Remember Read-Along adventure audio books?

Being a kid in the 1980s was awe­some.  We had Trans­form­ers, Garbage Pail Kids and Simon, among a plethora of other not very edu­ca­tional toys.  (Well, I sup­pose you could argue that Simon was educational…to some degree.)  If our toys were edu­ca­tional, there was usu­ally some type of elec­tronic gim­mickry involved, I guess because we Nintendo-playing, cartoon-obsessed spawn of the MTV Gen­er­a­tion had short atten­tion spans.

But one of my favorite low-tech toys of the 80s was Read-Along audio books.  I used to spend hours lay­ing on the floor on my stom­ach with my Fisher Price tape recorder, open book sprawled in front of me as I took an audi­ble jour­ney into my favorite sto­ries.  I must have read/listened to Beren­stain Bears and the Spooky Old Tree at least fifty times.

Who didn’t love turn­ing pages to this sound?

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Some of the coolest Read-Along books were the ones based on movies like Star Wars, Grem­lins, and The Goonies.  I found this great site that archives these for­got­ten trea­sures of the past.  You can down­load MP3s of the books’ audio, or an .exe file that presents the orig­i­nal book pages with read-along audio.  They even have Read-Along ver­sions Wil­low and The Dark Crys­tal!  Head on over to Read-Along Adven­tures for a trip down mem­ory lane.