But some people let their feathers get just a little too ruffled, I guess. Is this “risque” difference really enough to land Handford’s illustrated classic on the banned books list? I don’t think so. Here’s a portion of the controversial page in question, linked from Waldo Wiki:Īnd here’s the “clean” version, published as part of a special 10th anniversary edition of the book released in 1997: But apparently this “lewdness” was enough to land Waldo on the outs with libraries across the country. The time has come and we re celebrating our favorite wanderer in style For over a quarter of a century. Not to mention the fact that the female in question is smaller than the size of my thumbnail. Wheres Waldo Looking for Waldo Search no more. Mind you, there really isn’t much to be seen here. But to be fair, the woman is startled by sort of impish child ramming a cold ice cream cone onto her back! In her surprise, she leaps up and flashes the beachgoers around her. One page in the first “Where’s Waldo?” book featured a tiny, particularly risque character in a beach scene - a topless sunbather. But a little Googling got me to the bottom of this craziness pretty quickly. Of course, I’m a little late to entering the hype over the series - the first “Where’s Waldo?” book was published in 1987 (I was two). What could be so bad about a children’s book - fun for all ages - that my sister and I poured over for hours upon hours as children? We loved the original volume of the work and would often challenge each other to figure out who could spot our favorite red-and-white striped hitchhiker the fastest! All ages.After discovering the “Where’s Waldo?” book series by Martin Hanford on the American Library Association’s top 100 most-challenged books of the 1990s, I had a strange feeling in the pit of my stomach. The pictures are astonishing in variety, detail and humor, and the pages are filled with so many people that readers will marvel at the artist's patience. Waldo cuts through a maze of people and participates in numerous activities, but, unlike readers, seems to know where he is going.
Toward the end, Waldo has lost everything but his hat, and readers are expected to find those objects, too, in this amusing game of concentration amidst a sea of distractions. He's hiking his way across the world, and sees mermaids in canals, cows escaping from train cars, a helicopter chopping down flagpoles, a mummy's baby in a museum, a capsized desert island, a hat-eating giraffe and a glove attacking a man he tells all in postcards, considerately short and friendly. It's difficult to find him in the middle of a crowd because he does not stick out head and shoulders above the teeming masses of pedestrians, beach-goers or vacationers. An oversized picture book with hoards of people milling around on each pageamidst this humanity readers must try to spot Waldo, identifiable by his clothing and hiking paraphernalia, in a game of concentration.
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