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Albert Whitman Media, the media subsidiary of children’s book publisher Albert Whitman & Co., has signed Academy Award-winning actress Susan Sarandon to star in the podcast rendition of The Boxcar__Children, a series of half-hour ‘radio plays’ that reimagines stories from the book series.
Sarandon will narrate the episodes, portraying the role of the family’s matriarch, Grandma Alden, a new character introduced especially for the podcast series.
For the first time, the podcast series expands the origin story of The Boxcar Children, orphaned siblings Henry, Jessie, Violet, and Benny Alden who forge an improbable and ingenious new life for themselves by making a home out of an abandoned boxcar in the woods. Told through the vantage point of Grandma Alden, the podcast chronicles the months before the Aldens are reunited with their grandmother, relying on nothing but their wits, resourcefulness, and each other.
Each episode is a self-contained story set in and around the boxcar homestead, allowing longtime fans of the books to enjoy more of the unsupervised ingenuity and resilience that made author Gertrude Chandler Warner’s creation such an enduring success, while introducing newer audiences to an updated version of the Boxcar Children’s classic origin story. The combination of Grandma Alden as the omniscient, spirited narrator, together with the podcast’s contemporary format, will serve to introduce the beloved literary property to an entire new generation of fans.
Albert Whitman Media will produce an initial 40 episodes of The Boxcar Children podcast series for debut in 2022 on iTunes, Google, Spotify, and all major platforms. The Boxcar Children podcast is a production of Albert Whitman Media in partnership with Verité Entertainment (Verité Entertainment (veriteentertainment.net), a full-service post production audio and creative studio.
“We are extremely pleased to join with Albert Whitman Media and Attila Gazdag as partners for this exciting next chapter in the extraordinary history of _The Boxcar Children,” said Rene Veilleux, _CEO and Co-Founder of Verité Entertainment.
“In addition to bringing our creative and audio expertise, we were also thrilled to cast Susan Sarandon, one of Hollywood’s most celebrated actors, to narrate the podcast with her captivating and heart-warming voice,” added Donald Roman Lopez, Verité Entertainment’s President & CCO.