Movies - The Butter Battle Book

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	Movies - The Butter Battle Book

The Butter Battle Book is a children's book written by Dr. Seuss. It was published by Random House Books for Young Readers on January 12 1984. It is an anti-war story; specifically, a parable about mutually assured destruction and nuclear weapons. The Butter Battle Book was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

This book was written during the Cold War era, and reflects the concerns of the time, especially the perceived possibility that all life on earth could be destroyed in a nuclear war. It can also be seen as a satirical work, with its depiction of a deadly war based on a senseless conflict over something as trivial as a breakfast food. The concept of a war based on toast is similar to the war between Lilliput and Blefuscu in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels
, which was nominally based on the correct position in which to eat a boiled egg.

Plot

The Butter Battle Book tells the story of a land where two hostile cultures live on opposite sides of a long wall. The main dispute between the two cultures is that on one side of the wall people eat their bread with the butter side upwards, while on the other side they eat their bread butter-side down. The conflict between the two sides leads to an arms race, each competing to make bigger and better weapons to outdo the other, which results in the threat of mutually assured destruction.

Eventually, each side possesses a small but extremely destructive bomb, the smallest weapon of all, and neither has any defense against it. At the end of the story no resolution is reached. The question is left hanging for the reader to answer by his or her actions, much like the "UNLESS" question at the end of Seuss' The Lorax.

Television special

The book was adapted into an animated TV special in 1989 by filmmaker Ralph Bakshi. Seuss himself called the short the most faithful adaptation of his work.

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