The Butter Battle Book
The Butter Battle Book is a children's book written by Dr. Seuss and published by Random House on January 12, 1984. It is an anti-war story: specifically, a parable about arms races in general, mutually assured destruction and nuclear weapons in particular.[1] The Butter Battle Book was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
Author
United States
English
1984
[Fic] 19
PZ8.3.G276 Bu 1984
This book was written during the Cold War era and reflects the concerns of the time, as well as his own, regarding the perceived possibility that humanity could be destroyed in a nuclear war.[2] 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.
Plot elements of the book were adapted for Warner Bros. Animation's Green Eggs and Ham: The Second Serving.[3]
Plot[edit]
The Yooks and the Zooks live on opposite sides of a long curving wall. The Yooks wear blue clothes; the Zooks wear orange. The primary dispute between the two cultures is that the Yooks eat their bread with the butter-side up, while the Zooks eat their bread with the butter-side down. The conflict between the two sides leads to an escalating arms race, which results in the threat of mutual assured destruction.
The race begins when a Zook patrolman named Van Itch slingshots the Yook patrolman's "Tough-Tufted Prickly Snick-Berry Switch" (a many-pronged whip). The Yooks then develop a machine with three slingshots interlinked, called a "Triple-Sling Jigger". This works once; but the Zooks counterattack with their own creation: The "Jigger-Rock Snatchem", a machine with three nets to fling the rocks fired by the Triple-Sling Jigger back to the Yooks' side.
The Yooks then create a gun called the "Kick-A-Poo Kid", loaded with "powerful Poo-A-Doo powder and ants' eggs and bees' legs and dried-fried clam chowder", and carried by a spaniel named Daniel. The Zooks counterattack with an "Eight-Nozzled Elephant-Toted Boom Blitz", a machine that shoots "high-explosive sour cherry stone pits". The Yooks then devise the "Utterly Sputter": a large blue vehicle intended "to sprinkle blue goo all over the Zooks". The Zooks counterattack with a Sputter identical to the Yooks'. Eventually, each side possesses a small but extremely destructive red bomb called the "Bitsy Big-Boy Boomeroo", and neither has any defense against it.
No resolution is reached by the book's end, with the generals of both sides on the wall poised to drop their bombs and waiting for the other to strike. The Yook patrolman's grandson (who had followed his grandfather to the wall) asks, "Who's gonna drop it? Will you, or will he?" To which he replies, "Be patient. We'll see. We will see..."
Television media[edit]
Television special[edit]
There was an animated TV special by animator and filmmaker Ralph Bakshi, narrated by Charles Durning and produced by and aired on TNT on November 13, 1989.[4] The special followed the book quite closely, notably in its preservation of its original cliffhanger ending, with the addition of a title card that reads, "To Be Continued..." at the conclusion of the story. Seuss himself called the short the most faithful adaptation of his work.[5][1]