I managed to get my copy of the Wendy’s Kids’ Meal book My Favorite Colors a couple days earlier than expected. (In my experience, you don’t even have to walk into the Wendy’s to find when they have the new toys in stock; the ad sheet for the toys their currently offering is on or beside the entrance. So if you go there and see “Minute to Win It” toys on the sign, they’ll have My Favorite Colors in stock… although they first tried to pass me off an earlier volume, but they found the current one easily enough.)

It is not, as I previously speculated, a reprint or reworking of the Little Simon book Colors… and had I bothered to dig out that volume before voicing that speculation, I would have known better. That was a Baby Snoopy book, and the Baby Snoopy licensing has fallen out of favor. No, this is a simple cataloguing of Snoopy’s favorite colors, each with a picture of an item in that color and the name of the color written out. His favorite colors are red, white, yellow, orange, blue, pink, and (SPOILER ALERT) purple. Then the final spread recaps those colors, omitting white. Despite the use of green on the cover, it is copiously absent on the inside (well, it appears on the stem of the pumpkin that Snoopy is peering out from on the “orange” page, but it is never listed as a favorite, and is removed from his palette when the cover graphic is reused inside.) Perhaps that was a considered effect of the dog’s red-green color blindness.

The interior pages are all numbered, which is handy if one wishes to make one’s own notes and refer back to pages. The book does lack any table of contents or index which directly exploits these page number. The page numbering counts on the inside front cover and thus the right-hand pages have the even numbers, which I suspect will set off “something is wrong” alarms in the mind of most book designers; it certainly set off mine.

I am glad to have this book and am hoping it will come in use; I’ve got a 21 month old son who seems to know the names of many colors, but is having trouble associating them with the appropriate color (at first guess, everything’s “yellow”.) We shall see.

(Before anyone asks how Snoopy painted the word “COLORS” on the cover when his palette lacks the orange of the second O, presumably he blended the red and the yellow paints.)

Share the news!