These extreme examples were meant to be tongue in cheek. I’m not against making things less offensive and no one should be denied basic dignity. But I wonder if real and serious problems with real life discrimination are solved by trivial changes rather than being meaningfully acknowledged and addressed.
The people in question here aren’t trying to solve the world’s social problems with trivial charges. They want to sell more books.
Of course you are right. How prophetic they are releasing them all anew in their original form. One tires of media stunts, mock outrage and companies trying to take advantage of every moment to aggrandize themselves in social media or score free publicity.
Never knew that. Makes sense. Cujo is my example of a movie better than the book. The movie sucked, which says a lot about the book!
Speaking of changing books, they did a revised re-release of The Stand. It was successful when they added in chapters that the editors had cut (like the guy stuck in the car because of wolves); much less successful when King was throwing in small changes to “modernize” the back stories.
I never even heard of him until now. My idea of children’s books was sneaking into uncle Ralph’s closet to look at his Playboy collection that he kept hidden from Aunt Emma (but she knew). Reading anything in them was optional.
It’s official–Dahl wished for anyone who altered his books after he died to be hit on the head with a hammer and fed to a crocodile.
Very well. Fetch the crocodile!
Just checked the original Oompa Loompa song as written and it does indeed focus on the “greedy” aspect rather than his looks (other than one mention of being “big and vile”).
The song from the original film (which was not the one from the book) does ask:
What do you get when you guzzle down sweets?
Eating as much as an elephant eats
What are you at, getting terribly fat?
What do you think will come of that?
I don’t like the look of it.
But that’s not Dahl’s fault.
Good to hear!
Seriously, how much could they change a book, until they change the actual story itself? Because then what’s the fucking point?
I have a small peeve about John D. MacDonald “modernizing” short stories he wrote early in his career in the re-releases sold as “The Good Old Stuff”, so as to avoid datedness or “confusing” readers. Example of totally unnecessary and silly revision: one story was set up around a murder on a long train trip. The main character evidently was changed from a WWII vet to a Vietnam vet. I suspect that few Vietnam vets bothered taking long train journeys.
*might as well change “Murder On The Orient Express” to “Murder on United Flight #3387”.
Here’s more:
I’m generally able to pretty easily separate the bad person from the great art they create: Michael Jackson, Richard Wagner, Frank Lloyd Wright, R. Kelly, Kevin Spacey, etc. But that’s just me.