Read-Along Adventures Revisited

I have been recently thinking about the fun Read-Along Adventure books I had as a kid. You remember the ones...they came with a record or (in the mid to late 80s) a cassette and basically told you the story as you read through the book. Each one had a sound that told you when it was time to turn the page. Some may argue today that these story books were the product of lazy parents. I disagree. Disneyland Records pretty much invented these at a time when the only choice to enjoy animated movies was at a theater. Kids in the late 50s through about the mid 80s had to use their imaginations to relive the tales. If you were lucky, you had a Viewmaster, a Fisher Price Movie Viewer (pic above,) or Read-Along Books as your portable DVD player of the time. It really wasn't until the popularity of VHS players that kids could enjoy movies at their disposal.
Read-Along Adventures took reading books to the next level. Sure, there were books available based on our favorites, but adding that audio track with music, sound effects, and narration made all the difference to me as a kid. Most were based on the actual story from the movies we loved like Back To The Future, Gremlins, E.T., and pretty much all the Disney classics. Some even used new stories from the worlds of Masters of the Universe, Scooby-Doo, G.I. Joe and Transformers that you couldn't find on TV or in a theater. For example, Buena Vista Records released some original books from the Star Wars expanded universe in 1983. Books like Planet of the Hoojibs (shown below) took characters like Chewbacca and Princess Leia on a new adventure.
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Sceenshot from ReadAlongAdventures.Com flash file |
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