Goodnight Moon is an American children's book written by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd.

[1] In 1935,[2] author Margaret Wise Brown enrolled at the Bank Street Experimental School[3] in New York, NY.

[2] At Bank Street, Brown studied childhood development alongside the school’s founder, Lucy Sprague Mitchell,[2] who believed that children preferred stories about everyday topics rather than fantasies.

[2] Other revisions include replacing a framed map on the wall with a scene from The Runaway Bunny and blurring the udder of the "cow that jumped over the moon.

[citation needed] Anne Carroll Moore, the influential children's librarian at the New York Public Library (NYPL), regarded it as "overly sentimental".

[12] In 2005, publisher HarperCollins digitally altered the photograph of illustrator Hurd, which had been on the book for at least twenty years, to remove a cigarette.

[20] When Goodnight Moon was first published, it was considered controversial for such reasons as its lack of educational message and its narrative being confined to a single room.

[26] Pereira analyzes the effectiveness of Goodnight Moon's illustrations in assisting parents at bedtime through discussing Joseph Stanton's evaluation of the role of the "old lady", who is treated as another "feature of the landscape"[26] rather than as a character herself.

[26] Stanton notes that the objectification of the old lady contributes to a sense of independence in the child, who lacks a true parental figure in the "great green room".

[26] In the article 'Goodnight Nobody': Comfort and the Vast Dark in the Picture-Poems of Margaret Wise Brown and Her Collaborators, author Joseph Stanton discusses a motif present in Goodnight Moon that he refers to as "child-alone-in-the-wide-world".

[27] According to Stanton, this motif is present in much of Brown's work and is characterized by a child character finding resolution in being left alone.

[27] Further contributing to this motif, Stanton argues that the child is at the center of both the words and the illustrations in Goodnight Moon due to a lack of any parental figure.

[3] Beckerman references professor Julie Rosenthal's point that Goodnight Moon acts as a "scavenger hunt"[3] for children, as they are able to search the illustrations for each object mentioned in the book.

The special features an animated short of Goodnight Moon, narrated by Susan Sarandon, along with six other animated segments of children's bedtime stories and lullabies with live-action clips of children reflecting on a series of bedtime topics in between, a reprise of Goodnight Moon at the end, and the Everly Brothers' "All I Have To Do Is Dream" playing over the closing credits.

The special is notable for its post-credits clip, which features a boy being interviewed about dreams but stumbling over his sentence, which soon became a meme in 2011 when it was uploaded on YouTube.

[31] Here are the other tales and lullabies featured in the video: In 2012, American composer Eric Whitacre obtained the copyright holder's permission to set the words to music.