Comments on: Names of the Wild Things – Alexander, Carol, Douglas, Ira, Judith

By: Chase

Chase — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 03:07:00 +0000

AND BTW;
I have the Moishe plush doll.
I got it in Books-a-million.
They are licensed.

By: Chase

Chase — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 03:06:10 +0000

I love the original names.
I loved the movie but,
I was so freaking confused!!!
And that was stupid they made new names.
Disappointing.

By: Barbara Ling, Virtual Coach

Barbara Ling, Virtual Coach — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 12:10:29 +0000

Heh, in my family, they’d be called

Fang
Moose Major
Moose Minor
All Powerful Moose Mother

We’re rather non-creative. :)

By: Nancy

Nancy — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 06:43:40 +0000

I checked Amazon--you're right, plush dolls with those names (e.g. Moishe, Bernard) are currently being sold. Huh. Maybe they aren't officially licensed toys?

By: Uly

Uly — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 06:29:22 +0000

I’m not sure Sendak’s right hand knows what his left hand is doing, then, because I’ve definitely seen in stores stuffed animals of the monsters with the Yiddish names attached on tags.

By: Nancy

Nancy — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 03:12:18 +0000

Hi Uly,

Sendak mentioned those names in the Newsweek interview. Here’s the full quote:

I never wanted them to have names. When it was an opera and the director and I were working on it during rehearsal, we had to have names to tell them when they were screwing up. They had Jewish names: Moishe, Schmuel. You have to remember this is an English opera house. We were all speaking Yiddish. It was very funny. But the names were dropped after the opera. They never had names until they became movie stars.

By: Uly

Uly — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 03:06:02 +0000

Actually, Wikipedia states that the Wild Things have had names for quite a long time:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where_the_Wild_Things_Are

The original concept for the book featured horses instead of monsters. According to Sendak, his publisher suggested the switch when she discovered that he could not draw horses, but thought that he “could at the very least draw ‘a thing’!”[2] He replaced the horses with caricatures of his aunts and uncles, whom he had studied critically in his youth as an escape from their weekly visits to his family’s Brooklyn home.[3] When working on the opera adaptation of the book with Oliver Knussen, Sendak gave the monsters the names of his relatives: Tzippy, Moishe, Bruno, Emile, and Bernard.[4]

The dolls of the book are sold with those same names.