korman books, and the indescribable pain of Sweet Valley Twins and Babysitters Club - and I was reminded of one of my favourites, Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. Then I was reminded of the awful, awful movie, in which they changed Mrs. Frisby's name for no good reason, made Nicodemus all scary and warty, turned Jenner into a rampaging sociopath, dropped in a completely inexplicable magic amulet, and subtracted all the awesome, complicated, and well-developed parts about a sophisticated rat society in favour of scary, madly-gesticulating politicians, and gigantic monster rats, changing a complicated, interesting story about persecution, the hazy nature of morality and science and the consequences of human progress into a shallow, goofy, ninety-minute debacle about a plucky young mouse dropped into a creepy murder mystery... having some decent animation, and some good voice-acting, and some awesome scene-setting, but ruined by the fact that the story made no godsdamned sense...

...*breathes* Ahem.

There was a sequel, Racso and the Rats of NIMH, which was all right, and another, which I haven't read, because it has humans in it as characters, which considering the nature of the universe in question, makes me nervous (although now I will probably still buy it).

So I went to indigo.chapters.ca to look it up... and found... this.

...why? Why... WHY do they do these things?

'Scuse me. I have to go back to reading journals now to numb my brain in self-defence.