Cheburashka

- "On stores now" - The author Eduard Uspensky - A movie extract More goodies: + You can download soft copies of the Eduard Uspensky's other books here. + To see more Russian animations from the 70's and 80's, follow this link.

The keychain you see on the left was found on a random search on the net. As usually when you Google for one thing, you find too many other interesting places on the net. The keychain represents Cheburashka. Cheburashka (Wikipedia) is a tiny creature well known to anyone born before 1989 in the ex-Soviet Bloc. First published as a book by the Russian author Eduard Uspensky, later it became even more popular as an animation movie. Cheburashka was usually accompanied by Gena the Crocodile. They sang together, lived together and made billion adventures together. In the introduction of the book "Gena and his friends", Uspensky says that when he was a boy, he had three beloved toys: a crocodile Gena, a doll Galya and a plushy beast Cheburashka. The guys from the toy-factory made Cheburashka so wicked that nobody could ever say what kind of creature it was: rabbit, dog, cat or Australian kangaroo. His parents assured him that Cheburashka is still an unknown to the science animal, which usually lives in the tropical forests. Uspensky grew up and immemorized his toys in the book of a few generations. If you speak Russian you will definitely enjoy this audio adaptation of Cheburashka. If you feel like reading the book itself, it is available here. Or just listen the music from Cheburashka (i have suspicions that it was ripped directly from a big dark old vinyl). Offtopic but still interesting: an antismoking campaign featuring Cheburashka (~1 Mb).