Storytime

Plot synopsis:
The film begins with an animated version of director Terry Gilliam reading from a children's storybook. The story, "Don the Cockroach", opens with a palace high atop a mountain. Inside the wall of one of its rooms lives a cheerful cockroach named Don, who is shown frolicking and generally enjoying his life as a cockroach. One day, as Don scurries across a kitchen floor, he is suddenly crushed by a foot. The narrator Gilliam remarks that this does not matter, as cockroaches are not very interesting. The story then shifts to the man who crushed Don, then to his brother, then to the brother's friend, then to the friend's employer, and so forth. Eventually the chain of interconnected people reaches a cleaning lady who is involved in a search-and-destroy mission against a colony of cockroaches, one of whom is named Don. The film then loops back to Don, replaying some of the earlier events until a gruff voice interrupts the narrator with "You already said that!" and the sound of a punch. An intertitle appears, announcing that the animator responsible for the previous cartoon has been sacked, and promising that the next one will be better.
The next segment, entitled "The Albert Einstein Story", revolves around an English man who happens to share the name of the famous physicist, and is "quite interesting in his own right". The new narrator says that Einstein is very good with his hands, and that his hands are very good to him. However, they once stayed out late at night, carousing, misbehaving, and even cheating on their owner by shaking other hands. One of the hands was once seen out with a foot, causing a scandal in the upper-class society of hands, who were prejudiced against feet. The film then cuts to a musical extravaganza starring "Fred & Frank Feet & Their Dancing Body". The curtains draw to a close with the sound of a jeering audience, and the words "The End – Yours truly, Terry Gilliam" appear.
Next the film cuts to a segment entitled "The Christmas Card", set on Christmas Day in 1968 London. A lonely old man receives a Christmas card in the post. A series of Christmas cards are then shown coming to life in bizarre ways, connected only by the Three Wise Men, who follow the Star of Bethlehem from one card to another. Suddenly the postman returns and takes the card back, apologising for delivering it to the wrong address.

Tags: storytelling

Review:
Am I the only one who remembers this show?. So it would seem. It's got no reviews. It hasn't even gotten 5 votes yet for an average score on IMDb.But I have fond, vague memories of watching this on PBS when I was little. As I recall, the show was centered around a childish puppet named Kino who was cared for by his human friend, the gently maternal Lucy. In every episode, people would come and read storybooks to Kino and listening children. These stories were presented in a fashion similar to Reading Rainbow, but there were several on an episode, as opposed to just one.Storytime, along with Reading Rainbow and Wishbone, had a profound influence on my imagination and love for reading. The stories in this show and their illustrations stirred my mind, sparked in me a sense of wonder. The image of a haggard young Native American woman, shrouded in rags with dark hair unfurled around her shadowed face as she marches to marry the "Invisible Being", has never left me. Neither has the forlorn figure of shunned Baba Yaga, conjured up by color and lines of ink and simple words in a tale whose title I cannot clearly remember I haven't seen this little show since the earliest years of my childhood, and have no idea what I would make of it if able to see it again. But I know it fascinated and enthralled me back then, and played its part in shaping me. It seems a shame it appears to have been ignored for these long years.