As a child, I watched the cartoon and retained only a memory of the out-of-sync voices and an aversion to reading the book. Half-listening to my spouse read The Little Prince aloud, I became intrigued, and when the children complained because he was nodding off ("Daddy, could you please read it less sleepily?"), I took over. 
 And now that I've finished the book, I find it strange because I like it, but I can't really figure out why I like it. Sure, there are some great passages, like the one that brought me in to take over the reading because I didn't want to stop listening to the story: 
 "Whenever I encountered a grown-up who seemed to me at all enlightened, I would experiment on him with my drawing Number One, which I have always kept. I wanted to see if he really understood anything. But he would always answer, "That's a hat." Then I wouldn't talk about boa constrictors or jungles or stars. I would put myself on his level and talk about bridge and golf and politics and neckties. And my grown-up was glad to know such a reasonable person." 
 That's out of context, and I'm not sure if it will make sense if you've not read the book, but that's also kind of how the whole book is. There are maybe a couple of soundbites, but mostly I find I have to look at it as a whole to get any sense out of it, and even then, I'm not really sure I've got it. 
 To me, The Little Prince is like a cross between A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh and Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist; I like it more than The Alchemist and less than Winnie-the-Pooh. I'm not sure what my kids think of it. They paid close attention, but they weren't really able to say at the end what it was about. I'll have to see over the next few days if the fox's or the lamplighter's (or the snake's) words show up in their imaginative play. 
 Some friends recently blogged about their experience sailing away from the United States and returning for their first visit in three years. They note that they really want to talk about how their travel has changed them fundamentally, what the differences they've seen between the places they've traveled and the places they've called home in the U.S. have meant to them as human beings, but many people they encounter just want the surface of things---the color of the sand, the warmth of the sea, the smell of the local foods. 
 Maybe that's what appeals to me about The Little Prince. I might not understand it completely, but it feels like something deeper than the everyday.