AND IT WAS STILL HOT: Our earlier discussion of the movie version of Where the Wild Things Are raises the question of what children's books ought to be made into a movie but haven't been (or alternately, have been done so badly they need to be redeemed). The one that comes most obviously to mind is Roald Dahl's Danny, Champion of the World, far-and-away my favorite of Dahl's works. It's such a great father-and-son caper-movie with a plot against irredeemable bad guy and with a perfect children's movie climax, I'm surprised it has not been done on the big screen.
It was done as a made-for-TV with Jeremy Irons in the UK in 1989, but does not apparently exist as US-coded DVD.
The other that comes to mind is Zilpha Keatly Snyder's Below the Root -- a terrific coming-of-age fantasy -- although the atmospherics of the book are so unavoidably elvish that the one guy I think I could handle it, Peter Jackson, would have to tack so hard away from his LOTR stuff that it might not work.
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