The late Roald Dahl was a popular children’s writer, the author of such classics as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach. Children love them because they are funny and have a deliciously (but innocent) rebellious edge. Parents like them too because, unlike many children’s titles, they are not insipid and preachy, but are instead fun for all.
But Netflix, which purchased the rights to Dahl’s books from his estate, is taking away that rebellious edge by rewriting the books to make them more politically correct! Not only are words like “fat” and “ugly” removed, whole passages are revised so as to change witty writing to blasé preachiness. Here is a Twitter list of specific changes, among which are these, from Incunabula:
These revisions of Dahl’s books The Witches and Matilda were obviously made (1) to protect the feelings of those undergoing chemotherapy (2) to encourage girls to pursue the top professions (3) to cancel a great author who wrote in the context of the British empire, replacing him with a pretty-good writer who wrote in the context of the Great Depression.
Setting aside the artistic vandalism, is there any evidence that children are actually bothered or triggered or badly-influenced by the original wording? Isn’t this just an insertion of progressive indoctrination into works that are intentionally non-didactic? Isn’t this an assault on the work of an author who has been called “one of the greatest storytellers for children of the 20th century”?
And if progressive parents don’t want their children to be exposed to Dahl’s naughtiness, why don’t they just find other books for them to read? There are certainly plenty of others written to their standards, such as virtually every children’s book published today.
Here, by the way, is the source of Incunabula’s tweets, from the Telegraph in the UK. You can click a book and see all of the changes that were made to it. Including in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the complete removal of a reference to a boy playing with guns and changing “She needs a really good spanking!” to “She needs a really good talking to!”
The estimable Mark Hemingway writes about the fiasco in his article for The Federalist entitled The Censorship Of Roald Dahl Shows The Left’s ‘Book Banning’ Accusations Are Utterly Disingenuous. In which he asks, “The same people who say it’s OK to expose young children to sexually explicit material also think kids’ books need to be censored to stop calling people ‘fat’?”
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