I dunno if anybody else ever actually read this one (as opposed to simply watching Chuck Jones' movie). I didn't discover it until the 25th-anniversary edition came out a couple years ago - but it's since become my very own personal Monty Python sketch, i.e. I go around babbling randomly about the Whether Man, Officer Shrift (he's very short, and never pays attention) and Faintly Macabre the Not-So-Wicked Which until people start looking at me funny.
The nicest discovery was that some of Juster's best stuff got left out of the movie...
Like the sequence where Milo and Tock buy letters to eat. Of course an 'I' would be 'icy and refreshing', especially after a 'crisp, crunchy 'C''.
And when they come face-to-face with the .4 of a child - you know, 2.4 kids in every family?
And the encounter with another kid, this one from a family in which everyone starts at the top (their adult height) and grows down until their feet hit the ground. So naturally, their points of view never change...
Heck, yeah! I read it zillions of years ago, and then again just a few months ago!
Isn't Alec the .64 of a child?
Nope...Alec Bings is the kid who grows down.
The .58 of a kid is never given a name (I expect it's something like 'Dav' or 'Pet' or 'Step'.)
Another wonderful - and strangely apt to this morning at NitCentral - concept: The 'Everpresent Wordsnatcher', from a far-away place called Context, who grabs hold of your sentence fragments and misinterprets them:
"Well, I thought that by-" Milo tried again desperately.
"That's a different story," interjected the bird a bit more amiably. "If you want to buy, I'm sure I can arrange to sell, but with what you're doing you'll probably end up in a cell anyway..."
This was a good book. I remember it from being a kid. But I didn't know it was a movie. Live action or Cartoon? If it was live action I'm not sure how they could have done some of the things very easy like the aformentioned .58 kid or the family that grows down.
It was actually part live-action (the scenes with Milo in the real world) and part cartoon (the Tollbooth world). Same general idea as The Wizard of Oz's switch from B&W to colour.
Chuck Jones directed, but it's not one of his more memorable efforts. The scenes you mentioned, Lolar, are missing, along with a whole lot more of Juster's clever wordplay. (The exception is a really nifty visualization of the Lethargarians and their world, the Doldrums.)
What's left is a sort of Schoolhouse Rock-ish 'Be everything you can be' theme, accented by some really dreadful kiddy-movie songs.
I actually missed reading this one! (Did I mention I live in a cave?) Anyway, I've got some catching up to do in a lot of different areas. Tht next time I actually have enough time to read a book, I'll make a point to read it (thanks to the snippets you've all mentioned on this board...sound intriguing and fun!).
I'll avoid the movie!
This was absolutely my favorite book ever when I was younger. It's still way up there; I love puns and extended wordplay. My personal favorite is the bit about how one reaches the Island of Conclusions by jumping over the Sea of Knowledge. One can't return without swimming through it, though as Canby pointed out, some people can swim in the Sea of Knowledge all day and never get wet.
I must have been the only person at school who read this book. It was very clever, and I still have a copy of the book somewhere at home, though the British version, with some changes to the text, made less sense than the original American version I got from the school library, and thus some parts weren't quite as effective - particularly the scene with the Everpresent Wordsnatcher. However, I have to say that the movie didn't exactly destroy my memories of the book, it just trod on it somewhat and messed its face up a bit.