Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

"Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs" was published in 1978, written by Judi Barrett and illustrated by Ron Barrett, from Atheneum Books. The story is framed as a grandfather's tall tale told at bedtime: in the town of Chewandswallow, there is no regular weather — instead, food and drink fall from the sky three times a day, and the townspeople simply eat whatever the sky serves. The book's detailed ink illustrations sold the joke, filling the streets with oversized food and deadpan townsfolk going about their day under a drizzle of dinner.

The premise is what stuck with kids: the fun of imagining pancakes, soup, and meatballs falling like rain, and the tension when the weather turns and the portions grow monstrous. Eventually the food gets so big and so out of control that the townspeople have to abandon Chewandswallow, sailing away on boats made out of giant sandwiches and slabs of stale bread. Though the book predates the decade by years, it became a fixture of '90s and 2000s childhood as a classroom read-aloud and a reliable Scholastic book-fair pick — one of those titles a generation remembers hearing before they could read it themselves.

In 2009, Sony Pictures Animation released a loose film adaptation, directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (released September 18, 2009). The movie kept the falling-food premise and the town name but reinvented almost everything else, adding an inventor named Flint Lockwood whose machine turns water into food — a big departure from the quiet bedtime-story book. The film and its sequel introduced the idea to a new wave of kids, but for the millennials who grew up on it, the memory is the original picture book and the strange, wonderful thought of weather you could eat.