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> The only part of the depiction he’s complaining about is race

Am I?

Are you sure?

Can you quote me on that please?

The blue fairy is an important part of my culture, at least for me.

If someones rewrites it using all the power of a conglomerate like Disney, that puts at risk our shared culture and heritage.

For me she's gonna be a woman with blue air, for someone younger it will be a bald black woman, that has no direct representation in the society where I live.

I don't care who the actress is or what the color of her skin is, it's just not the "Fata Turchina", it's another character.

Simple as that.

Try doing that with Sherlock Holmes and see what happens.

What would happen if a Chinese company made a movie where Martin Luther King is an Albanian immigrant who came to Italy with the Vlora ship in 1991 to become a supporter of immigrants rights and got killed by a mobster in a fight over a pool game?



I would totally watch a Sherlock Holmes played by Benedict Cumberbatch dressed up as bald black woman!

Look, if having the blue fairy's character being reinterpreted in such a way is simply something you'd prefer not to watch, that's cool. Maybe it bothers you that a generation of new viewers will absorb a different version of a story for which the orginal has a particular place in your heart, but that's just how culture works - for most of human existence stories weren't written down and changed on each retelling anyway. It doesn't lessen their importance or impact.

Having said all that - I've yet to hear many examples of modern adaptations of music in classical tradition written 100s of years ago that I can accept as any sort of improvement. I can't quite put my finger on why there's such a difference.


> What would happen if a Chinese company made a movie where Martin Luther King is an Albanian immigrant who came to Italy with the Vlora ship in 1991 to become a supporter of immigrants rights and got killed by a mobster in a fight over a pool game?

You're not very good at arguing your case. I see where you're trying to go with this, but that analogy sucks.

Look, Disney just ruins everything. I grew up with the A.A. Milne books for Winnie the Pooh. As a child, I had a picture in my mind for all of the characters, appearance, voice, manner. Disney's Winnie the Pooh is not it, and they have such cultural dominance that their vision can seem to overwrite the original.

I've had to just learn to not sweat it. Blade Runner 2049? Excellent movie, but I do not consider it canon. The original had a sense of humor and hopefulness that 2049 just absolutely lacked.

My Disney+ shows that I'll have access to Pinocchio on September 8th. Not sure if you have already seen it, but if not, give it a watch with an open mind. You might like it.


> For me she's gonna be a woman with blue air, for someone younger it will be a bald black woman

Weird that you spend more time complaining about her skin color than her hair.

> Try doing that with Sherlock Holmes and see what happens.

Shit yeah, sign me up.

> What would happen if a Chinese company made a movie where Martin Luther King is an Albanian immigrant who came to Italy with the Vlora ship in 1991 to become a supporter of immigrants rights and got killed by a mobster in a fight over a pool game?

They might well do that. But it’s different when it’s a real person than an imaginary fairy. And also when you change his appearance versus when you change what he stands for.


From Wikipedia:

Collodi often used the Italian Tuscan dialect in his book. The name Pinocchio is a combination of the Italian words pino (pine), and occhio (eye); Pino is also an abbreviation of Giuseppino, the diminutive for Giuseppe (the Italian form of Joseph); one of the men who greatly influenced Collodi in his youth was Giuseppe Aiazzi, a prominent Italian manuscript specialist who supervised Collodi at the Libreria Piatti bookshop in Florence. Geppetto, the name of Pinocchio's creator and “father,” is the diminutive for Geppo, the Tuscan pronunciation of ceppo, meaning a log, stump, block, stock or stub.

It seems to me there's a lot of cultural references here that are elided for non-Tuscan audiences. I imagine that could be frustrating. I think it would not be easy for Americans to be sympathetic to this kind of thing.

Hey, this is a cool song. It's a bit how Europeans can feel about American hegemonic cultural dominance: https://youtu.be/Rr8ljRgcJNM




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