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Pop&Circumstance Blog: ‘Baby-Sitters’ back in business in April

By Blair Thill, blairthill, on January 4, 2010 12:48 AM

By Blair Thil, Gavel Blogger -

Happy days are here again. Today’s female youth still has a chance – a chance to recapture the innocence that my generation experienced in our childhood. First Justin Timberlake brought sexy back, and now Scholastic is bringing wholesome back. The children’s book publisher has announced plans to bring back the once popular Baby-Sitters Club book series. What a way to ring in 2010! According to Vulture, the first two out of print BSC books, Kristy’s Great Idea and Claudia and the Phantom Phone Calls, are going to be re-released in April. The reboots will include all of the pure preteen plots it once did, only this time in the 21st century, meaning no cassette tapes or leg warmers. Personally, I enjoy the 80′s nostalgia, but I understand Scholastic’s artistic choice for the tweens of today.

In addition to the retooled novellas, original BSC author Ann M. Martin has cooked up a brand spanking new prequel titled The Baby-Sitters Club: The Summer Before. Basically, Martin has graced us with an origins story. I mean, Christopher Nolan did it with Batman. The X-Men franchise has a whole slew of origins movies lined up after the success of X-Men Origins: Wolverine. So why shouldn’t Ann M. Martin capitalize on the same school of thought and revamp her monumental book series.

Monumental might seem like an extreme word. By today’s standards, the BSC series wasn’t exactly groundbreaking. It only spawned one major motion picture. I saw it in the theater, and based my entire eighth birthday party around it, but I was probably an anomaly. None of the books had midnight release parties, insane Amazon pre-orders, or claims that they “made reading fun/cool/important” again. Martin’s creation didn’t do any of these things, but the series did run from 1986 to 2000 and included 213 books. That’s no small accomplishment. In today’s day and age of film adaptation after TV adaptation, a reboot could possibly infuse new breath into the lives of the responsible seventh graders who just want to make a few extra bucks.

Each girl had her own, distinct personality, and I remember them all to this day. Kristy was the president of the club and certainly acted like it. She was bossy and controlling, but what could you really expect from a girl struggling with her parents’ divorce. Claudia was the vice president, but only because her room was the headquarters of their operation, because everyone knows Claudia is a scatter brain. Stacey (my personal favorite), was the treasurer, though that just seems like a horrible idea given her shopping compulsion. Dawn and Mary Anne were step-sisters, and Mary Anne was the only one in the bunch with a boyfriend, the so-good-looking-in-my-head Logan. Round out the group with young-ins Mallory and Jesse and you have the greatest rag-tag crew of tween girls ever put on paper.

The Baby-Sitters Club is a representation of the types of books that girls my age read as children. Before J.K. Rowling ever wrote Harry Potter on a napkin, the books we read were about real kids. No super powers, no mythical creatures, just kids, tweens, and teens doing kid/tween/teen things. Not that there’s anything wrong with wizards and vampires – my world would certainly be dull without them. But the abundance of the supernatural in young adult literature is getting to be a little ridiculous. What happened to the blonde twins that attended Sweet Valley High? What happened to the Margarets of the world who question God’s whereabouts? What about the family of orphans who lived in a boxcar? I can only hope that now that the baby-sitters are back, the rest can’t be far behind.

*Photo courtesy of leeeloou007 on photobucket.com