"'You saucy beast!' becomes 'You trickster!' Other changes are just patronising.
The Witches once imagined a woman 'working as a cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman.' Now she might be 'working as a top scientist or running a business.' Are there no women cashiers now? Rather than going white as a shee,' the Queen’s maid in
The BFG now goes 'still as a statue.' Dahl can’t even poke fun at a tortoise any more. In
Esio Trot, tortoises can only read backwards because they are 'very backwards creatures.' How rude! Now they can only read backwards ... just because. And when Boggis, Bunce and Bean set out on their tractors to destroy the foxes’ home once and for all in
Fantastic Mr Fox, the animals once noted in terror that 'The machines were black. They were murderous, brutal-looking monsters.' The tractors are no longer black, just in case a fox was being racist."
63 Comments on Althouse: "Many of the changes to Dahl’s books seem minor: 'I’d knock her flat' becomes the much more diplomatic 'I’d give her a right talking to,' for instance."
Ronald Dahl agrees with this comment."
Should we burn our DVDs of Matilda, Fantastic Mr. Fox, etc.?"
The Roald Dahl Story Company, copyright owner, is managed by the author's grandson, Luke Kelly. And he just sold all film rights to Netflix over a year ago.
He owns the family business. He's diversifying and increasing profits. If he and Puffin, with its sensitivity readers, want to update the catalog, that's their legal right."
Hopefully they'll realize kids don't read books anymore anyway and certainly read this sanitized dreck."
Might as well just read stories written by AI, if that's what they are going to do to real authors.
"You saucy beast" is fun. It makes me want to find an opportunity to quote it. "You trickster" is boring.
It goes beyond the meanings of the words. Dahl's word choice just has a sound that works better. It's made me think about the difficulties in translating literature. I wonder if they are making changes to foreign translations or only changing the English books.
This may be the thing that finally gets me to cancel my Netflix subscription."
Who are the brain police?"
Commenter Mark justifies this under the belief that because Dahl was an anti semite his work is fair game. I don't like where that line of unreasoning is taking us. I don't know enough about Dahl to know if he is an anti semite or not. But shouldn't his work stand by itself?
"
His sensitivity staff can write up a press release and say some Dahl fans gave Mr. Kelly the opportunity to go snorkeling with the boneless brown trout in their natural habitat."
But no, antisemitism is the one prejudice that's considered excusable in the arc of history. Fuck them all. "
It's good that the cleansing of the culture can still be perceived that way by nice moderate people. Althouse in her own way has joined the #Resistance. But the wrecking has been going on for a very long time now. Can it still be stopped? What would it take? "
No Wagner, Chopin or Richard Strauss. Probably the same for Beethoven and most of the German composers.
On the other hand, maybe we can take an axe to Karl Marx? "
I'm wondering: how many similarly bowdlerized versions of Huckleberry Finn are out there?"
... J.R.R. Tolkien"
“Honey, do these jeans make my ass look enormous?”
"
Who wants this though? "
Gee, whoda thunk it?
Not 81 million, for sure.
"
"sex education book full of illustrations depicting sexual acts has ignited a controversy after it was left at an Oregon elementary school library, according to a report late Thursday.
The book in question, “It’s Perfectly Normal,” explains bodies, sex and sexual health, the station reported.
The illustrations in the book include pages of naked teens and adults, some depicting sex acts and even masturbation, the station reported.
Rainier School District officials defended “It’s Perfectly Normal,” according to Fox 12. The officials said the book has been approved for students 10 and up and is on the state-approved list of books allowed at the school."
It'a strange, strange world we live in.."
No, not at all. The reasoning for bowdlerizing Dahl's language is to hide language in the originals presumed to be offensive, covering it over with band-aids of replacement language presumed to be inoffensive. What might one find offensive about the Mona Lisa, and how would adding a Magic Marker mustache obscure or mitigate whatever offense one might propose?
Perhaps your meaning is more general, that bowdlerizing any extant art justifies the bowdlerizing of any other art, past, present, or future. Well, there are already plenty of such historical justifications and of such alterations, as other commenters are pointing out with examples. Governor DeSantis is going Full Monty in this direction, canceling an AP class he presumes--or purports--to be wrong-think and ordering schools in Florida to empty their shelves of books, pending "review" of the books in each school's library.
It can only be the party (or parties) who have legal ownership or control of Dahl's works that could have permitted this. Are the traitors to Dahl his family or the publishers of the books?
(Small "six degrees of Roald Dahl" anecdote: When I worked at a hotel in NYC decades ago, I had a brief conversation at the front desk with Dahl's then-wife, actress Patricia Neal. She had come to the desk because she wanted something, but all I recall is that she was pretty damn drunk.)"
You mean Netflix?"
Time for someone to start printing and selling the original version. The copyright has been abandoned by the new owners."
This is something they would do in the old USSR. How much longer before "counter-revolutionaries" get airbrushed from old photos and movies? "
All the liberal/leftists supported the Hollywood producers. How dare anyone change their films. Where are these liberal/leftists now? "
It is close to something Frodo says to Sam in LOTR:
“The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don't think it gave life to the orcs, it only ruined and twisted them, and if they are to live at all, they have to live like other living creatures.”"
New! Improved! Ten pounds of Orwell in a five pound bag!"
"Commenter Mark justifies this under the belief that because Dahl was an anti semite his work is fair game. I don't like where that line of unreasoning is taking us."
No Wagner, Chopin or Richard Strauss. Probably the same for Beethoven and most of the German composers.
On the bright side, no more Martin Luther, either!"
Perhaps losing an eye to a different group of censors has emboldened him."
Personally, I am a purist when it comes to free speech. However, when the powers that be censor only some offensive speech, a very bad message is being conveyed -- something like hating Jews is not like hating other groups and is, in fact, acceptable. "
So, a fascist has a fascist opinion of a fellow fascist. Is that unusual? I dunno. Let's ask Ernst Röhm!
(Apparently, Mark has either bugged out voluntarily or otherwise, but a good jab is always in good taste.)"
Yet another reason to not throw away physical books. "
https://napavalleyregister.com/news/ashcroft-wants-drapes
-on-nude-statues/article_8e1035cb-b15b-507b-af17-9de4004b2807.html
ErmehGERD the horrors reported in and by the news media..."
LOL. And Nathanial West, Bellow, and Mailer hated Gentiles. Prove me wrong. But don't worry, someone will take the bait, and write a 3 page memo on how he REALLY loved the Jews."
Can't wait."
Isn't it a violation of copyright? Did Dahl's estate sign off on this?"
That's an argument for suppressing all of Ezra Pound's poetry. And censoring all of the other authors who held currently-unfashionable political views.
(Not that I'm excusing anti-Semitic views -- just advocating on behalf of literature)."
"Under this reasoning taking a 'Magic Marker' to the Mona Lisa is totally justified."
"No, not at all. The reasoning for bowdlerizing Dahl's language is to hide language in the originals presumed to be offensive, covering it over with band-aids of replacement language presumed to be inoffensive. What might one find offensive about the Mona Lisa, and how would adding a Magic Marker mustache obscure or mitigate whatever offense one might propose?"
Who determines what is offensive? I'll let my own judgement determine what is offensive or not. Everybody else can just fuck off."
As the stories go, he was quite the asshole. And assholes make good ghosts. "
The people doing this would be clamoring to have all his work burned instead of edited if Dahl had talked about blacks the way he did Jews. This douchebag thought Jews had brought on the Holocaust themselves. Hitler, he said, "didn't just pick on them for no reason."
I don't think so. Dahl undoubtedly was anti-Semitic in private life, but this cute little bowdlerizing stunt is almost stunningly unrelated to that. I have not seen a single change made to Dahl's texts that has any relation to anti-Semitism. They are all about race, gender, and fat-shaming. And by "race" I mean that you can't refer to a black tractor or someone "turning white as a sheet" with fear. By "gender" I mean that mothers and fathers become "parents," and the word "female" is out (to be replaced by the "adjectival 'woman'," naturally), and we have to imagine that the Oompa-Loompas are 50% female -- except that that word is out! (I don't really want to know what they did to the Vermicious Knids.) And by "fat-shaming," I mean that the word "fat" is banned. Augustus Gloop is no longer "enormously fat," just "enormous." Presumably his gluttony had no effect on his waistline, but did make him eight feet tall.
If there were a single example of anti-Semitism in Dahl's books (as opposed to his private correspondence) that had been "remedied" by this campaign, you'd think that by now someone might have located it. I have seen none at all so far.
"