Tiny Hamster is a Giant Monster, silly all age reading fun

Based on a You Tube sensation. Not long ago that phrase and ‘movies that are produced by toy companies’ would’ve produced groans from me. However, it’s a brave new world and entertainment born on one platform can easily cross over to another. Proof of that is Tiny Hamster is a Giant Monster.

The Tiny Hamster YouTube videos are incredibly popular with some of them having tens of millions of views. Their videos are also very, very cute and focus on what makes the internet tick: cute animals doing cute and or anthropomorphic things. In their case, it’s a hamster, granted the hamster is not the traditional go-to internet critter, but in this case they make it work.

It’s easy to seque between the videos and the book because Tiny Hamster is A Giant Monster is a book created from photos taken during the video. So, which came first the chicken or the egg? In this case it doesn’t matter because both of them are very entertaining and make you recall the days when the hamster was THE pet in the house.

In this case the tiny hamster snacks on a barrel evil green ooze and proceeds to go on a rampage around town.  He eats a (cheese and bacon) train, some (lettuce) trees, gobbles billboards and knocks over tall buildings. All of this happens until he tastes another bit of the ooze that made him big, but this time it makes him small.

Tiny Hamster is a Giant Monster works because of the detail in the photography and the love that it was done with. Yes, love. It is just a cute hamster, but the fact that his costume is to scale and done so perfectly makes you realize that this is one lucky hamster.  The tiny buildings that he scales are detailed, the helicopter-everything is done with such an eye that you want to love it, even if you don’t like hamsters.

The vocabulary in the book is on a reading upper elementary school level, but the images and silly story are OK for any age. Our five-year old likes to look at the photos, laugh and image his own hamster adventures in his head.  This is a silly book that logically takes the video one step further and allows children to daydream about what their mental hamster would do. It’s silly, but they both love it.