Parachute Express Drops In With ‘Looney’s’ Tunes Kids Will Love

Audio

Doctor Looney’s Remedy. Parachute Express. Trio Lane Records. CD: $12.98; cassette: $9.98. (888) HI-5-IOUS. One of children’s music’s top groups offers a creative, engaging new collection of original play songs and songs that speak to a child’s heart. With their signature musical expertise and memorable harmonies, trio members Stephen Michael Schwartz, Janice Hubbard and Donny Becker serve up the wonderfully silly title song (“All you got to do is / Put in the goo / Stir up the brew / Make it boil and bubble. . . .”) and celebrate a child’s worth in their poetic anthem “We the Children.” “Halfway Through” offers jazzy encouragement to finish a task; then, with mariachi rhythms, the trio shows how something as small as “A Little Night Light” can be a gift of love.

Smithsonian Folkways Children’s Music Collection. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, CD: $9.99; cassette: $8.50. (800) 410-9815, (516) 484-1000; https://www.si.edu/folkways. Legendary folk artist Pete Seeger is in sterling company in this diverse, memorable collection of 26 children’s songs and poems by Woody Guthrie (“Riding in My Car,” “Why, Oh Why”), Leadbelly (“Ha-Ha This-a-way”), Langston Hughes (“Dreams” and “Youth”), children’s music pioneer Ella Jenkins and many more.

Video

Madeline and the New House. Golden Books Family Entertainment/Sony Wonder. 25 minutes. $9.98. With a new live-action feature film, innumerable audio, video and CD-ROM releases and merchandise tie-ins galore, Ludwig Bemelmans’ gentle storybook heroine is mighty big business these days. Still, the little French girl hasn’t lost her sweet charm, at least in this modest video tale--narrated with his usual class by Christopher Plummer--in which the cozy old vine-covered house has a date with the demolition squad.

Things look grim when falling plaster and leaks send the girls to a high-rise with cranky neighbors and rigid rules. Never fear. Madeline finds a happy solution.