At some point in my Adventures In Licensing column, I want to write about a Read-Along Record Book: Those old vinyl LPs that re-tell the story of a movie while kids follow along via a stapled-in, floppy picture-book. What’s been holding me back is that there aren’t as many interesting movie-related Read-Alongs as I’d hoped. That’s a problem that Rob Lammle apparently noticed as well, and has decided to correct. For his Space Monkey X Audio Workshop podcast, Lammle has turned John Carpenter’s 1982 horror classic The Thing into a Read-Along Record Book, complete with a PDF of the picture-text and an accompanying MP3 download. For those who don’t want to bother juggling all that media, Lammle has also put the two together on YouTube.

This is an impressive first attempt, which gets the experience of the Read-Alongs just right, down to the “turn the page” chimes and the spare music and sound effects that run beneath the narration. (Plus, who doesn’t want to take 20 minutes out of a busy day to relive The Thing?) The Space Monkey X Audio Workshop is planning to make Record Books of other non-kid-friendly movie favorites, in between other projects the podcast has in the works. Can we get one of these for The Big Lebowski next? There’s already some appropriate artwork available.