Arthur The Aardvark Moving Into New Pbs Series
The story of how Arthur the aardvark came to be is as easy as A-B-C.
One night a long time ago, Marc Brown’s son asked for a bedtime story about a weird animal. Brown started running through the alphabet. He never made it to the letter “B.” “He’s the first animal I thought of,” Brown says.
Since then, Brown has worked very hard to keep Arthur simple as author and character have moved from bedside to children’s books and, starting Monday, to an animated public television series.
For an animal that was supposed to be weird, Arthur has turned out to be a pretty down-to-earth fellow.
A third-grader who wears glasses and looks very little like an aardvark, Arthur worries about things adults may not consider traumatic, like being the last in his class to lose a tooth or trying to write a story people like.
“We forget what it’s like to be in a child’s shoes,” Brown said in a recent interview. “It’s also about believing that what happens in your own life is worth sharing with others.”
Like his character, Brown took some zigs and zags before settling on the homespun plots and cheerful watercolors of the Arthur books.
After attending the Cleveland Art Institute, he dreamed of being a painter. He turned to illustrating textbooks after losing his job as a professor at a Boston art college.
Nobody wanted to publish his first manuscript, which was based on a folk tale and used sophisticated painting techniques. He now says the book was too “painterly” - beautiful to look at but uninspiring to children.
Even after he sold his first Arthur book in 1976, it took years for Brown to dedicate himself full time to writing.
The PBS series, produced by WGBH-Boston and CINAR Films of Montreal, may launch Arthur into celebrity orbit, but he is already a high-flying institution among elementary school-age readers. Brown receives 100,000 letters a year from Arthur fans. His publisher, Little, Brown & Co., gets even more.
xxxx Program time “Arthur” premieres Monday and will air weekdays at 2:30 p.m. on Spokane’s KSPS-Channel 7.