C is for Children

There have been many hundreds of books published on Doctor Who, and many approaches taken over the years ... but this year has seen the first pre-school Doctor Who titles made available ... one really does wonder who the target audience for this stuff is!  Personally, I think it's the adults who love the retro-kids concepts being played with!

The first book is T is for TARDIS, a pretty traditional picture book where we go through the alphabet and picture items from Doctor Who which start with that letter ... thus we kick off with A IS FOR ANGEL ... but we also have Amy pictured eating an apple, and there's also an adipose there for good luck ... I IS FOR IMPOSSIBLE and lo, we have Clara, along with an Ice Warrior ... and so on.

The imagery is basic but cute, and of course they have problems with Y where it is apparently for ALLONS-Y!!  (However there are Yeti pictured ... what about Yartek as well?) And X is for EXTERMINATE but at least we have a picture of an X-Ray as a poor chap is blasted ... but no Xeraphin?

It's a tricky one as is it for kids? In which case it doesn't really matter ... or is it for adults, in which case including other monsters would be fun ... so under W (where we have simply WARRIOR and a picture of the War Doctor, we could have had War Machine, Warrien, Weed Creature, White Robot, Wirrn, Wolf Weeds and Wood Beast ... and that's just from the Classic series ...

At £9.99 for a slim hardback, this is perhaps a step too far ...

Of far more interest are a new series of Mr Men mash-up books with Doctor Who which celebrate each Doctor, depicted in classic Mr Men style ...  There are four titles in the initial release: Dr Twelfth, Dr. Eleventh, Dr. Fourth and Dr. First and each tells a story about that Doctor, featuring some classic monsters into the bargain.

In Dr. First, the Doctor comes up against the Cybermen while being grumpy ... the Fourth Doctor escapes from a Dalek via some coincidental techniques ... the Eleventh Doctor teams up with River Song and narrowly escapes from Zygons, Silurians, Angels, snakes and a giant spider to rescue his fez ... while the Twelfth Doctor tries to stop Missy as she steals things all over the place.

The books are in the same small format as all the other Mr Men titles, and are actually really cute and diverting ...  Just the thing for bedtime stories ... And at £4.99 each are are a much cheaper proposition than the picture book ...