Familijny CD-Romek was a Polish series of educational games aimed at children produced and published since September 1999 by Longsoft Multimedia based in Wrocław and distributed on CD-ROM for Microsoft Windows.
The games consist of specially-produced animated and slightly modernised adaptations on popular children's literary works (especially the ones well-known in Poland)note , which are characterised by traditionally animated characters being put on CGI backgrounds and minigames, puzzles and activities related to the stories.
If you happen to be familiar in any way with Longsoft's adaptations (and you are from outside of Central and Eastern Europe), then you must have heard of the PlayStation 2 ports released by Phoenix Games in association with Aqua Pacific (yes, that's not their own original product), which are mainly characterised by their poor quality English dubs.
The series consists of:note
- Brzydkie kaczątko (The Ugly Duckling)
- Czerwony kapturek (The Little Red Riding Hood)
- Dziewczynka z zapałkami (The Little Match Girl)
- Jaś i Małgosia (Hansel and Gretel)
- Kopciuszek (Cinderella)
- Królewna Śnieżka i Siedmiu Wspaniałych (Snow White and the Magnificient Seven, the English version's title was renamed to Snow White and the Seven Clever Boys probably to avoid
a lawsuit from MGM.) - Królowa Śniegu (The Snow Queen)
- Księżniczka na ziarnku grochu (The Princess and the Pea)
- Nowe szaty cesarza (The Emperor's New Clothes)
- Opowieść wigilijna (A Christmas Carol)
- Pinokio (Pinocchio)
- Piotruś Pan (Peter Pan)
- Złota kaczka (The Golden Duck, a Polish folk tale)
These games provide examples of:
- 2D Visuals, 3D Effects: Most of these games feature 2D animated characters over CGI backgrounds and objects.
- Adaptation Species Change: Snow White replaces the seven dwarfs with human boys.
- Anthropomorphic Animal Adaptation: Longsoft's adaptation of A Christmas Carol is this with Scrooge and Cratchit as a wolf and a rabbit respectively.
- Art Shift: Some of games in the series deviate from the 2D characters/3D backgorunds combo for other art styles:
- Longsoft's The Little Matchmaker adaptation is made completely in CGI.
- The Little Red Riding Hood is a Puppet Show instead.
- The Artifact: Remember that cartoony arrow which had to be moved with a controller on the PS2 ports? In the original PC version it was a cursor that was controlled with your mouse.
- Blackface-Style Caricature: Sonny from Snow White, with his bright-red Gag Lips, looks like he walked straight out of a 1930's cartoon.
- To make matters worse, his name in the original Polish version was Blacky.
- Compressed Adaptation: The animated shorts clock in at around 7 minutes each, so large sections of the story have to be left out. Pinocchio deserves an award for having a song that's less than a minute long covering everything (and we mean everything: as soon as the song ends, it's back to the Framing Device) after the first encounter with the Blue Fairy.
- Green Aesop: Peter Pan features the following line, in response to being told that Never Land looks very green:Peter Pan: Yes. The Never Land residents care about nature. They love animals and don't destroy the gifts given to them by the earth.
- Informed Attribute: In Snow White and the Seven Clever Boys, the narrator gives the boys sans Joseph Jr. various attributes, but we see little to none of them in action.
- Setting Update: Cinderella is set in modern times, with Cinderella driving a car to meet the prince at a nightclub. However, the narrator still calls these things a carriage and castle (which seems to be intentional, since he also mentions skyscrapers at the end).
