REGARDS TO THE MAN IN THE MOON

"Junk?" says Louie's junkman foster-father Barney, told that the kids have been teasing Louie. "They should know better than to call this junk. All a person needs is some imagination! And a little of that stuff can take you right out of this world." So he builds a sort-of space capsule, labeled IMAGINATION I; Louie and Susie climb aboard; and "way out in space" they encounter Ziggie and Ruthie, in a junked bathtub ("We decided to follow you"), and have a run-in with some monster rocks. . . before returning home, where all the kids are ready, now, "to take off." That blatant recourse to "imagination" (or IMAGINATION I) isn't very imaginative, and the whole junk-is-what-you-make-of-it angle is pretty trite too; but the phantasmagoric outer-space collages—the kids and their impromptu space vehicles whirling through elements from NASA-type space photos—makes this a visual extravaganza akin to the small-screen and large-screen space spectaculars. Given Louie's solid in with kids, most of them will at least want to have a look: when the monster rocks are careening about, especially, there's a three-dimensional, trompe l'oeil quality that's never been known to fail.