The series has been made into a short-lived TV show in Canada, simply called Ramona and starring a young Sarah Polley in the title role. This show emphasizes the light drama found in the books over the light humor, and is most heavily based on Ramona Quimby, Age 8, but with a few episodes drawing on Ramona and Her Mother and Ramona Forever too. The series, comprising ten episodes and aired over four months in 1988-89, first aired on CHCH, an independent TV station in Hamilton, Ontario, and then nationwide on CBC and in the U.S. on PBS. Hidden Depths: Some characters introduced in early books reveal additional depth in later books, giving insight into why they are the way they are. Also in Ramona Quimby Age 8 Ramona gets grumpy after her second day in bed with the stomach flu. Mrs. Quimby smiles and says she knows Ramona is getting better because she's "acting like a wounded tiger." Ramona in a grumpy tone informs her, "I'm not acting like a wounded tiger." New Baby Episode: Downplayed for the book "Ramona Forever". A subplot is that Mrs. Quimby is pregnant, and the baby, whose name ends up being Roberta, is born in the final chapter. Non-Standard Prescription: In the book Ramona Forever, a doctor diagnoses Ramona with "siblingitis" (that is, jealousy over the attention her parents are giving her newborn sister) and hands her father a prescription for more attention.

Ramona to Beezus, especially when she was younger. She constantly bugs Beezus to play with her when Beezus wants to do other things and often embarrasses her in front of others (such as stealing one of her classmates' candy, disrupting the board game she was playing with Henry, and destroying Beezus's birthday cake by shoving her doll inside the batter while it was in the oven). According to Ramona, the letter Q written in cursive. It just looks like a sloppily written number 2. In Ramona Quimby, Age 8, it is stated that Ramona and her fellow third graders are the oldest kids at her new school. However, in Ramona's World she enters fourth grade at the same school. It's also explicitly stated that Ramona's teacher, Mrs. Meachem, has been teaching fourth grade there long enough to have had some of her current students' parents in her class (ruling out the possibility that the school just added a grade over the summer). Beverly Cleary was born Beverly Atlee Bunn in McMinnville, Oregon. When she was 6, her family moved to Portland, Oregon, where she went to grammar and high school. She was slow in learning to read, due partly to her dissatisfaction with the books she was required to read and partly to an unpleasant first grade teacher. It wasn't until she was in third grade that she found enjoyment from books, when she started reading The Dutch Twins by Lucy Fitch Perkins. Thereafter, she was a frequent visitor to the library, though she rarely found the books she most wanted to read — those about children like herself. Hoist by Their Own Petard: Both Mrs. Kemp and Willa Jean suffer this after Mrs. Kemp blames Ramona for Willa Jean breaking the accordion Uncle Hobart gave her. The Quimbys all get an Everyone Has Standards moment when Ramona cries over dinner, and they agree that if Ramona and Beezus come straight home after school, it shouldn't be a problem to avoid the Kemps indefinitely. From what we hear offscreen, neither Mrs. Kemp nor Willa Jean is pleased with this. Now that Ramona is no longer providing free babysitting for the younger girl, Howie has no reason to hang around at home while trying out his new unicycle, leaving Willa Jean with her strict grandmother. It also means Mrs. Kemp has no scapegoat and only herself to blame when Willa Jean gets in trouble. Willa Jean eventually calls on the phone begging for Ramona to come to play with her again but is too little to realize the reason why Ramona stopped coming. Howie also starts behaving obnoxiously when he's forced to be the ring-bearer in his uncle's wedding, ensuring Mrs. Kemp is not having a good time with her older grandchild.Open Mouth, Insert Foot: At Ramona's birthday party in Ramona's World, Susan comes with an apple and says she's not allowed to eat cake because it has Ramona's germs from when Ramona blew out the candles. This immediately makes most of the guests scrape off the frosting, and Ramona is understandably furious. Finally, her new friend Daisy eats the cake and says there's nothing wrong with it, leading to the Surprisingly Realistic Outcome moment where the other kids call out Susan for being impolite, and she starts to cry because she thinks no one likes her. Willa Jean to Howie, for similar reasons as Ramona: noisy and attention-seeking. In the later books, Ramona bristles at any suggestion — especially by Beezus — that she was once just like Willa Jean, even though we, the readers who have been following the series, know just how true it is. Demoted to Extra: Henry Huggins, the protagonist of the previous series, barely gets any mention in the Ramona series. Howie Kemp: Ramona's friend who loves building things. He becomes Ramona's cousin in Ramona Forever when his Uncle Hobart marries her Aunt Beatrice. He never gets excited about anything, which really makes Ramona disappointed.

Ramona's kindergarten and first grade classes host an Eric J. and Eric R. They disappear by the time Ramona is in second grade, so maybe they were placed in different classes to prevent confusion. Many American migrants to California were biased against the Mexicans who lived there. The new settlers from northern and midwestern states disparaged what they considered a decadent culture of leisure and recreation among the elite Latinos, who held huge tracts of land, lived in a region with prevailing mild weather and unusually fertile soil, and relied heavily on Native American laborers. The new settlers favored the Protestant work ethic. This view was not universal, however. It jumped out at Cleary (while composing Henry Huggins) that the greater part of the characters she had made hitherto had no siblings or sisters. “Somebody ought to have a kin,” she wrote in My Own Two Feet, “so I hurled in a younger sibling to clarify Beezus’ epithet. When it came time to name the sister, I caught a neighbor shout to another whose name was Ramona. I wrote in “Ramona,” made a few references to her, gave her one brief scene, and felt that was the end of her. Little did I dream, to utilize a trite expression from books of my adolescence, that she would assume control books of her own?” Sudden Name Change: In Beezus and Ramona, Mrs. Quimby's maiden name is "Haswell", but later in the series, it's "Day".

This series contains examples of:

Picture postcards, by the tens of thousands, were published showing "the schools attended by Ramona," "the original of Ramona," "the place where Ramona was married," and various shots of the "Ramona Country." [...] It was not long before the scenic postcards depicting the Ramona Country had come to embrace all of Southern California. [15] Some reprintings of Ramona and Her Mother showcase Ramona trying to hide the famous "toothpaste cake" from her mom — it's actually Beezus who finds it.