Geronimo Stilton - Moby Dick

The part of this adaptation that really bothers me is that there is another spin off series called the Kingdom of Fantasy, which are long, lavishly illustrated, with wandering adventure stories, and pages full of digression-padding like maps, lists, diagrams, etc that are unrelated to the actual story. Geronimo will say, breeze through the Kingdom of Crystal Witches or something for two pages, and then there's a double page-spread of the Crystal Witch Kingdom map, and then another two-page spread showing the taxonomy of two dozen Crystal Witches (Amethyst! Quartz!), and then a one-page recipe of nonsense Crystal Potions, etc. Anyway, this format is ideal for actually adapting Moby-Dick - half of M-D is digressionary in nature anyway. You could have all the travel maps, the taxonomy of whales, the diagrams of ships, anatomies, explanations of how sailing stuff works, etc. Such a missed opportunity, but of course I understand why that book is never getting published.

Noted on August 28, 2020

My son has always loved this series of Geronimo Stilton books - he devours the short chapter books, he LOVES the much-longer 'Fantasy' books, he listens to the audiobooks, he reads the spin off series. I kind of can't stand them.

They're all half-baked stories about a fraidy-cat mouse who has accidental adventures, and they are churned out by the boat-load by some anonymous studio of writers and illustrators. The originals are Italian (of all places!) BUT: look at this! here's a spin-off series where they just retell classic literature. And Moby Dick!

SO: it's more or less Moby Dick. They don't insert Geronimo as a character - a relief to me, and probably why this spin-off series isn't commercially successful. The story roughly matches, and although they build in the idea that EVERYBODY is hunting M-D from the beginning, which is a weird choice but I get it. It's pretty cagey about the actual whale-killing part! The harpooners throw harpoons but apparently they also ... net the whales? And catch them? They don't really go into what happens after that.

Noted on August 28, 2020