Eating Through The Week

attn tired parents: open this direct link on a tablet/phone and use the "Add to home screen" option to install it as a web app! after opening it once, it should work offline every time after. you're welcome :) 

my kid is currently obsessed with The Very Hungry Caterpillar - the book, obviously, but also the animated short version created sometime in the 90s. we had been watching a low-quality version of it on YouTube until i thought to find a DVD copy on eBay ($6 sealed) that might provide a marginally improved "catapill" experience for my perfect child. i did not think to search YouTube for a higher quality version until just this moment, so let's just pretend that doesn't exist and buying a DVD in 2025 was good idea.

The Very Hungry Caterpillar And Other Stories (2006 DVD) is very sparse on bonus content, but I found the single inclusion pretty cute - an interactive "game" built entirely out of DVD menus titled "Eating Through The Week", which more or less mirror's the book's story with the addition of multiple choice prompts each time the caterpillar is about to eat his next meal. i played through it once with the kid, and while they were able to correctly identify the canonical meal for each day, i had to be the one to handle the clunky DVD remote input to advance the story. 

Eating Through The Week (2025 web game) is a 1:1 reproduction of this DVD menu game that I built in Godot. all assets (except for the caterpillar cursor, which is a crude trace-over job) are directly ripped from the disc. all credit goes to Eric Carle for his original work that this is all based on as well as the folks who animated and narrated this adaptation. i believe this DVD has been out of print for years, so probably no one cares about the questionable legality of this project (esp considering you can even find a full recording of this game on YouTube)

special thanks to ibis_, Corwin "weasel" Brence, and eliot on the Video Game History Foundation Discord for helping me through some technical hurdles with the DVD rip