OO! OO! Maybe Brit dopers can help. Here’s what I remember.
Movie from the 60’s, I think. Youthful actors with British accents. Motorbike gang. Their leader dies in a crash. Somehow the other kids think they can join him by crashing and dying too. One by one they do stuff like ride their motorbikes into the fronts of buses.
Scared the everloving shiite out of me. I’ve always wanted to know what movie this was. Thanks in advance.
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU!! The second I saw the author’s name, I knew that was it. As I was typing my vague description, I kept thinking, “Why do I keep thinking about ‘coppertone’ having something to do with this?”
That’s one of those books that just stuck with me, and played a part in shaping my identity and character. I’m very grateful that I can now start searching for it - I’d really like my daughter to read it.
Morgainelf, if you can remember anything more about that book about the dog and the flood, please do tell. My mom things the dog’s name and possibly the title was Wiggly, Wiggy, or Waggy or something starting with a “W”. My grandmother read it to me several times a day (whenever I asked) for weeks on end and eventually I was able to read the book by sheer force of word shape recognition (not really reading). I think this more than anything else got me started on my love for books. My gma is in a bad way now with Alzheimer’s and does not have long to live. I would dearly love to read this particular book back to her one more time to show my appreciation for what she did those many years ago. I hope that doesn’t sound too sappy.
King of Spain, that reminds me of the Mrs. Coverlet stories but I don’t think that’s right.
haardvark, I guess you mean Mrs. Zimmerman, of the purple, well, everything, and chocolate chip cookies.
You may like this spotlight review, of an old favourite, (about 1/3 down the page, by John Fracisco.)
[SUB][SUB]“No fighting, no biting.”[/SUB][/SUB]
This is a great thread. Sorry I can’t help with any so far. I have a couple that I’ve been thinking about posting for some time.
A short story I read in 5th or 6th grade. It’s about two boys, one white and the other black. They meet over the summer, and hang out together all summer long. I remember a description of them laying in the grass, looking up at clouds. One boy says one of the clouds looks like a old sailing ship, then they make up a story about the ship and so forth. School starts, and they stick together for a while, but soon they get caught up in different groups–the white kid with other white kids, the black kid with other black kids. Then they don’t hang out together anymore. For a while they still say hi when they pass each other by, but then that stops. At the end of the story, they bump into each other in a store, and, even though no one else is around, they each go their own way without even saying hello.
this one’s even more sketchy. It’s something I saw on TV a long, long time ago. A kid dies and goes to heaven. At first he’s confused and sad, as he doesn’t know anyone there. Then he runs into his grandpa (or some elder type person) who befriends him and introduces him to other people up there. He even finds his dog for him, who died a while ago. Then the kid is happy. But one thing bothers him: His white robe has no pockets. He keeps asking and asking if he can get a robe with pockets, and finally he does. He has to go somewhere else in heaven to get the robe. When he gets back, excited to show everyone his new robe, all the people he’d been hanging out with are nowhere to be found. Only the dog remains. It ends with him in heaven, robe with pockets, alone except for his dog.
I’ve got two, one book and one song.
The book - it’s a children’s book set back in the 1800s, I think. The main character is a young mute boy. He’s traveling with his mother through the snow, and somehow they get separated. He gets taken in by a woman who owns an inn. She ends up being evil and makes him her slave - she beats him on the feet with switches and makes him do all the chores (since he’s mute, he can’t tell any of the boarders). And there’s something about how he thinks you can open a sleeping person’s eye and see what they’re dreaming. His mom comes in days/weeks later and the evil innkeeper locks the boy in a room, but at some point he escapes and ends up back with his mother.
The song - talk about vague! It’s a country/western song, fairly recent (last 5 years or so). It’s by a male singer whose lover has left him (like all country songs). The only lyrics I vaguely remember are “I called her Mom in San Antone just to see how she had been”…and the part I always liked was during the chorus, there’s a short melody/rift played on an electric banjo (I think) - it’s just three or four notes, but it was a really original sound (to me, anyway). And I can’t for the life of me remember the song…
xcheopis, you rock! It’s Baker Street. I just got a copy of it from, err… my “sources”, and that’s exactly the song I was vaguely describing. ::shudder:: Still gives me the inexplicable creeps, but at least it’s not bugging me anymore! (Now what bugs me is what kind of weird ESP powers you have to get that from my vague description…) And thanks for the assist, skeezix!
Sorry, nothing rings a bell so far. Great thread!
I have one from a book I read in elementary school. It’s about these two kids, a boy and a girl, who like to scuba dive. The boy goes diving into this cave, and discovers an underground cavern that contains a stone crypt. He goes and gets the girl, and they go back down an together push the lid off. Inside is a creature with webbed feet and hands. Somehow he comes back to life, and it turns out he is the last of his species. They have many adventures with him. Any clue?
This sounds like two books I read (and loved) as a pre-teen. One is “Behind the Attic Wall” by Sylvia Cassedy, although it was more heartwarming than creepy. The other is in the style of RL Stine (although I’m sure he’s written a book or two about a haunted dollhouse), I can’t remember the name either, but it did creep me out- in the book you remember, did a bookcase fall in the dollhouse then on a real man, and was the Blue Danube or Waltz somehow involved?
Dolores Claiborne, that sounds very similar to Stranger from the Depths. (I don’t know the author, though.)
It has a very similar story line, but with two boys instead of a boy and a girl. The paperback I read had a cover with the creature swimming straight out (towards the viewer, so the goggling eyes are prominant), and appearing to be in motion.
SolGrundy, as soon as I read “wailing saxophone solo” I heard it in my head. Then I started singing the damn thing and now my boyfriend hates me. 
Got another one: Again, a book for an older child or young adult. It’s about a girl who thinks she might be a witch. There’s a boy named Gil, and a girl named India in the book, but neither are the main character. I remember the girl’s friends trying to convince her she was not a witch - I believe they did a trial by water kind of thing to prove it to her.
Any takers here?
Ooh! This is an obscure children’s/teens novel that my mom’s employer lent her when I was six or so. It may have originally been written in a different language then translated.
I’m guessing it was written in the '20’s or sometime shortly after WWI. There may have been two novels, or 2-3 parts bound into one book. It’s about a farm family in possibly Checkloslovakia during the war. The father’s brother dies, so the family adopts their daughter, who’s name was Kata. She would climb in the rafters of the barn and eat the curing sausages that were meant for the father. She also had a palimino horse, and would race with the brother. The brother, and possibly the father were drafted and went to war. I remember the book ending saying that they (the family at home) didn’t know that he (either the father or brother) was sleeping under a layer of snow (he’d died in the war).
I read this when I was in middle school in 1983, so it has to be from that year or earlier.
The story is, four children: Nels, age 12, Stevie, 9 (his turning ten is a big plot device), Rory, 8, and Jenny, 6, are spending the summer at an inn owned by their aunt and uncle while their parents’ divorce is being finalized. The two younger children are happy as clams playing with the housekeeper’s daughter, but the older two are very disaffected. Nels is getting into that moody teenager thing, and Stevie is all needy.
Nels finds a closet in one of the rooms that opens onto a tower. A guy his own age, who is perfectly on his sci-fi geek wavelength, lives in there with his wonderful, perfect parents. The two of them hangs out in the tower every day. The aunt and uncle don’t seem to know anyone lives in the tower, and Nels doesn’t tell anyone he has this friend.
Meanwhile, Stevie is completely out of the loop, so he finally ends up going to the park nearby where some older teenagers hang around; they kind of humor him, which is better than nothing. The aunt is impatient with him, the uncle is a space case, Nels brushes him off and ultimately blows up at him. Stevie just gets no love! He’s looking forward keenly to his tenth birthday, and on the day, he gets caught sneaking a box of ice cream bars out of the inn’s store so he can host his own birthday party. Of course, this is the first time anyone remembers that he was having a birthday, and Nels is overwhelmed with guilt; how could he have forgotten his brother’s birthday, when he even remembers the birth day?
Before the impromptu birthday party, Nels goes to confront Alan and ask him once and for all: who is he, and how can his family live in this tower without anyone knowing about them? Alan won’t give him an answer, and when he asks Alan’s parents for an explanation, they fade away like apparitions. Then he can’t get out of the entrance room. Stevie finally hears him pounding on the door and lets him out. Turns out…there IS no tower. He must have hallucinated the entire thing.
Now, SOMEBODY has to remember this! I’m stuck on the title and the author, except that the author’s name was somewhere in the middle of the alphabet, maybe M-something or Mc-something, because I can picture the book being in that part of the stacks.
I haven’t recognized any of the above, but I’ve got a couple more vague book descriptions if anyone can identify them.
One is a young adult book about a small group of high school students (from a private school, maybe?) who go on a bicycle trip (no adults go with them) across some backcountry paths and roads. The trip takes a few days, they camp out in tents and I think in a barn once. The story is about their relationships with each other and some difficulties they encounter on the trip. At least some of them use nicknames from LOTR-- I remember specifically that one of them went by “Gollum.” That’s about all I remember, but I remember that I really like the book when I read it at about age 13 back in 1985.
The other is a children’s book about a town/village that is being terrorized by a coven of witches who live in a cave in a nearby mountain. They come out every night and do mean things to the villagers. The village men get together one night when it is raining (remember that witches melt in water) and they hike up to the witches’ cave. Each man carries on his head a clay pot containing a dry robe to replace the wet one he wears on the hike up there. At the cave entrance, they all change into their dry robes and enter the cave. They tell the witches that they are warlocks and that they aren’t wet because they can dance between the raindrops! They then each pair up with a witch to teach them the trick. They all dance their witches out into the rain where the witches get wet and melt. IIRC, the pictures in the book were simple black and white sketches/line drawings. The whole thing makes me think of Shel Silverstein, but I have no idea if it was him or someone else and the searches I’ve tried haven’t turned up anything. Anyway, I really loved the book as a kid (I am 29 now) so if anyone knows anything about it…
Thanks, and this is a cool thread
Tangent, the second one is “The Rabbi and the Thirty-Nine Witches”! I had a copy; don’t remember what happened to it! The deal was, in addition to all the other crappy things the witches did, like causing the cows to give sour milk, they also made it rain every time there was a full moon. Finally, an elderly woman said, “Rabbi, I would like to see the full moon just once before I die” so he devised that plan, and got thirty-eight of the village men to accompany him.
That country song that someone was stumped about, I think, is by Tim McGraw…I think it is entitled, " I see your face everywhere." That is the first song that came to mind.
Thanks, Rilchiam!
You’re welcome!
Okay. No answers here, only questions; one absurdly vague and one with some semblance of specificity.
The vaguer of the two is a movie I saw like ten minutes of a decade or so ago. It was about either a curse or some sort of demonic posession that was bestowed upon a teenageish guy by (of course) an old gypsyish woman in connection with dating. The curse/posession had a physical manifestation somewhere on the guy’s torso; it shows up in my memory as either an appendectomy scar type thing or something strange around the spine area. Any guesses?
The more specific I can actually narrow down to author. It’s a Terry Pratchett book I would have sworn several times was in the Discworld series. I started reading it in seventh grade (around eight years ago), couldn’t get into it, and stopped. It included a footnote about spelling and magic; specifically about a genie who gave someone the power to turn things into glod, and about how this dwarf named Glod kept getting whisked off to places unknown. I say I would have sworn it was in the Discworld series, but I’ve now read every listed Discworld book up to The Last Hero (which just came out and has not to my knowledge been published in the States yet), and have not yet found it. Again, any guesses?
That would be The Littlest Angel .
You ask me how I know? I had completely forgotten I had seen that movie until your post. The scenes you described dislodged from my head, and I remember it starred the kid who wasn’t Will Robinson but was in Sigmund and the Sea Monsters. So, a few searches on IMDB, and vwa lah!