I hate when people use the word "sanitize" in this context. For one, it's a weasel word and needlessly moralistic. But, even more than that, when people write essays complaining about sanitizing classic stories, most of what they succeed in communicating to me is that they don't actually understand how literature works.
Adjusting older stories to reflect contemporary cultural values has been happening for as long as there have been stories. The reason for that is simple: one of stories' major functions is to express things about ourselves - lessons, observations, etc. When an element gets dropped from a story, it's because that element is no longer culturally relevant, plain and simple. Stories, too, need to choose between evolution and extinction.
Take an oft-bemoaned example: Disney's version of the Little Mermaid. It's a very good adaptation. Adaptation. It differs from Hans Christian Anderson's in part because the lessons we think are important to teach our kids are different. But also, the medium itself affects things: children's movies don't have to be as graphic to achieve the same excitement level and emotional impact as written stories with few or zero pictures. A movie that didn't change anything from the original version of the story wouldn't have had nearly the same cultural impact, because it wouldn't have been nearly as good.
Sure, like cautiously removing key words from Huckleberry Finn because words matter and its more important that people consume less Xanax than accurately reflect on the contemporary nature of historical setting in its linguistic context.
Really though, its sanitizing. Even sanitize is too nice a word. Why not just call it what it is: selective censorship. Its pulling a Tipper Gore so that you can pretend to be a carefully concerned liberal in full hyper conservative hypocrisy[1][2].
These are fairy tales we’re talking about. Accurately representing a historical context was never the goal. Telling a compelling story is the goal, and to do that you need to adapt to your audience.
The question is whether to choose broad appeal or narrow appeal. Narrow appeal is more salient to a smaller group of people. Most narrow appeal media won’t be profitable enough. So large companies target broad appeal media. It is good, but may be altered to broaden the appeal. For example Red Dawn 2012 changed the enemies from Chinese to North Korean because China has a huge middle class (potential customers) and North Korea does not, despite the fact that a Chinese invasion might be scarier or more plausible.
All the more reason to take historical accuracy seriously. These stories were intentionally written to scare the shit out of little children in immediate graphic horror, to give them paralyzing nightmares.
The primary reason was to teach child to stay out out of the forest, or if absolutely necessary, then at the very least stay on the damn road and listen to their parents. The forest was a scary place full of beasts and bandits. People did not have cell phones. If a child got lost and injured in the forest they would probably starve to death, or if lucky, be devoured by wolves.
Let's not censor this so Disney can sell cartoons to the sad and ignorant. Instead let's enjoy it for what it was as it was written. People would lose their damn minds if you took the same actions to remove the violence and sexual fantasy out of Shakespeare, which was pale in comparison.
The only plausibly defensible purpose of scaring kids was to scare them into staying safe. Not for the sake of scaring them. But if you’re actually interested in scaring children to protect them you should be writing stories about guns, car accidents and drugs, not wolves and witches.
AFAIK many of the tales that Grimm collected were told in the context of Germany during the 100 year's war. Due to economic and geopolitical conditions of the times, it was literally true that the woods were full of predators. They were just human veterans of a lifetime of war and deprivation, rather than wolves. It was a very good idea to instill in your farm daughter the notion that the world out there is not safe, and don't trust people.
I see these as two completely different topics. One is about retelling classic stories in a way that is more relevant to modern audience. "Disney's The Little Mermaid" is most definitely not "Hans Christian Anderson's The Little Mermaid" and is never really presented as such. It's just a retelling of a story that happens to have been first told in some fashion by Hans Christian Anderson
As a completely separate issue we have censorship, where Mark Twain or Roald Dahl have their works republished using words that are not their own but still using their name. That's deliberately confusing and masking historical context, and that's objectionable.
To object to a retelling of a Hans Christian Anderson story is basically to advocate for unlimited copyright terms.
On one hand there are works like Pride, Prejudice, and Zombies. Its not a whitewashing of the original and its not trying to be. Even better is that it does a moderately good job of preserving the direction of the original story while adding absurd extensions like zombies and busty breasts overflowing their blouses.
On the other hand there is Disney's Aladdin. Uggghhh, yeah, its a complete whitewash. Nobody knows what Aladdin really is any more. Call that a new original story about some goofy cartoon who sings songs with some blue vapor clown thing. Don't call it a fairy tale, because its not remotely related to the fairy tale of the same name. Its no different than spinning the historical tragedy of the Trail of Tears into some positive romantic comedy cartoon fantasy to sell movie tickets. Sure, you if look hard enough you might be able to find some sliver of an encounter to support your whitewash idea, but that doesn't make it savory.
I understand your point, but you're overlooking who does the adapting. Oral stories were naturally updated with each generation, and I think that's wonderful. However, in this case, we're discussing literature being adapted by a global corporation with shareholders aiming to please a broad audience.
If Disney were to adapt The Lord of the Rings in 100 years to reflect new "lessons," I would be relieved to no longer be around to see it.
The Amazon Prime adaptation Rings of Power was an interesting (see: bad) case-study on what happens when you try to write Tolkien without him. It's perpetually insipid, like watching a puppet show try to adapt Shakespeare. So much is stripped off the bone that no story exists anymore, and all the characters and their motives blend into one another or aren't shown at all.
> If Disney were to adapt The Lord of the Rings in 100 years to reflect new "lessons," I would be relieved to no longer be around to see it.
What's funny is, these adaptations don't even do that. Peter Jackson's films are fun because they're essentially a "Spielbergian" take on what these books should be. They're still pared-back, but they have enough of the throughlines with the original story that you still get the big takeaways at the end. They're reductive films, but powerful.
Rings of Power just, exists. It doesn't want to adapt Tolkien's original themes of death and transcendence, it doesn't want to embrace a new theme, so it's stories feel incidental and pointless. There are no conflicting plots or overarching adventures. You're just watching people in costume do pretend-errands so we can point at the TV like Leonardo Decaprio when we see our favorite character. It has no intention to conserve the original narrative or puppet it's corpse for something new. It's just a cruel mockery of an IP that can be bought out for the highest bid.
A completely faithful film adaptation of Tolkien's books would make for a terrible movie.
Which isn't to say that all the adaptations are good, of course. But the changes that were made in Peter Jackson's LOTR or the Rankin/Bass adaptation of The Hobbit were well-intentioned and generally made sense for their respective media.
Probably Tolkien wouldn't like either, but that doesn't automatically make them bad. A good example here would be Stanley Kubrick's version of The Shining, which was an excellent film regardless of what Stephen King thinks about it.
Which isn't to say that all adaptations are good, of course. But ragging on artistic license in general just because some works of art fail is a depressing, philistine conclusion to draw.
Speaking of Stephen King, The Mist is another great example. The film adaptation completely changed the ending, and people almost unanimously agree for the better.
The adaptation was by a group of screenwriters, story tellers, and artists.
Sure, it lived inside a soulless corporation that imposed limits & expectations. But please don’t do a disservice to the brilliant artists and creatives who make animation.
> Sure, it lived inside a soulless corporation that imposed limits & expectations. But please don’t do a disservice to the brilliant artists and creatives who make animation.
Just because people are hard working and skilled does not place them above criticism. In fact they should be criticized even more when the stuff they produce is substandard
We would never say something trite like "don't do a disservice to the brilliant programmers and techies who make software" when we're criticising bad tech industry security practices
But they were specifically responding to a point about the identity of the creators, not the quality. And if it were about the quality, well, Disney's Little Mermaid is a classic.
Directors and PMs in multiple FAANG companies that I worked in would commonly say that "a lot of people worked really hard on this" and therefore we couldn't internally criticize an awful implementation or a terrible business plan that caused massive brand / reputation damage that could have been avoided if people outside the org had been able to file complaints sooner in the process.
In this case it is who is being criticized, or even more to the point, outright ignored.
I stand by my comment. It is incredibly, incredibly hard to make a living as a creative and even more challenging to do something as memorable as the Little Mermaid in all the many challenges of the entertainment industry.
Guess I’m just stuck on the “man in the arena” moment. Criticism is not virtuous by default.
Are you referring to the brilliant artists and creatives who refer to their place of employment as "Mousechwitz", or a different group who likely have their own affectionate nicknames? Because I'm pretty sure artists themselves are some of the most aware of how commercial imperatives warp the creative process.
I agree with what you wrote mostly but I think you are dismissing the criticism of sanitizing stories too easily. It’s a real phenomenon, and it is genuinely motivated by changing cultural precepts. And it is unfortunate, something about ourselves is lost in the process. Is it in the best interests of civilization? It may be. But not always.
I think that I couldn't disagree more with this point. Riffing and building on existing cultural artifacts does not erase them. Nobody's telling Hans Christian Andersen to shut up, and nobody's telling publishers to stop publishing him, and readership of The Snow Queen - the original version - is presumably much greater now than it was in 2012. My kids have specifically asked for it, while I wasn't even aware it existed as a child.
On the other hand, the implied message of people who complain about modern retellings is that they should not exist. (What else can it be?) And if they have their way, something absolutely would be lost: the ability of these stories to continue to participate in living culture.
A commercial decision to bury a set of works, made by the corporation that owns the exclusive rights to Dr. Seuss's creative output, falls into a completely different conceptual category, and bringing it up here is the kind of whataboutism that only serves to muddy the waters.
Or, to put it another way, invoking a concrete example of the kind of cultural loss that's an inevitable result of the ongoing erosion of the public domain does not actually function very well as a counterpoint to a defense of one of the primary virtues of having a vigorous public domain.
> falls into a completely different conceptual category, and bringing it up here is the kind of whataboutism that only serves to muddy the waters
Does it though? Seeing several comments in this vein of "it's fine to put your own spin on a classic because the classic still exists" but it's clear that publishers do in fact have the power to stop producing new copies of classics
What then? Is it still whataboutism if the publisher says "we're no longer publishing new copies of the original and will only make this new revised (read: sanitized) edition available"?
Because it's a fact that over time the originals in circulation will dwindle and it will eventually become a near forgotten work. And we in society will have lost something with it
The post you were responding to includes this sentence:
> I agree with what you wrote mostly but I think you are dismissing the criticism of sanitizing stories too easily.
Bringing up Dr. Seuss is not whataboutism, nor is it muddying any waters. It is directly relevant, your preference to focus more narrowly notwithstanding.
I don't think we really lose anything about ourselves unless we are going back and changing the original work. The Hans Christian Anderson version of The Little Mermaid is still readily available.
For thousands of years, stories, myths, and legends were handed down through oral tradition and changed radically over time. The key difference today is that anyone with basic literacy and access to a library or the internet can go back and see old "versions" of these stories.
Am I the only one who sees the irony here that you're triggered by a particular word, which is ostensibly the same reason most of this "sanitization" is happening?
Good point. It’s just that some weirdness arises as stories (or adaptations) begin to pass as originals, which I think happens by default. More effort to not take the thing at face value, more effort to asterisk every story you tell. Sanitizing is sorta like politeness in its (usually mild) degree of dishonesty. We tend to accept this level and sometimes praise it. Both also usually add slight bias towards the teller’s needs.
Even the idea of telling _the_ story of Cinderella vs _a_ story of Cinderella adds a not necessarily warranted suggestion of what people hundreds of years ago moralized and embellishes it with a kind of “time-tested” truth of humans.
The thing is, though, that there's no such thing as an "original" when we're talking about folkloric fairy tales. People give way too much deference to the first person who happened to get his own version of a story into print, typically imposing their own middle- or upper-class sensibilities onto it in the process. Those versions deserve respect as literary and scholarly works, but they neither require nor merit actual deference. Rich people using public domain stories as a vehicle for for-profit moralizing in the 18th or 19th centuries is not inherently more laudable than rich people using public domain stories as a vehicle for for-profit moralizing in the 20th or 21st centuries.
Agree there’s no or few “original” stories, and also that that’s not exactly something to bemoan. The quibble I’m making is that the longevity, whether intended by the tellers or not, tends to stick to the story in such a way as to lend not-necessarily-earned historical validity. The story is “time-tested” in an evolutionary sense not “time-tested” as a truth. That is, the story changed to survive, it didn’t hold up against time. Many of the stories take on the latter shine of certainty and legacy—as key selling points.
Making it more entertaining to contemporary audiences is fine or normal or whatever.
Adjusting older stories to reflect contemporary cultural values has been happening for as long as there have been stories. The reason for that is simple: one of stories' major functions is to express things about ourselves - lessons, observations, etc. When an element gets dropped from a story, it's because that element is no longer culturally relevant, plain and simple. Stories, too, need to choose between evolution and extinction.
Take an oft-bemoaned example: Disney's version of the Little Mermaid. It's a very good adaptation. Adaptation. It differs from Hans Christian Anderson's in part because the lessons we think are important to teach our kids are different. But also, the medium itself affects things: children's movies don't have to be as graphic to achieve the same excitement level and emotional impact as written stories with few or zero pictures. A movie that didn't change anything from the original version of the story wouldn't have had nearly the same cultural impact, because it wouldn't have been nearly as good.