I'm not familiar with those, but I'd definitely like to hear more!
TCM just showed 1970 feature film cartoon version of
The Phantom Tollbooth. I saw it as a child, found it pretty strange. Watching it now, I think it's got a great message and the animation and music are amazingly beautiful.
In the end, all the characters were celebrating because "Rhyme and Reason reign once more. Sense and Sanity prevail." I intially wondered about this; it seemed to go against certainly the Muppet ideal of insanity and craziness being great things to strive for, hehe. Was the
Phantom Tollbooth being stiff and conventional?
Well the more I thought about it, there was a different way of looking at this. The enemies in the story were the policeman who said everyone was guilty before a trial. Or the Languids who encouraged people to stop thinking and do nothing. And the rival kings who refused to agree to disagree. In a way, these are all forms of insanity, the bad kind, because they cause harm and suffering in the world. The Muppets would have been against all of these things. Yet they are the ones who are called "crazy."
So in that way, it's a good thing that "sense and sanity prevail." I guess it's all a matter of semantics--which is very appropriate to this story!
