Goop Tales

More About Goop Tales

Maria, the host, describes the show like this: This fun, family friendly podcast is a great introduction to different cultures as it takes listeners around the globe and slips in interesting facts about different cultures and fascinating animals. The length of each episode is between 30 to 40 minutes.  It’s an ongoing series with a new episode available every month. 

FPG Giveaway

Before we learn more about the vibe of the show, we’re gonna take a quick break to talk about my first FPG giveaway. I wanted to say thank you for listening to the podcast as we approach the first birthday of FPG. It has been so much fun to launch the podcast and meet all of you, mostly virtual this past year. As a thank you, I wanted to give one of my listeners a $25 Amazon gift card.

All you have to do is fill out a quick demographic survey, and I’ll choose one of you to win the gift card at the end of the month. Thank you so much for filling out the survey. It helps me make sure to find podcasts that you’ll enjoy and find sponsors that align with your wants, needs and desires. Thank you so much for a great year, and I can’t wait to give away that Amazon gift card.

Introduction to Maria

I’m Maria Callini and I’m the author of Goop Tales, which is a storytelling podcast for children all over the world so that they can use their imagination and discover new lands and cultures. Yeah, I mean, from a very young age, that was my thing, wanting to travel. And so I thought if I could get kids interested in all these foreign places, That they don’t actually have to go to yet, but then inspired to wanna go there and learn about them one day.

How Goop Tales Got Started

Because the Goops I had read the Goops are characters that were originally created in 1904 and the first 52 of them, and they’re named after Naughty Habits that kids, and I say adults do as well.  Things like Gaia talks a lot, Barry Vain looks at herself in the mirror.\, Wannu never wants to do things, and so the first 52 were created to teach kids manners and I was enchanted by them in their drawings, and I decided one day. To put them on t-shirts. And after putting ’em on t-shirts, everyone wanted to know the stories behind them.

So I started writing stories and decided to send them to different countries and unusual places in the world. And after I got to 52 the kids, the listeners, started making up all these new Goops and now I’m at 115 I think, and I have hundreds of names to choose from that they’ve written me in. 

What to Expect from Goop Tales

I want them to realize that there’s this whole big world out there and if they can’t get to it physically at the moment, that they can reach it in their imagination and they can create it. You know, when I was little I used to walk home from schools, sometimes go into the woods.  I would imagine all these like little gnome houses in the elves, in the tree trucks. And I do a lot of that in the stories, those kinds of things like bringing nature fantasy into the stories. And so I want kids to use their imaginations just when they’re out and about in their daily life and realize how amazing the seemingly ordinary can be.

The Vibe of Goop Tales

I would say it’s multicultural based on imagination and I am very nature oriented too. I am always inspired by pictures that I, oftentimes, look at real photos of real places in the world to get inspiration to write the story, and then I describe what I see as part of the description in the story.  Like, I’ll look, for example, say at a snow covered forest in Finland with one tiny light in the middle of it. That like starts this mystery of like, what is that light? What’s there? What’s gonna come out of it? And you just go right into that world. So it’s very imagination oriented.

Maria’s Favorite Episode

It is hard to choose. I will tell you a listener favorite episode and when it becomes a listener favorite episode, it becomes my favorite episode, . And it is called Bad Moodier and the B Dhabi cert. And the B Dhabi cert is this incredible landscape, air, it’s not landscape, but incredible like natural terrain with these layers, you have to go look it up. The B Dhabi cert. But Badia is a goop that’s always in a bad mood. Oh, and sometimes, and she wears a mood ring that shows her moods as they change, as she goes through the B Dhabi cert.   

It was a favorite for some reason, you never know what’s gonna resonate, but that’s the one that got more downloads and more feedback than anything else.  I don’t know if there’s a lot of little goops out there that resonated with bad moods, or they were fascinated by the mood ring or the B Dhabi cert, but that’s the one.

Goop Tales and Little Ears

Of course, a hundred percent. And I wanna say little growing ears in the sense that I don’t shy away from big vocabulary. I don’t like tame this down. So I like to put in big words where they have to stop for a minute and ask what they mean or think about it.