The damn gopher was obnoxious enough…

Which part of “timeless” is this dolt missing:

“We got raised eyebrows even in-house at first, but the feeling was these timeless characters really needed a breath of fresh air that only the introduction of someone new could provide,” says Nancy Kanter of the Disney Channel.” usa today via lileks

Disney makes more from Pooh than any of its other characters. And the abuse of the classic goes on and on and on.

Once Disney bought the copyright it was free to introduce what ever goofy characters it wanted to and turn Tigger’s bounces into a excuse for super dooper ally ooper action flights. We got an annoying bird, Kessie, and the obligatory Festus character, Gopher. Disney dumbed Pooh down and made sure that it was all the rock’em sock’em action required for children raised on six hours a day of television.

Now we have the prospect of a bike helmeted little girl to take the place of Christopher Robin. As Lileks puts it,

Christopher Robin is the bridge to this world, and once you’re there you really don’t need him. When I was very young I wanted to take his place, and it seemed an easy thing to do, since he had no qualities of his own. Nevertheless, the name has a certain persistent power – it’s almost an incantation, a line in a childish liturgy that summons up the 100 Acre Wood. lileks

The point of a liturgy is to place a child or a person in a place at some distance from their daily lives. A bike helmeted, knapsack toting, little girl keeps the child stuck in the day to day. No more, “Once upon a time”. Just the relentless destruction of the tiny threads of childish imagination which have somehow survived the onslaught of the pedestrian minds at Disney.

And people wonder why we don’t have a TV.

Written by jay on March 10th, 2007 with no comments.
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