1. Instead of dreaming to someday win the Silver Skates in the great December ice-skating race, Andy Brinker hopes to earn 200 dollars a week by joining Team X-Bladz.
2. While Hans’ father Raff is ill and unable to work due to a head injury sustained from working on the canals of Amsterdam, Andy gets suspended from high school for rollerblading on school grounds.
3. In Hans Brinker, Hans lends his skate to his friend Peter, whose straps have broken, just before the final run, essentially taking himself out of the running for the grand prize of the Silver Skates; in Brink! Andy’s nemesis Val sabotages Gabriella’s race by sprinkling pebbles onto the course.
4. In the book, Hans’ father is cured after Dr. Boekman performs trepanning on him. No one is trepanned in Brink!
5. Hans Brinker, unlike Brink!, does not prominently feature the music of Fastball.
6. At no point in Hans Brinker does Hans tell his father “Yo, Dad, what up?”
7. No one in Andy Brinker’s family has a lost treasure of 1,000 buried guilders.
8. A quote that originally read “A tamed bird is a sad bird, say what you will”
becomes:
“Val and his crew were dissin’ us. We started givin’ ‘em beef right back, but they wanted to hit it right there at school. Clearly, we couldn’t step off, so we had to battle.”
9. Hans never throws a chocolate milkshake in his rival’s face; in fact, he and his family are quite hungry, due to their extreme poverty.
10. Hans Brinker never skates under the name “Team Pup ‘N Suds.”
Tags: determined california boys, determined dutch boys, erik von detten, hans brinker, mary mapes dodge, skating, trepanning
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Where do I sign the petition for more trepanning in Disney Channel Original Movies?
Little Kid Nicole was always pissed that this book wasn’t called Gretel Brinker and the Silver Skates, or maybe Hans and Gretel and the Silver Skates; after all, Gretel had nearly equal story time in the book AND she actually won the skates at the end.
Wait, what? If somebody had told me that I might have read the damn thing!
i was so in love with brink. i knew i could never become a hot inline skater girl because of a total lack of athletic ability or coordination, so i just started wearing layers of tank tops and board shorts and sitting close to skater boys in class while strategically showing off my punk-o-rama cds. anyway. good reference.
Woah. This drudged up some really buried memories.
Woah. This drudged up some really buried memories.
Andy’s father was also unable to work due to a back injury.
I TOTALLY FORGOT that the first time I found out about trepanning was in Hans Brinker
I hold that book entirely responsible for my ill-conceived ice-skating birthday party. I could not skate. I am the least coordinated person ever. And I had to invite my entire class, even Adele, and Adele could skate, and was perfectly happy to have everyone crowd around watching her show off and spin and stuff, while I sat on my bruised back side in the bleachers, wishing it was time for cake already.
I mean, it’s not dismal poverty, or even Val throwing pebbles in my way, but it was traumatic in its own right, to my 3rd-grade self.
I did not know that this website could get any more inside my brain and heart, and then this happened.
I read this book and “Five Peppers and How They Grew” way too many times growing up for someone born in 1974!
11. Hans Brinker never participated in a plot to humiliate Princess Mia Thermopolis at a school beach party.
somewhere deep in the repositories of the Haynes Bridge middle school video records is a tape of yours truly doing inline skating tricks, pretending to be Brink.
Um… I never realized that movie was an adaptation. And I watched it recently with my child. *shakes head*
Sad that there’s only this post under “erik von detten.”