“This book was written many years ago, and so we regularly review the language to ensure that it can continue to be enjoyed by all today.” That was how Puffin and the Roald Dahl Story Company announced that they would be rewriting significant parts of Dahl’s books.
But there isn’t actually a Puffin Books or a Roald Dahl Story Company.
Once a beloved children’s books publisher, Puffin is just another of the brands owned by Bertelsmann, the German ex-Nazi giant book monopoly, also the force behind much of literary wokeness, which publishes Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist”, Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility”, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “Between the World and Me”. And the Roald Dahl Story Company is owned by Netflix. The largest television streaming producer and book publisher decided that it would be best to monetize Dahl’s books by giving them a woke makeover.
What’s happening to Dahl isn’t a new phenomenon.
Another arm of Bertelsmann was caught purging Dr. Seuss books that its author actually wrote and replacing them with new “inclusive” books by “diverse” writers that he didn’t write. Classic children’s authors have become corporate brands with hundreds of millions of dollars on the line. The Hollywood executives who are now in charge of Seuss or Dahl have no more of a problem going back and rewriting a book than they do asking a screenwriter to change a script.
Bertelsmann and Netflix go back and “regularly review the language” in books and then rewrite it the way that the entertainment industry can decide that Superman ought to be black, that his son ought to be gay or that ‘Truth, Justice and the American Way’ needs to become, ‘Truth, Justice and a Better Tomorrow’. That’s what reducing literature to intellectual property does.
Copyright, originally meant to protect the rights of the author, has instead allowed Hollywood to buy up the work of authors and then butcher them. Netflix paid an estimated $686 million for the Roald Dahl Story Company. Dr. Seuss Enterprises, which already has deals with Netflix and major studios, is considering its own total sale that would probably top $1 billion. Amazon paid $500 million for the rights to make The Rings of Power: a woke pastiche of Tolkien.
Companies are not paying that kind of money just to keep books from the 30s or 40s in print.
As Netflix put it when describing its Dahl deal, it’s out to build “a unique universe across animated and live-action films and TV, publishing, games, immersive experiences, live theater, consumer products and more.” Copyright on the books will lapse, but Netflix, Bertelsmann, Disney, and other giants are looking to turn authors into a “universe”, much like the Marvel Universe which has taken over theaters and made Disney fantastically rich, while disposing of their actual works. They’ve done this for so long with comic books that it probably never even occurred to the executives that there would be any pushback when they began doing it to children’s books. But there’s more at stake with books than with Spider-Man.
And yet it’s not hard to see how we got here.
Amazon built the base of its massive monopoly by gobbling up retail channels for books by, in part, turning them from physical matter made out of dead trees into a digital file on its proprietary Kindle devices. Electronic books are easy to seamlessly edit in a way that would be obscene to do to an actual book. A word here, a few words there and no one will notice.
Our affection for books, the conviction that they are something sacred, is closely linked to their physicality. When we look at a copy of the First Folio, we experience a connection to Shakespeare and the history of English drama and literature. At New York’s Public Library, flanked by its grand lions, you can find a writing desk used by Charles Dickens.
This is the sort of thing that matters if you believe that books are a state of communion, rather than a holographic palimpsest that can be infinitely reinvented as generations of literary theory has taught. If a grad student’s interpretation of Frankenstein has as much validity as what Mary Shelley actually meant, then why not go a step further and rewrite not just movie adaptations, but the book itself? Or argue that Shakespeare was really a black woman? Literary theory has devalued the author and the endless efforts to find new things to say about old works gave way to wokeness by applying leftist lenses that updated them in line with the new politics.
What’s happening to Dahl and other authors is just the implementation of academic theories.
One of the characters in a New York Times ad is described as “imagining Harry Potter without its creator”. The ad was promoting the paper’s story about sexual identity activists eliminating J.K. Rowling from their universe. What is a book without its author? Nothing. Every work is rooted in the identifiable tastes, values and idiosyncrasies of writers. But if you come to view authors as creators, rather than writers, and books as participatory linchpins of imaginary universes, prompts for the ‘headcanon’ of their fans, then the writers disappear.
That’s how Black Panther, the work of two Jewish guys from New York, working off crude pulp ancient African fantasies like those of H. Rider Haggard, was reinvented as a black nationalist proto-history that the cultural establishment pays tribute to. The idea of Wakanda is compelling to those who fantasize about their origins in an advanced African master race, the reality of Stanley Lieber (Stan Lee) and Jacob Kurtzberg (Jack Kirby), ruins that glorious fantasy.
J.K. Rowling was a cult figure when she was misinterpreted as using Harry Potter to champion children who felt different before discovering their inner powers, not in the traditional hero’s journey sense, but in the sexual one, and was canceled when she made it clear that she was not on board with most of that. Harry Potter became a universe whose corporate overlords made it clear that Rowling was no longer welcome around the works that she had written.
Dahl and Seuss are not around to be canceled. That makes them easier to rewrite. Their corporate overlords reduce them to a style and a sensibility, a rhyme scheme and some silly words, and ultimately a brand like Macy’s or McDonald’s that are universally familiar, but don’t require us to actually think about Rowland Hussey Macy or Richard McDonald. Writers become the founders of fictional universes who can be set aside, much like Rowland or Richard were.
A fundamental difference is that literature is not a fast food chain. The ‘property’ element of intellectual property rests on copyright that no longer serves authors, but corporations. Congressional Republicans and Democrats passed the Mickey Mouse Protection Act which created a century of copyright and extended it to fifty years from the death of the author. This wasn’t done to benefit writers and artists, but to benefit Disney. Perpetual copyright armed Hollywood with vaults full of intellectual properties while unleashing a cultural war on America.
The solution is fundamentally reforming copyright law.
Wokes can’t create anything original and enduring. Peak TV and the billions spent in a handful of years, more than Hollywood had spent for decades on TV shows and movies, proved it. Netflix, Amazon and other giants are investing billions to lock down classic works because they don’t expect the new properties that they sank millions into developing to last past a few years.
Abusing copyright allows them to parasitically feed off the writers of the past while draining their work to comply with the politics of the present. Most of these intellectual property franchise ‘universes’ are woke ‘fanfic’ whose massive budgets can’t compensate for their hollowness. Incapable of creating enduring works, even when they have the rights to popular classics, they have to settle for constantly reinventing them politically as a distraction.
Copyright, meant to ensure the centrality of the authors in a publishing environment tilted toward publishers, has instead made them marginal figures while handing control to corporations who own ‘universes’. Some authors, like Rowling, are fortunate enough to at least enjoy the financial rewards of the arrangement, many others labor as sharecroppers in the corporate “universes”. Disney, on taking over Star Wars, decided to stop paying royalties to the writers who had been producing Science Fiction novels in that setting. Copyright had come to mean that writers have obligations to companies, but that companies had few if any obligations to writers.
All of this was bad enough when it came to movies and comic books, but turns into outright book burning when applied to literature. Netflix can do whatever it likes with its properties, but there’s no reason that books that are eighty years old should be anyone’s property.
If Netflix and Bertelsmann want to create a version of Dahl’s works in which you can’t turn two pages without hearing about the evils of fat-shaming or the importance of affirming all gender identities, they can do that. And anyone else should be able to do it too or publish the originals. Copyright on Dahl’s books doesn’t serve the author, who died in 1990, his grandson, a mediocre children’s story writer who lives in America and sold the whole estate, or even preserving the original works, which are being drastically altered. There isn’t a single good argument for itt except that Hollywood paid Congress a lot of money to pass a Mickey Mouse bill.
Copyright should exist to protect writers and books, or it should not exist at all.
Models developed in Hollywood and the comic book industry, always nightmares when it came to the rights of authors (Superman co-creator Joe Shuster sold off his rights for $130 and was reduced to delivering packages to the DC office while struggling to pay medical bills) are now being rolled out to classic works of literature by massive Big Tech and Hollywood monopolies.
Reforming copyright would rob them of their vast hoards of intellectual property whose language they review on an annual basis to ensure compliance with best practice DEI policies and release them to the public. It would force companies to reckon with the cultural bankruptcy of wokeness that has seen them blow through over $100 billion while creating not a single classic.
And it would remind all of us that the books we read are grounded in the work of real people. Many writers were flawed, dysfunctional, bigoted, and otherwise unpleasant human beings. Art flows from those complexities and it is impossible to edit them out by committee without losing the soul of a book. The wonder of a book lies in the duality of its aspirations and imperfections. The woke pursuit of political ideals, like Soviet literature, has produced nothing worthwhile.
And it never will.
They tried to adopted two classic kids books to the silver screen Cat in the Hat and Peter Rabbit and made a mess that must have the original authors spinning in their graves
Yeah I watched a new Peter Rabbit movie on Netflix with my grandchildren and it celebrates the rabbit KILLING the gardener who is an old white man of course and the young white woman who lives next door is the hero, sorry for the spoilers.
All of that is deliberate. They want the name recognition, but then they twist the material to show their contempt for any classics.
Leftists (who believe in radical egalitarianism, and thus violate personal boundaries at will) seek to ravish works of genius for their own prestige and profit and power, while stripping them of the raison d’etre imbued by their actual authors.
Enlightened stuff Daniel, you have captured the thoughts of many.
One small thing:
“ The solution is fundamentally reforming copyright law.”
Reform or Re-form?
My career has been based on project and programme management and I have been lucky enough to travel the world helping organisations improve things.
My view is now that we need to go back to the good old days and scrap lots of those so called improvements.
Both. We need to return to what copyright law was and also account for the more modern abuses in which corporations just hoard copyrighted properties long after the author’s death.
C’mon man, Hunter would be happy if someone could alter his artwork!
Mr. President,
You needn’t fret. Have you forgotten that those color-by-number paintings aren’t exactly sold for their aesthetics.
You handlers arranged for us to get access and those ridiculous paintings are discarded 5 minutes after we hand over our proposal.
(Just curious, Mr. President. The Taliban didn’t fork over a single dime, and got everything they wanted and more – MUCH more. What up!??)
I forget why, sorry man.
Mr. President,
That’s why we always write down our requests, and hand ’em to your handlers.
Pleasure doing business with you.
Digital text will always be subject to hacking and subtle changes without consent of the author. Books and original documents can’t be edited after they’re printed. That part of history is only edited-out of view by burning them.
And isn’t it weird, that the most popular online book app is Kindle… and in the book burners needed to kindle a fire.
Rimshot! 🥁
The left destroys everything they get their hands on, except their own retirement packages, and palasades kept free of illegals or Nidal Hassan types. (Martha’s Vineyard demonstrated that.)
Furthermore, owning a book is actual private property; buying an ebook (e.g., Kindle) is not.
A book may be bequeathed to an heir; an ebook may be so bequeathed; it is merely a rental.
Correction: an ebook may not be so bequeathed.
Creating fake narratives and worldviews. Some people live in them.
Private property is selfish and selfishness is deplorable and reprehensible. Selfishness also known as individualism is a fake narrative, the self is the enemy of brotherly love. Get rid of the selfish copyright laws for the common good, for brotherly love. Stamp out selfishness once and for all. Dr. Seuss didn’t write that! It takes a village of brothers and sisters to raise a Dr. Seuss. Share the intellectual wealth, spread the intellectual wealth, for the common good.
Let us know when you actually write something that is relevant to anything.
Your rant is even more incoherent than usual. Congrats.
But an intelligent response that addresses the actual situation instead of slogans would be too much to ask.
I assumed this was sarcastic, but 4 thumbs-down seem to think THX is sincere. ???
It seems as if many readers missed the sarcastic intent of THX’s post.
You might have gotten more upvotes if you had added the (sarc) tag to your post.
Go, run and buy the orginal of any such work-not a digitalized woke version
While you still can.
When Seuss books were cancelled, eBay banned old editions from being sold.
For the time being, one can still obtain older editions of extant works at: bookfinder.com.
Alibris is also a good resource.
Leftist threw a fit about classic movies being colorized. But they have no qualms about cutting scenes from those movies when they don’t like the content. Now books are on the hit list for leftist censors, and are being ruined in the process. These aren’t the only egregious rewrites. They are just the ones in the news because of being classic children’s books. For example, Tom Clancy’s “Without Remorse” was totally rewritten to coincide with the release of an Amazon steaming series. I still have the original book that is far superior to both.
Whoa. I was not aware of that.
” Tom Clancy’s “Without Remorse” was totally rewritten to coincide with the release of an Amazon steaming series.”
I know Clancy became a brand a long time ago, but rewriting a deceased author’s book is a new one.
Is there any coverage of that?
I always buy hard copies (used, whenever) of the books I really like, though I prefer the convenience of eBooks. Word to the wise.
I do too.
The compulsion to censor/edit the words (and hence the thoughts) of one’s fellow humans is hardly new. Thomas Bowdler published the expurgated William Shakespeare edited by his sister, Henrietta, in the 19th Century, to make it more palatable to wholesome family life. (As a Christian conservative and an ordained minister, I empathize with the desire, but denounce the result: Shakespeare belongs to Shakespeare; if one does not like his style, then one does not need to read him.) Harper-Collins, circa 2005, attempted – but, fortunately, failed – a reverse Bowdlerization (that is, from the political left, not from the right) of The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis. The vaunted Peter Jackson trilogy of movies of The Lord of the Rings, circa 2001-2003, is rife with deliberate secularization and subversion. (That is why Christopher Tolkien, his father’s sounding board for the work in progress, hated those movies.)
That is very well stated. What happened with the Narnia books? I had not heard of this.
There was some kind of push back, I think by the family estate (but that is old memory from 2005 or so). I do explicitly recall that Harper-Collins intended to remove any intimations that Aslan was a type of Christ; their intent was clearly to make the work completely secular.
Thank you. I would have assumed that they’d have more issues with Prince Caspian.
We are now officially living in Orwell’s dystopian nightmare: Amerika.
To think that a gang of radical maniacs dare to manipulate the words as written by its author is a final act of destruction of Western civilization.
The barbarians are within the gates!
Next come the DemoNazi burning of books!
Make that Conservative Books wrote by Conservatives
“There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity…I am certainly anti-Israel, and I have become anti-Semitic…makes one wonder in the end what sort of people these Israelis are. It is like the good old Hitler and Himmler times all over again”. Some of his comments. He also said things about US legislators that are not far removed from Congresswoman Omar’s pearls of wisdom about “Benjamins”. So, if he gets edited (to say the least), I am nothing but indifferent.