THE TRULY GREAT NOODLE

A heaping plateful of interactive, often gross-out effects nearly bury this rhymed gustatory episode. Not that that’s a bad thing.

The spaghetti that young Nate sits down to slurp turns out to be just one long noodle that extends out the door, across the street, past the cat scratching in the playground sandbox, through the pig sty and like unsavory places. “Finally, it stopped at Gower’s Junk Store, / and ended up next to a boot on the floor.” Each of the 17 broadly comical cartoon scenes is festooned with touch-activated animations or sound effects large and small. These range from a dog-walker’s “Go pee-pee for Mama!” and a snoring pig’s chartreuse fart to a recurring mouse popping up in various garbs and, toward the end, Nate’s escalating series of belches. The screens load quickly, and multiple taps on some of the special features trigger multiple responses. Children can’t turn off the short, brassy soundtrack loop but do have the option of hearing the tale read by a jovial canned narrator, reading it silently or recording it for themselves. The “self-record” also comes into play in an Extras area, which, along with samples from an album of food-related songs (sold separately), contains a “Burp-O-Meter” for competitive eructation.