Fredericka's Flicka Books

In September, 2003, while watching the seventh season of the hit reality show, Survivor, on CBS, one team member triggered in me a germ of an idea for a story. Dressed in a Boy Scout's uniform with a tag line, "that's how it's done in the Boy Scouts," Lillian Morris (ironically who was never a scout at all) helped her tribe make fire. She, (Lucy, in the book) and others fired up Fredicka's Flicka Books.

I look forward to one day sharing Fredericka with my two young grandsons, Oliver and Mack Cohen. Hopefully, they will discover my blog and learn about the history of Sommers Plastics and me, their Zeyde. I also credit my muse and girlfriend at the time, Linda (Miss Frasier) who married this writer two years later in 2005. Linda was a math teacher in middle schools in some of the worst neighborhoods in NYC. Not quite like Fredericka's school in Eastwood Forest. Thanks, Linda. I love you even more than Fredericka. Oh, yes, and thanks to my Pomeranian, Foxy, for being the model of another fictional character, Dogcat.

I began writing FFB as a "short" story about an empowered young girl living in an unusual setting- a tree house high in the forest where her dad could perform his job as a fire watcher. In retrospect it seems a combination of children's classics like Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland. My story line and the number of characters with illustrations grew and grew over the course of many months but stopped short of achieving full fruition.

Immediately, I thought my idea was a true original. To the best of my knowledge no one had ever done this in the world of book publishing. I planned on combining the bound, printed pages of a book with many state-of-the-art lenticulars. There were going to be twenty individual lenticular cards which corresponded to all the characters. After all, a flip book, or "flicker book" is first printed as a multi-frame animation as a proof before printing an actual proof on the plastic lens. When cards tilted they would exhibit various animations pertinent to the characters thus enhancing the illustrated story. I planned on combining the story book with this series of "collectible" lenticular movie cards even registering the word, "Moviecards." They were to be attached over actual 2D illustrations printed on various pages throughout FFB (Hah. Or sold separately foil-wrapped like baseball cards on a counter-top display... in my rose-colored dream).

However, the process of self-publishing an illustrated book of this dimension with the intensive computer interlacing of  many professionally-drawn cells to be printed behind clear lenticular plastic proved to be cost and time prohibitive.  We did produce a wonderful lenticular proof of Fredericka at her desk with Miss Frasier waving her pointer when the card was tilted, a dream balloon appearing with a Flicka Book image. (see page 1).

 To make the project more challenging for myself, I drew a blueprint for a planned board game similar to Candyland or Chutes and Ladders. To assemble the game one needed to lay the backs of the twenty Moviecards together like a puzzle in the proper order. Fredericka's Flicka Book game never got beyond a mere drawing.

Alas, due to economic conditions at the time, a vanishing print/publishing industry and a burgeoning Internet, my dream never fully materialized. This weekend I came across a CD of my story and decided to add to my blog. I converted the CD into pdf files, screen-captured and saved the 48 pages as jpgs to upload here. Hope you enjoy the tale and imagine what could have been (and one day might be).

to be continued. maybe