Falkor Is SO Not a Dog!

Let's get this out of the way first: mostly everyone has seen the movie The NeverEnding Story, right?

The classic* 1984 fantasy film is probably best remembered for its kick-ass theme song** and the large white dog-dragon named Falkor.

If those things do not ring a bell, do yourself a favor and watch the movie.

Now!

Although I definitely loved the movie as a kid (and own it on DVD), the real significance that The NeverEnding Story: The Movie has for me is that it led me to The NeverEnding Story: The Book.

And The NeverEnding Story: The Book completely and irrevocably changed my life.


Picture it: It is Christmas, 1996.

I am thirteen and like anyone who has ever gone to middle school, I am experiencing some awkward and tough times.

I have recently experienced a burst of popularity after a shy and brainy childhood. (As an adult, I understand this popularity to be solely attributable to my breasts, but at the time I kind of just thought everyone liked me). I am just coming out of a four week relationship with a certified hottie, who has dumped me for being a prude after I refused to let him feel me up under my overalls in the middle of the cafeteria during lunch. I have a group of friends who I am not entirely sure I like, and who I am not entirely sure like me either. I have been devoting the last year of my life to thirteen-year-old-girl things like YM magazine, nail polish, and boys. I have mostly given up my childhood habit of reading.

Basically, I am a little bit lost - a little bit confused about who I am, who I ought to be, what I like, what I ought to like, who my friends are, and who my friends ought to be.

Enter The NeverEnding Story by Michael Ende.

I buy it at Barnes and Noble with a Christmas gift-certificate.

I choose it because I remember seeing the movie when I was little and I have vague but decidedly warm memories of it.

The paperback cover has an image from the movie (and a sticker that says, "NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE" about twelve years too late) and I think, "Why not?

And poof!

Life changed forever.

I read it in one extended sitting over a couple of days and I went totally bonkers for it.

It was such a beautiful story! It was about the magic of reading and the power of imagination. It was about the interconnectedness of people. It was about how our lives touch innumerable other lives and our stories weave with innumerable other stories and in that sense we are infinite and our stories truly are never ending. It was about a bunch of other things, too, and it made me feel hopeful and happy and inspired.

In the post-NeverEnding Story months, I started reading again like a mad-person. Every single book I read during that second half of 8th grade seemed truly amazing - even the several very shitty preteen romance novels about Puritans - and some of the books I read then are still among my favorites. I even reread The NeverEnding Story like three times within a few months of first reading it.

Then, that reading fever just never died. I remain a devoted book reader. I majored in English because all I ever wanted to do was read. I became a librarian because I want to help children and teens discover books that make them feel the way this book made me feel.

I mean, I even sniff books. I frequently thumb through the pages and breathe deep and...aaahhhhhh. To this day, I prefer the smell of books from Barnes and Noble to those from Borders, which is of course because that is where I bought The NeverEnding Story and so books from there smell like it.

It all comes back to The NeverEnding Story. My love of reading would have never sparked the way it did without that one book.

Without that spark, I may have swayed the other way when I was 13. Abandoned myself to the world of vapidity, stayed friends with people who I was never myself around and continued to date boys who thought it was okay to publicly fondle a girl in the middle of a lunch with friends.

But luckily, I found that spark. At 13, I was lost and in the absence of finding myself I lost myself in books. Which, it turned out, was how I found myself. So cheesy, so lame, but so true.

And now, because I am sure the saga of my thirteenth year has left those of you actually wanting to hear something about The NeverEnding Story feeling gypped, let me end with something about the book to movie translation that has left me disgruntled for thirteen years:

Leaving aside for a second that the world in peril contained within the pages is Fantastica not Fantasia (why lose the "C"?) and that Atreyu really ought to have green skin (true story!! literally green skin) and that in The NeverEnding Story II movie, the ever-dreamy Jonathan Brandis was woefully miscast as Bastian, who is by all accounts a chubby, charmless, lump of a boy, my big complaint is this:

Falkor is not a dog.

Technically he is not a dog in the movie, either, but boy does he look like one.


And boy, does everyone think he is one. I have had lots of passionate arguments with people in which I explain that Falkor is a LUCK DRAGON and in no way a dog or even part-dog. Arguers inevitably counter with, "Well, he looks like a dog," and I have to come back with, "Well, that movie is not THE ORIGINAL SOURCE MATERIAL!"

Then I seem all kinds of insane. Because really, besides me, no one in the universe cares about this at all.

So, you should read this book. I think that since you are probably not an insecure and recently dumped preteen, this book will likely not have the impact on you that it did on me. Still, it's great fantasy and so much more nuanced than the movies portray. Plus, the character names are delightful and Germanic and often missing what most Amerians would consider the proper number of vowels.

Plus...oh, I could go on forever...because this book...well, we just went over it: It. Changed. My. Life.



*P.S. Am I allowed to simply decide a movie is a classic? Like, I believe The NeverEnding Story is a classic and I referred to it as such in the opening of this post. But I also kind of think that Willow is a classic and that is probably wrong. Is it okay for me to declare that or does the application of the word classic require something like critical consensus? Is it like how only the French government gets to declare clothing as "haute couture" and any other application of the word is technically a misnomer? Really - I am asking because I do not know the rules. Somehow I suspect that my feeeeeling that a movie is a classic is not really an acceptable criterion.

Thoughts?

**P.P.S.Greatest music video OF ALL TIME?