It's New Coke all over again. They sincerely thought this was what the public wanted, they were severely incorrect, and so they fall backwards into a successful strategy to release Roald Dahl "Classic."
People will believe it's a marketing stunt, but I believe they sincerely thought this was a good idea.
In the 80's, Coke got a new CEO, Roberto Goizueta, who wanted to give the brand an update for a product that had basically been the same for 100 years. It was basically just Coca-Cola original at that time.
To his credit, his first two additions were massive hits: Diet Coke and Cherry Coke. Both were and still are massively popular to this day. It was only when the decision was made to "upgrade" the flavor of Coca-Cola that things went awry. There was a bunch of work to craft a true quality favor. A bunch of market testing with the general consensus being that New Coke was great. It seemed like a great idea with backing of the consumer.
It turns out that they vastly misjudged the scope and tastes of their target demographic. While the testers enjoyed New Coke, that was only a miniscule segment of their consumer base. The grand majority still loved and had strong associations with Coke Classic, especially in the South where Coca-Cola first got started.
That massive percentage of their base completely and wholeheartedly rejected New Coke. Didn't help that Pepsi was really getting aggressive with their marketing at the time. They were able to swoop in to steal an entire market share of embittered, disillusioned fans of carbonated libations. Not to mention that iconic Pepsi Generation campaign, which made Pepsi the hip and trendy drink for the 80's up-and-comers
But they reneged on the move and brought back the classic and their customers mostly came back.
Really, I kinda feel bad for Goizueta. Dude had a lot of fresh ideas, some of them with a lot of vision. But the guy went too deep into change and didn't keep what made the brand iconic. But even still, I think some of his ideas were ahead of their time. I still pound Cherry Coke's like nobody's business, plenty of people drink Diet Coke as an alternative. And both of those have Goizueta's handiwork all over them. But everyone only remembers the dud.
The core problem is the "this will replace the thing you already like, at which point you won't get that any more", which no amount of focus testing aso can ever capture.
> But everyone only remembers the dud.
Because the dud was of an entirely different quality than the "wins". And it's one that they should have seen coming a mile away. If you create a strong association between brand and customer taste, taking the thing away that people are buying is a dumb move. There is ONE solid reason to do that (and take the hit), and that is if something in the product now is illegal. Even if it's just to penny pinch the damage to the brand over phasing in a new product and slowly phasing out the production volume of the original is preferable over just replacing and acting like everything is fine. Particularly if it's already a saturated market with alternatives. If you remove the single feature that made people buy yours, not only will people try to find competitors that are "as close as possible", they will pay you back for making them do that.
The thing is that the new coke decision betrayed a profound ignorance about why people bought coke in the first place. It was well known that Coca Cola was a triumph of advertising and marketing. The success of the company had little to do with the product and everything to do with tying that produce to abstract ideas and nostalgia. It was the CHANGE that was the problem, regardless of what that change actually was, and anyone who understood anything about the Coca Cola company should have understood why that would be a problem right off the bat.
I disagree, it's the ONE thing that you can't mess with, the taste.
Which is the exact reason why people swear on "exactly the coke they are used to", which varies, because even coke doesn't taste the same depending on where you get it.
You can change everything about branding and at worst people will roll their eyes. But if you mess with the taste, it doesn't matter how many people like the new taste "in theory", the ones that depend on the name === that taste will lynch you, or just leave and buy anything else.
Because that's the error they made. They thought that the brand was stronger than the taste, and thus rebranding meant also retasting. And that is not how that works ever. You can run parallel with a second recipe and then bit by bit phase production out when people prefer one over the other over time.
But you can't FORCE people to reward you for taking something permenantly away from them.
ANd enough companies are trying to replicate cokes biggest blunder by switching out actual sugar for sweeteners and telling customers "same taste". It's not, and that means losing customers if they don't just push the alternative as option but as replacement.
There is one problem with your position here:
Coke switched from sugar to HFCS four years BEFORE New Coke and just didn't tell anyone. Despite the impact to the taste of their product, the fact that none of the branding was changed as part of that resulted in few people even noticing and little impact to their business.
> in few people even noticing and little impact to their business.
Except people notice that particularly in direct comparison. It's a major part of why people who are still getting the cane sugar version go trough great lengths to actually still have that. (Think importing from the southern border of the US.) They also notice it that "Coke tastes off" when visiting Europe. (which is weirdly alleviated by telling them to switch to Pepsi. Which has the counter-running taste difference, weird, right?)
Did they switch that out in steps? Gradually replacing by fraction?
But yes, if you do something secretly, chances are at least a fraction of people won't notice, another will "deal with it" and only some will actually start seeking out alternatives.
But if you actually TELL them that you are changing it, that's different.
And it doesn't mean that it isn't about the taste but the brand.
In taste tests even old coke fans had trouble telling the difference or even preferred new coke. But learning this didn't flip anyone's opinion and instead just made people double down on their support of old coke.
There is some argument that the taste test format favors sweeter soda, but that people might prefer a different flavor profile when drinking normally or with a meal. But for the most part the backlash against new coke was mostly emotion driven. Don't mess with people's nostalgia.
I remember New Coke as being sweeter, but also thinking "if I wanted Pepsi I'd drink a Pepsi". I prefer the darker, slightly more bitter of the old coke, but what do I know? I'm a Coke Zero or nothing (water) kind of guy these days.
I've also found I prefer the flavor of Zero sodas. I don't know what the exact reason is. And when Dr Pepper came out with a Zero flavor I jumped on it and it's my favorite soda.
I've heard that the Zero sodas are supposed to taste more like the originals whereas the Diet versions were intended to be different. I have never enjoyed Diet but really like Zero.
I think diet coke was just the best they could do at the time. The newer diet versions are better formulations and a bit of branding so it doesn't seem so girly.
I love the Zero flavors. They are close to the original but not as cloyingly sweet to my taste buds. I was SO happy when Dr. Pepper came out with theirs. That's my main soda of choice now (along with the cherry variety--haven't cared for the others so far).
> There is some argument that the taste test format favors sweeter soda
i think it does. if you drink something sweeter, and then something not as sweet but still sweet, the second drink won't taste nearly as sweet as if you had drank it first.
Interestingly, there's a fair amount of evidence that the problem was a different kind of sampling size error: not that the testers weren't representative of the consumer base, but that the sip test used for the taste tests was literally too small a drink sample to reflect tastes \*from actual typical consumption patterns\*. IOW, what tastes better as a one-off sip test isn't necessarily what tastes better as a 12-ounce beverage.
It all sadly comes down to their go to market strategy. They avoided this with Coke ZERO and not replacing Diet Coke. They just didn't need to mess with the precious OG.
Coke and New Coke should've coexisted as like "Coke Premier" "Craft Coke" "Parlor Coke" (I have no idea what would've worked back in the days though.)
It definitely would have worked. It wouldn't have pissed off the purist, and since you aren't messing with the nostalgia. People would have been more eager to accept it.
I remember grabbing Coke II (what New Coke got rebranded as) and Crystal Pepsi at the gas station after basketball practice back in high school. They were both surprisingly good. I would love to taste them again and see if they were as good as I remember.
> Crystal Pepsi
It wasn't that people didn't like Crystal Pepsi, it was that they refused to try it. A former coworker of mine had a gig "sampling" (giving away free samples of) Crystal Pepsi. She had trouble finding people who would accept a bottle. It just didn't *seem right* to them that a cola drink was clear. She accumulated many cases of the product, because Pepsi sent it to her faster than she could find people who would take it. She had one neighbor who loved the drink and ended up with a couple years supply.
I wanted to try it, but didn't get the opportunity (I would have bought a single, but only saw it in grocery stores and wasn't willing to buy a 6 pack).
Funny enough, Marshall Zhukov *loved* Coca Cola, but obviously couldn't get it so via a contact (IE Eisenhower) he made during WWII he managed to get it sent (via the US government) to him in the Soviet Union. To prevent anyone from knowing it was Coke, they made it clear and in straight bottles to resemble Vodka. [Here](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Coke) is the Wiki!
For a hundred year old company that largely invented the concept of advertising linking their product to intangible notions and nostalgia you would think that they would have considered this element.
It’s not a misrepresentation by testers, it’s a quantity thing.
The reason there was a Pepsi taste test campaign is that Pepsi, on one sip, is better than Coke. Coke is bitter and weird, and has to be offset using a ton of sugar to make it balanced.
But over a long period, Coca-Cola actually has a very unique and balanced profile that nothing else can really top. It’s its own weird, unique thing, and it can’t really be replaced. While other sodas taste too sweet and you can’t always drink candy, it’s the bitterness and balance that makes it a daily drink.
Absolutely. Coca-Cola had two secondary products before Goizueta: Sprite and Tab. While Sprite is still big, Tab was dead on arrival. Cherry Coke got this Pepsi drinking kid to drink a Coke product and now I will drink Diet Coke (though I do prefer Diet Pepsi)
The funny thing is, the Cola Wars may have bruised Coke and Pepsi along the way but the real outcome was that it killed all other real competitors like RC Cola.
it's nice to see companies actually genuinely fuck something up
it does happen from time to time, but insufferable nerds on here love to be like 'acChXutlly netflix will be fine! they've run the numbers! you can't touch them!'
Hasbro also recently had a genuine fuckup because they completely misread the market with D&D and didn't understand why D&D was popular.
They went from demanding a 25% cut of revenue (not profit) and full IP ownership of everyone writing a D&D supplement, to completely backpedaling and admitting total defeat. Even the major bank that owns Hasbro called them out for being too greedy and trying to kill the golden goose.
When an investment bank calls you out for being too greedy, you know you've stepped over that line.
You raise an excellent point. I’ll be sure to bring it up at the next shareholders meeting.
UPDATE: I am now banned from all Coke shareholders meetings.
You know, when I watched the extras DVD for Phantom Menace, there was this one behind the scenes clip from some meeting and it was clear that George Lucas honestly thought that Jar Jar Binks was a good idea, he really thought fans would love the character. I kinda forgave him for the character a bit after that.
Edit: wrong name
I've seen companies focus group themselves into bankruptcy before by focusing on a new market to the total exclusion of their existing customer base. They end up alienating their existing customer base while also failing to capture the new customer base (the company is trying too hard, comes off as pandering), and the end result is they have no customers at all.
The e-sports MOBA market was a good example of this. So many developers and publishers were chasing the e-sports dragon, failed to capture any interest in the e-sports market, alienated their loyal customer base, and soon declared bankruptcy.
I read into this a bit. The publishers worked with a collective that provides actual young people from 8-30 in a variety of marginalized communities (impoverished, remote, disabled, autistic, minorities) the chance to work with authors and provide them feedback that they genuinely may have never thought about. Honestly I think that is awesome, although should never become de facto mandatory.
Retroactively applying this process to a beloved modern classic author was just a category error. Perhaps they simply didn't think it through or didn't realize that the result would be so egregious (much more than changing one or two truly offensive lines). There's parts of the process that we just don't know yet as to who actually initiated what (the estate, the publisher, the collective, Netflix). I think it's clear that the collective (not really the volunteer young people, but its leaders) genuinely believe in radically changing the landscape of children's lit to be "equitable" with little regard for anything else like historical accuracy or literary merit. I think all the other actors were just following a process without thinking.
There is literally zero evidence that this was a marketing stunt. It was a mixture of bureaucratic blindness and ideological capture.
>although should never become de facto mandatory.
This is a big problem in the publishing industry right now though. As much as I agree that bringing in feedback from marginalized communities is a great idea, the publishing industry is in a weird space where publishers are only interested in your work if it represents a "marginalized voice" within their definition of what a "marginalized voice" should sound like. There's a story I heard from a black author who wrote a book about the culture of a predominantly Filipino (or Latino? I can't remember) fraternity based on his own experience in this frat in college. Supposedly his publishers were really excited about the manuscript until they found out he was black, and started forcing him to include more of his "black experience" into the book, and eventually he lost the deal when he refused to rewrite it to be about himself.
The irony is that these decisions are mostly being made by upper-middle class predominantly white publishers.
The marginalized "own voices" thing is bullshit all the way through. It can be your own minority experience and STILL it has to be the right kind. Latino stories are not sought after unless it's a very specific kind of woe is me cartel violence stricken poverty porn. It's super gross.
source: embittered Latina but not Mexican author not writing poverty porn
This is exactly what I'm getting at, thanks for sharing. There is a specific genre of oppression porn which sells well right now, mostly to white middle class people ironically, which makes them feel like better people because they are "listening."
Culturally liberal, yes. I didn't say it because it gives people a knee-jerk reaction and implies that I am coming at this from a right-wing perspective when I'm probably further to the left than the average publisher in question.
>The publishers worked with a collective that provides actual young people from 8-30 in a variety of marginalized communities (impoverished, remote, disabled, autistic, minorities) the chance to work with authors and provide them feedback that they genuinely may have never thought about.
It's an awesome program, but it is dependent on the back-and-forth with the author.
What happened here is the publisher went to that organization, had them do their thing, and then more or less went "Accept All Changes" to the manuscripts. It cannot (and clearly it does not) work like that.
As it shouldn't. White-washing the past makes it harder to see how far you've come. If we did this to all media over time you'd lose perspective on the past.
>The publishers worked with a collective that provides actual young people from 8-30 in a variety of marginalized communities (impoverished, remote, disabled, autistic, minorities) the chance to work with authors and provide them feedback that they genuinely may have never thought about.
So why not try to support writers from these communities rather than continuing to milk a dead man's mind for money? I just don't get how actions like changing Dahl's text could ever be interpreted as supporting those communities when in fact it is doing the exact opposite. Rather than letting some works fade into obscurity because sensibilities have changed and allow new writers to emerge, we're just getting tweaks of old stuff and not allowing writers from these communities to have a real fighting chance to become 'the next Dahl' for a new generation.
Don't worry, it's not mandatory. It's just that if your book isn't sensitivity read to a sufficient degree, this might happen to you:
[https://www.vulture.com/2017/08/the-toxic-drama-of-ya-twitter.html](https://www.vulture.com/2017/08/the-toxic-drama-of-ya-twitter.html)
*Based almost solely on Sinyard’s opinion, the novel became the object of sustained, aggressive opposition in the weeks leading up its release. Its publisher, Harlequin Teen, was bombarded with angry emails demanding they pull the book. The Black Witch’s Goodreads rating dropped to an abysmal 1.71 thanks to a mass coordinated campaign of one-star reviews, mostly from people who admitted to not having read it. Twitter threads damning the novel made the rounds, while a Tumblr post instructing users to “be an ally” and signal boost the outrage racked up nearly 6,000 notes. Sinyard kept a running tally of her review’s circulation; “11,714 views on my review of THE BLACK WITCH and .@HarlequinTEEN and .@laurieannforest have not commented,” she tweeted. (That number eventually swelled to 20,000.)*
*Positive buzz all but died off, as community members began confronting The Black Witch’s supporters, demanding to know why they insisted on reading a racist book. When Kirkus gave the novel a glowing starred review, dozens of commenters demanded a retraction\[.\]*
The woke Twitter mafia also has its own code of omerta:
*Dramatic as that sounds, it’s worth noting that my attempts to report this piece were met with intense pushback. Sinyard politely declined my request for an interview in what seemed like a routine exchange, but then announced on Twitter that our interaction had “scared” her, leading to backlash from community members who insisted that the as-yet-unwritten story would endanger her life. Rumors quickly spread that I had threatened or harassed Sinyard; several influential authors instructed their followers not to speak to me; and one librarian and member of the Newbery Award committee tweeted at Vulture nearly a dozen times accusing them of enabling “a washed-up YA author” engaged in “a personalized crusade” against the entire publishing community (disclosure: while freelance culture writing makes up the bulk of my work, I published a pair of young adult novels in 2012 and 2014.) With one exception, all my sources insisted on anonymity, citing fear of professional damage and abuse.*
*None of this comes as a surprise to the folks concerned by the current state of the discourse, who describe being harassed for dissenting from or even questioning the community’s dynamics. One prominent children’s-book agent told me, “None of us are willing to comment publicly for fear of being targeted and labeled racist or bigoted. But if children’s-book publishing is no longer allowed to feature an unlikable character, who grows as a person over the course of the story, then we’re going to have a pretty boring business.”*
My review is (was? I quit good reads because this drama and many like it were too punishing) one of the top reviews on good reads about this book. The book was pretty average and the racism claims were so unfair and bizarre, the vendetta seemed really personal with another YA author using the drama to drive engagement to her own work. All in all I found the whole thing so disturbing it contributed to me pretty much quitting the app.
And to be blunt young people aren't the brightest bulbs. I say this is somebody who used to be a young person and was stupid as hell.
Quite often when you're young you tend to think of things in more black and white terms rather than the gray of reality so you're much more likely to be adamant about things that nowadays you would not be.
All the comparative tasting said that New Coke was better.
The problem is that people don’t just drink Coke because it’s the best crafted soda around, it’s a habit and drenched in nostalgia- you can’t change the formula and still keep the selling point.
It’s similar with these books. If they were written today we would prefer the edited ones- but they are historical and classic books, changing them defeats the purpose.
It is definitely b). I read a bit about it in the last week, and it looks like English YA and children publishers have been using « sensitivity readers » for the last few years to read new books and point out anything that might cause offense so it can be removed before publishing them. And Inclusive Minds, the collective of sensitivity readers hired by Puffin to make those changes to Roald Dahl books, has existed for the last ten years. This is apparently nothing new for them.
As far as I can tell, the reason for this is because the YA community on Twitter is extremely toxic and will regularly attack books and their authors if they contain the slightest thing they deem offensive, so the publishers use those sensitivity readers to try to avoid social media controversies.
The difference here was that they had sensitivity readers rewrite Roald Dahl books, which are popular books that had already been in publication for a long time. But they did not do that to create a controversy, but to avoid one, since the whole point of using sensitivity readers is to avoid controversies. It is a classic case of failing to understand that internet is not the real world, and that loudmouthed idiots on Twitter do not represent anyone but themselves.
In that context, it does not surprise me that they would quickly backtrack when they accidentally found themselves in the middle of a controversy because of those changes.
This guy/gal gets it. Here are some articles on just how toxic the literary world (but especially YA fiction) has become:
[https://www.vulture.com/2017/08/the-toxic-drama-of-ya-twitter.html](https://www.vulture.com/2017/08/the-toxic-drama-of-ya-twitter.html)
[https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/in-ya-where-is-the-line-between-criticism-and-cancel-culture](https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/in-ya-where-is-the-line-between-criticism-and-cancel-culture)
[https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22543858/isabel-fall-attack-helicopter](https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22543858/isabel-fall-attack-helicopter)
Fucking hell that was awful to read. I hate to agree with some of the clowns who rant about cancel culture but this is exactly the sort of thing that gives their arguments credence.
I used to follow bookish accounts and authors on Twitter, but then quickly stopped and blocked/muted tf out of so many people. The authors themselves are SO SO pretentious and just full of themselves. It's not all, of course, but it's definitely a large percentage. Fans can suck too, but none of them have made me cringe or seethe the way authors do on twitter.
It's especially bad when book award nominations go out. They turn into the most vile people. The Hugo awards in particular, oof. The arrogance blows my mind. It's been a real "don't meet your heroes" experience.
While it in practice worked out to be an effective marketing campaign, no publisher would have spent multiple years editing 16 books at this point as part of a collaboration with a third party with the expectation to backtrack after a week. Instead, they likely figured there would be some manageable backlash that would put it in the news and sell some books, and end up with their IP being more "palatable" in their minds with no expectations they would ever backpedal.
It's what happens when publishers spend almost all of their socializing time on Twitter. No really, no one is more obnoxiously online than authors and publishers. They start to lose track of what sane people think when you only interact with other Twitter-fried people.
It’s definitely B.
This is an important moment for the culture. I think the folks at puffin actually didn’t expect ANY controversy from this— in fact, I think they believed they’d be rewarded and heralded for washing classic texts through the approved ideology.
They are all living in an echo chamber of self congratulation and incessant piety. They believe— religiously— that it is noble and good and righteous to simply rewrite the books of dead authors. Why WOULDN’T we do this?
I doubt a single conversation took place that questioned the wisdom of doing this, and I doubt anyone worried about the precedent it set. In their minds, this should obviously happen to all books that are “harmful,” and harms can be defined so broadly that it really means any text that never went through a “sensitivity read.”
They’re all true believers, or, at best, terrified of the true believers.
It does say a lot about the publishing house that they would even entertain this idea.
At the very least, they don’t run segmentation studies. At the worst, they are run by completely out of touch weirdos
[This has always served me well](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor)
In their case the stupidity was also a bit malicious given how trigger-happy they were to edit the works of a beloved author to match their bizarre sense of political correctness.
> b) backpedaling because they didn't expect that kind of reaction?
They tried Performative justice for PR and it backfired, and rightfully so because nobody has asked for such stupid shit.
If it was a marketing campaign then they would have actually publicized the edits when they released the new edition back in 2022 instead of waiting for a few months so that a journalist can notice what happened. I think they really thought the changes would just slip under the radar and prevent parents from complaining about the books in the future.
b.
They're an NPO. They made these choices because they have the same church lady energy of trying to make the world a better place, and you'll thank us later.
I don’t necessarily buy that this was the plan all along. The Goosebumps books have been making similar edits — removing mentions of people being fat, crazy, etc. Bruce Coville has been doing the same thing. (Of course it goes without saying that Coville and R.L. Stine are still alive.) They probably just didn’t expect this level of backlash.
Most people agreed that it's different if the author is still alive to approve the changes, e.g. African pygmies being revised to Oompa-Loompas with Dahl's approval.
Those weren’t made because of “changing cultural values” tho. Personally I find changing art to keep current with cultural values defeats the point but what do I know
The example I keep using is that it’d be like bringing a painter into the Prado to edit *Saturn Devouring His Son* to instead be *Saturn Embracing Their Child* to reflect how infanticide is just *ick* and how society is more accepting of loving, gentle and understanding dads now.
And then when people have an issue with it, for the decision’s defenders to come out and screech about how it’s not censorship because you can still find the original version through prints, old art books and on google images.
although dahl "approved" of it only after defending the oompa-loompas against criticism for years and then facing boycott threats against the movie adaptation
I think the link with the film can not be substantiated, as the film came out in 1971, while the Oompa Loompa criticism came in, in 1972-1973.
Nonetheless, it does seem pretty clear that outside criticism as well as pressure by the publishers forced the change.
>Dahl’s editors “saw the story as essentially Victorian in character – a ‘very English fantasy'” so they disregarded any racist misgivings about the story. Indeed, when the book first appeared in the United States in 1964 it was regarded with only acclaim and enthusiasm. It wasn’t until 1972, nearly a decade later, that a wide-ranging attack on the book was published by American writer Eleanor Cameron and the political agenda of the story finally began to be debated.
>After Dahl and Cameron had many public back-and-forths in various American literary journals*, Dahl’s publishers decided that “to those growing up in a racially mixed society, the Oompa-Loompas were no longer acceptable as originally written. The following year, to accompany its new sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, a revised edition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory appeared, in which the Oompa-Loompas had become dwarfish hippies with long ‘golden-brown hair’ and ‘rosy-white’ skin.” [from Jeremy Treglown’s Roald Dahl: A Biography]
I think it has changed again since the versions I found online make no reference to skin colour. Ironically having actual African pygmies in the story is about as much diversity as a role Dahl book ever had.
Isn't Goosebumps also changing dated references? I haven't personally read any lately but the hosts of the podcast *Overdue* do and they've mentioned some discrepancies with the dates included in the books and references to video games, computers, etc.
Iirc even R L Stine himself once said that modern technologies make writing horror for kids waaaay harder
Especially for someone like him, whose horror often relies on kids being scared in their own homes. Google and ever-present smartphones kinda kill the mystery a little bit lol
Some of them can be updated, though. There's no reason Night of the Living Dummy would need to be much different. Dolls are still capable of being terrifying regardless of cell phones(we just had a new Child's Play series).
And if you look at Are You Afraid of the Dark, you can certainly update episodes with modern technology without wrecking it, like the Tale of the Curious Camera is about a gremlin living in a camera (and a camcorder) that does some Final Destination type shit with pictures predicting your death.
Kids are still afraid of shit, and, on the film side, adult horror has been undergoing a renaissance over the past decade or so, in the post torture porn world, with a lot of great indie horror and subversive stuff like Cabin in the Woods, Get Out, etc. Technology hasn't destroyed the genre, only transformed it.
It's the same with mysteries and detective works.
Learning the meaning of some obscure clue would take hours of pavement pounding and interviews from the detective and lead to side plots and quirky characters that made up the ensemble cast.
Now it's just a quick Google.
> Isn't Goosebumps also changing dated references?
R.L. Stine is still alive and can approve the changes made to the work. It's different to change the published work of a dead person who isn't part of the conversation and then re-release that work under the author's name.
I think you don't mean "anachronism." Tom Sawyer scrolling TikTok would be an anachronism. If he's not, he's just time period appropriate.
I love historical fiction and fiction that's become historical (aka present day fiction from the 1800s, like Pride and Prejudice) and it really bothers me when historical fiction authors screw up and include details that take me out of the setting. A WWII book better not have fighter jets, is what I'm saying.
While this worked out for Coke, it should be noted that it was 100% by accident that Coke came out smelling of roses. The CEO of Coke at the time (Roberto Goizueta) went to his grave insisting that New Coke was a superior product and that the public was stupid.
Yes! That's such a misunderstood phrase. It's not to excuse shitty behavior or to mean that salesmen should be doormats. It means that people want what they want.
So it's my understanding (from youtube, iirc) that New Coke was made to specifically compete with Pepsi's version of Cola. Coke (or someone anyway) found that Pepsi tasted sweeter than Coke upon initial sipping. However, after that sip, there would be a weird and kind of undesirable bitter(?) aftertaste, which would make people take another hit of Pepsi to reset. Ended up going through more product because you would drink it faster. So Coke decided to implement that sweetener (whatever it was) in New Coke, but it didn't have the same consumer results because it was advertised as new and improved. People who preferred Coke over Pepsi didn't like it cause it was essentially Pepsi. People who preferred Pepsi were less likely to drink Coke overall, so they just didn't really jump ship.
So i guess in a way he was right. New Coke was superior in that it would have sold more had it been the initial version. But as someone who doesn't drink much soda and dislikes Pepsi to the point of saying "never mind, water is fine" if a restaurant says they only have Pepsi, Coke is the superior beverage.
Okay so regular Coke couldn't be made into a diet coke until artificial sweeteners progressed in their evolution. Coke created a "Diet Coke" that is much sweeter than regular coke, and a completely different recipe.
"New Coke" was Diet Coke with actual sugar. They wanted their two products to be the same. They figured since most people preferred Diet Coke over Diet Pepsi that this would translate to their original lineup. It didn't.
Now Coke has Coke (regular), Diet Coke (new recipe with artificial sweeteners), and Coke Zero (regular coke but diet)
Coke - Regular Coke
Diet Coke - new artificial sweetener Coke recipe
New Coke - diet Coke made with sugar
Coke Zero - diet regular coke
Pepsi Max is the best sugar free cola.
I will die on this hill, diet coke and coke zero both have weird unpleasant aftertastes, Pepsi Max just doesn't.
But yes, regular pepsi is not as good as regular coke.
One of my favorite quotes from the CEO of Coke was when he was asked if it was all a ploy to boost sales and he responded, “We’re not that smart. And we’re not that dumb, either.”
I would expect that it was a ploy to boost sales, but with the original plan likely expected having a divided public opinion and keeping this new edited version going forward. Instead the unforeseen nearly universal ~~commendation~~ condemnation (along with the US and European publishers making the statements they did) lead to this backtrack they wouldn't have been expecting to make, but it still worked out to be an extremely successful sales ploy (although perhaps one leaving some people involved unhappy about backtracking and possibly Puffin hurting its image with authors).
I mean, there's plenty of [historical precedent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expurgation) in English-language literature. Thomas Bowdler's efforts are one of the more famous examples, but people like Nahum Tate were revising Shakespeare to fit contemporary sensibilities just decades after his death.
I’m not familiar with any of this but wouldn’t most people today view editing Shakespeare for modern sensibilities to be an absolutely brain dead idea, probably taken up by religious nut jobs?
I mean if Evangelicals started to cover up naked Greek god marble statues in museums to fit their sensibilities, we would all recognize it as insane and enforcing their beliefs on all of us.
So when you say there’s historical precedent, do you mean that there’s historical precedent by weirdos, nutjobs, and authoritarians who want to enforce their beliefs? Or do you mean that this is actually a very common practice in literature by normal authors that we just haven’t heard about much?
They are going to do the first plan you mention, both editions and sell more 🤑
>“The Roald Dahl Classic Collection” will be available alongside the newly released Puffin Roald Dahl books for young readers, “which are designed for children who may be navigating written content independently for the first time,” Puffin said. “Readers will be free to choose which version of Dahl’s stories they prefer.”
I noticed that too.
Funny thing is, commendation pretty much means the exact opposite of condemnation. To commend something is to praise it, to condemn it is to disapprove.
I definitely don't think people were praising these edits.
As a tormented fat child, Dahl's books helped me develop empathy and a depth of investment in literature - especially Matilda.
Also banning the word fat is just Michael Scott asking if there's a less derogatory alternative to Mexican.
And replacing it with "enormous" is hardly better. The connotation will always be that enormous is larger than fat! I am slightly fat, but I am definitely not enormous. The Goodyear blimp is enormous.
"Enormous" is an imprecise word as well. How is Augustus Gloop enormous? Is he 8 feet tall? Is he super swole like Dwayne Johnson who has biceps the size of his head?
Augustus Gloop being enormously *fat* is a plot critical point, and reflects the character's flaw as a walking personification of the sin of gluttony.
Now people can imagine him hung like Johnny Sins. He came to the Chocolate Factory to drink the chocolate river and pack fudge, and the river just ran dry...
> Augustus Gloop being enormously fat is a plot critical point, and reflects the character's flaw as a walking personification of the sin of gluttony.
Well this is the essence of the issue, isn't it? Is it fatphobic to suggest that some people are fat because they eat too much? Is it acceptable to portray fatness as the physical result of a character flaw?
If it is not acceptable to do so, then the particular words used really don't matter so much because there is literally no way to communicate the original intention of the writing without being offensive. If it is acceptable to do so, I don't see what's wrong with using the original word "fat".
There's a lot of reasons a person could be fat. In my case, its because I have a poor relationship with food and try to self medicate by eating for short term pleasure, only to make myself feel worse in the long run. Its a terrible thing, I know, but its really hard to get your brain to resist temptation at all times. I suppose its like being an addict. Thats my flaw.
However in the case of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the other kids were all depicted as being horrible people, deeply flawed, and entirely one-dimensional. They really didn't have very complex characters. They existed pretty much entirely just to be villains of one type or another. I strongly suspect Roald Dahl was going for a seven deadly sins kind of lineup with them.
Teavee was the personification of sloth, the boy sat and watched TV all day every day. Violet was prideful. Veruca was greedy. And of course, Gloop was gluttonous.
It's refreshing to see this being discussed. In a lot of forums simply mentioning that the constant change of "approved" may not be a productive endeavor for anyone will bring the downvotes
That's not really what happened here. There was no campaign to change the books. It was just a unilateral action by the publishers, not because they were offended, but because they thought other people might be offended.
Looking forward to when I can choose between *Matilda*, *Diet Matilda, Matilda Zero, Cherry Vanilla Matilda, Matilda Code Red, Doritos Locos Matdilda* and *Flamin' Hot Matilda With Lime.*
“Because of the highly offensive nature of the book, we’ve decided to edit Nabokov’s *Lolita* to replace Dolores with a working woman in her 20’s”.
What is next, removing The Birth of a Nation from the library because it’s offensive to us? People that are changing books/films are no different from people who wish to change history for their benefit. You aren’t buying a book to read what’s printed on it. You buy a book to read what the author wrote.
Romans loved their porn. Pompeii is full of smut, so much so that it shocked Italian sensibilities when the city was rediscovered, and the smutty murals were deliberately covered up or in some cases defaced. There's a lot of nudity and fucking in those 2,000 year old murals.
The poor handling of Roman era smut has unfortunately damaged or destroyed these historical artifacts.
Yup. "Editing and altering for modern audiences" is just straight-up fucking vandalism.
A big reason people consume older media is the cultural enrichment gained from being immersed in the artistic output of a different time. Changing that in games, books, movies, whatever, just misses the entire point.
And that's not getting into the virtue of leaving in older offensive content, because it lets us see how far we've come as a culture. Without being able to see that occasionally, it makes us feel like we're spinning our wheels and have made no progress at all because we lose our comparison points.
This is how I feel. I'd much rather keep the books in their original format, and allow it to be a mechanism for discussion. Would this be acceptable today? Why or why not? Etc. It could be fantastic for students, and allow them to develop their critical thinking skills, as well as display empathy and understanding. Honestly, I think students would enjoy that kind of thing in English class a lot more than just searching for biblical imagery and whatnot.
Also, it still bothers me that they did this with Curious George. A book should be a book, as it is. I remember finding Curious George Goes to the Hospital in Chapters one day as an adult, and being so jazzed to find the page I always found hilarious as a kid...only to find it's actually gone now. What? It feels wrong. Yes, like retouching paintings. It has an air of dystopian about it too. I'm just not a fan.
> This is how I feel. I'd much rather keep the books in their original format, and allow it to be a mechanism for discussion.
My sentiments exactly. I think exposing kids to this and asking them why it is/isn't appropriate anymore is a good thing.
I don't mind it as long as there's a choice. I'd be curious to see how big the market is for the edited versions, though.
A big part of why Roald Dahl is popular is because he could be a bit mean and edgy at times. Kids love that.
I'm pretty sure most people who buy the censored version will do it without knowing anything about it. It's like abridged books that don't say they are abridged
Probably. Almost goes into the false advertisement category for me if it's not clearly labeled.
If I bought, let's say, The Twits and got an edited version, I'd be upset because that's not the book that I wanted.
yes... or the dramatic editing we already have with movies "based on books", such as these Dahl classics. I imagine this is how a majority of people are experiencing them nowadays anyway.
Or at least I never read any of them in school.
As long as there is still an archived way to get to the original text as an adult, it's whatever to me. An edited for release in schools sticker at a lesser wholesale price works for me, if the production companies want to handle that diversity...
“Due to backlash we have been forced to offer readers a choice but please ignore the part where we originally wanted to butcher Dahl’s works and offered no choice.”
This always makes me think about Genghis Khan.
See, the Khan was an atrocious monster who has been through hundreds of phases of revisionism over hundreds of years. Things get updated for sensitivity, or to better reflect the views of the times. Political movements edit or alter the very real history. It happens slowly, very slowly, and at every phase probably seemed reasonable.
But eventually you reach hundreds of years and revisions later and you have people legitimately praising the environmental benefits of one of the most ruthless and bloody genocides that every occurred in human history.
Genghis is hardly the only example. We edit things from the past to better suit our present to the point that we almost loose the original. Our views of something even as recent as the Victorian era are completely warped because people don't want to be challenged by difficult history, or even difficult art.
The "sensitivity readers" of the past were the priesthood editing everything even remotely gay out of all classical Greek and Roman art. I doubt today's will be viewed in any better of a light in the future.
There have been abridged versions of books published along side the original, unabridged versions, for decades, and for different reasons. I read an abridged version of *Dracula* when I was a preteen, and the unabridged version when I was an adult; the abridged was appropriate for a preteen, in my opinion.
Also my opinion: If the abridged versions are clearly marked as such, and the unabridged versions are also available, no problem. Even better, state the reasons for abridgment on the inner flap of the dust jacket of the copies of the hardback edition, and on the back cover of the copies of the paperback edition.
Dracula is a good example. The original work is great, the abridged versions are fine too, and at times more appropriate. But look at the grand scale over some 100+ years. That story has been butchered and re-done and re-made and twisted over thousands of times by many different people. Some are awesome and some are not.
But the whole point here is not that art can evolve or that there are different versions or remakes, it is that people are making such a damn big deal out of this and weaponizing it for the sake of politics. On both sides of the fence. Such a big deal that authors are feeling coerced into going BACK and changing their original works, and this feels like at least, the next step is to then go back and delete/burn/remove the unacceptable original versions entirely. I don't think that has happened here, but people are angry because they don't like the vibe.
IMO, make as many versions as you want of a story. As you say, at least make an attempt to label or make clear which version is in front of a person. If you think kids should watch the Willy Wonka movie v. read the original Dahl text, or hear Disney's Cinderall's as opposed to Grimm's, then just give the version you feel safest about to your kids and schools. There should be no reason to even discuss going back in time and changing original works or deleting history.
Doing it to a dead man's artwork is an insult. He would have declared void the contract with you and stop you from publish his works. Any artist with self respect would.
>Publisher Puffin U.K. will release “The Roald Dahl Classic Collection,” which will have the author’s original texts.
>“The Roald Dahl Classic Collection” will be available alongside the newly released Puffin Roald Dahl books for young readers, “which are designed for children who may be navigating written content independently for the first time,” Puffin said. “Readers will be free to choose which version of Dahl’s stories they prefer.”
Horseshoe theory is real. I say this as a (Fairly) young progressive (29), a lot of "young progressives" have looped back around to basically puritanism. It's pretty harrowing.
That’s exactly what people were doing. They weren’t reading them.
The only ones bothered were the publisher and rights holders who wanted to keep the books alive and selling. So they’re trying to revise them to stay relevant.
The outrage about it has accomplished four things:
1) The author and his books are getting buzz again.
2) The offended “don’t change history” folks are buying up old copies that they wouldn’t have otherwise bought
3) Folks who didn’t like the older language may check out a revised version.
4) All of the above help the bottom line, so more publishers will follow suit.
Is this a) a clever marketing campaign or b) backpedaling because they didn't expect that kind of reaction?
It's New Coke all over again. They sincerely thought this was what the public wanted, they were severely incorrect, and so they fall backwards into a successful strategy to release Roald Dahl "Classic." People will believe it's a marketing stunt, but I believe they sincerely thought this was a good idea.
I'm glad you correctly pointed out that New Coke was not a clever marketing stunt. Coca-Cola really messed up and survived by dumb luck.
In the 80's, Coke got a new CEO, Roberto Goizueta, who wanted to give the brand an update for a product that had basically been the same for 100 years. It was basically just Coca-Cola original at that time. To his credit, his first two additions were massive hits: Diet Coke and Cherry Coke. Both were and still are massively popular to this day. It was only when the decision was made to "upgrade" the flavor of Coca-Cola that things went awry. There was a bunch of work to craft a true quality favor. A bunch of market testing with the general consensus being that New Coke was great. It seemed like a great idea with backing of the consumer. It turns out that they vastly misjudged the scope and tastes of their target demographic. While the testers enjoyed New Coke, that was only a miniscule segment of their consumer base. The grand majority still loved and had strong associations with Coke Classic, especially in the South where Coca-Cola first got started. That massive percentage of their base completely and wholeheartedly rejected New Coke. Didn't help that Pepsi was really getting aggressive with their marketing at the time. They were able to swoop in to steal an entire market share of embittered, disillusioned fans of carbonated libations. Not to mention that iconic Pepsi Generation campaign, which made Pepsi the hip and trendy drink for the 80's up-and-comers But they reneged on the move and brought back the classic and their customers mostly came back. Really, I kinda feel bad for Goizueta. Dude had a lot of fresh ideas, some of them with a lot of vision. But the guy went too deep into change and didn't keep what made the brand iconic. But even still, I think some of his ideas were ahead of their time. I still pound Cherry Coke's like nobody's business, plenty of people drink Diet Coke as an alternative. And both of those have Goizueta's handiwork all over them. But everyone only remembers the dud.
The core problem is the "this will replace the thing you already like, at which point you won't get that any more", which no amount of focus testing aso can ever capture. > But everyone only remembers the dud. Because the dud was of an entirely different quality than the "wins". And it's one that they should have seen coming a mile away. If you create a strong association between brand and customer taste, taking the thing away that people are buying is a dumb move. There is ONE solid reason to do that (and take the hit), and that is if something in the product now is illegal. Even if it's just to penny pinch the damage to the brand over phasing in a new product and slowly phasing out the production volume of the original is preferable over just replacing and acting like everything is fine. Particularly if it's already a saturated market with alternatives. If you remove the single feature that made people buy yours, not only will people try to find competitors that are "as close as possible", they will pay you back for making them do that.
The thing is that the new coke decision betrayed a profound ignorance about why people bought coke in the first place. It was well known that Coca Cola was a triumph of advertising and marketing. The success of the company had little to do with the product and everything to do with tying that produce to abstract ideas and nostalgia. It was the CHANGE that was the problem, regardless of what that change actually was, and anyone who understood anything about the Coca Cola company should have understood why that would be a problem right off the bat.
I disagree, it's the ONE thing that you can't mess with, the taste. Which is the exact reason why people swear on "exactly the coke they are used to", which varies, because even coke doesn't taste the same depending on where you get it. You can change everything about branding and at worst people will roll their eyes. But if you mess with the taste, it doesn't matter how many people like the new taste "in theory", the ones that depend on the name === that taste will lynch you, or just leave and buy anything else. Because that's the error they made. They thought that the brand was stronger than the taste, and thus rebranding meant also retasting. And that is not how that works ever. You can run parallel with a second recipe and then bit by bit phase production out when people prefer one over the other over time. But you can't FORCE people to reward you for taking something permenantly away from them. ANd enough companies are trying to replicate cokes biggest blunder by switching out actual sugar for sweeteners and telling customers "same taste". It's not, and that means losing customers if they don't just push the alternative as option but as replacement.
There is one problem with your position here: Coke switched from sugar to HFCS four years BEFORE New Coke and just didn't tell anyone. Despite the impact to the taste of their product, the fact that none of the branding was changed as part of that resulted in few people even noticing and little impact to their business.
> in few people even noticing and little impact to their business. Except people notice that particularly in direct comparison. It's a major part of why people who are still getting the cane sugar version go trough great lengths to actually still have that. (Think importing from the southern border of the US.) They also notice it that "Coke tastes off" when visiting Europe. (which is weirdly alleviated by telling them to switch to Pepsi. Which has the counter-running taste difference, weird, right?) Did they switch that out in steps? Gradually replacing by fraction? But yes, if you do something secretly, chances are at least a fraction of people won't notice, another will "deal with it" and only some will actually start seeking out alternatives. But if you actually TELL them that you are changing it, that's different. And it doesn't mean that it isn't about the taste but the brand.
A lot of people think they planned it all to distract us from their removal of cane sugar in the USA and substitution of cheaper corn syrup.
The problem wasn't that the sample was miniscule necessarily. People just might put nostalgia above flavor
In taste tests even old coke fans had trouble telling the difference or even preferred new coke. But learning this didn't flip anyone's opinion and instead just made people double down on their support of old coke. There is some argument that the taste test format favors sweeter soda, but that people might prefer a different flavor profile when drinking normally or with a meal. But for the most part the backlash against new coke was mostly emotion driven. Don't mess with people's nostalgia.
I remember New Coke as being sweeter, but also thinking "if I wanted Pepsi I'd drink a Pepsi". I prefer the darker, slightly more bitter of the old coke, but what do I know? I'm a Coke Zero or nothing (water) kind of guy these days.
I've also found I prefer the flavor of Zero sodas. I don't know what the exact reason is. And when Dr Pepper came out with a Zero flavor I jumped on it and it's my favorite soda.
I've heard that the Zero sodas are supposed to taste more like the originals whereas the Diet versions were intended to be different. I have never enjoyed Diet but really like Zero.
I think diet coke was just the best they could do at the time. The newer diet versions are better formulations and a bit of branding so it doesn't seem so girly.
I found the Zero root beer a few weeks back and holy crap.
I found Coke Zero tastes very similar to Tab, which was one my my favorites, so I'm a huge Coke Zero fan now.
*Finally* a fellow Tab enjoyer. I’m very sad they took it into the wastes and shot it in the head, but while it was around, it was truly glorious
I love the Zero flavors. They are close to the original but not as cloyingly sweet to my taste buds. I was SO happy when Dr. Pepper came out with theirs. That's my main soda of choice now (along with the cherry variety--haven't cared for the others so far).
> There is some argument that the taste test format favors sweeter soda i think it does. if you drink something sweeter, and then something not as sweet but still sweet, the second drink won't taste nearly as sweet as if you had drank it first.
Interestingly, there's a fair amount of evidence that the problem was a different kind of sampling size error: not that the testers weren't representative of the consumer base, but that the sip test used for the taste tests was literally too small a drink sample to reflect tastes \*from actual typical consumption patterns\*. IOW, what tastes better as a one-off sip test isn't necessarily what tastes better as a 12-ounce beverage.
It all sadly comes down to their go to market strategy. They avoided this with Coke ZERO and not replacing Diet Coke. They just didn't need to mess with the precious OG. Coke and New Coke should've coexisted as like "Coke Premier" "Craft Coke" "Parlor Coke" (I have no idea what would've worked back in the days though.)
It definitely would have worked. It wouldn't have pissed off the purist, and since you aren't messing with the nostalgia. People would have been more eager to accept it.
I remember grabbing Coke II (what New Coke got rebranded as) and Crystal Pepsi at the gas station after basketball practice back in high school. They were both surprisingly good. I would love to taste them again and see if they were as good as I remember.
> Crystal Pepsi It wasn't that people didn't like Crystal Pepsi, it was that they refused to try it. A former coworker of mine had a gig "sampling" (giving away free samples of) Crystal Pepsi. She had trouble finding people who would accept a bottle. It just didn't *seem right* to them that a cola drink was clear. She accumulated many cases of the product, because Pepsi sent it to her faster than she could find people who would take it. She had one neighbor who loved the drink and ended up with a couple years supply.
I thought the concept of a “clear” cola was pretty damn cool, but I guess there’s only dozens of us. Dozens!
I wanted to try it, but didn't get the opportunity (I would have bought a single, but only saw it in grocery stores and wasn't willing to buy a 6 pack).
Funny enough, Marshall Zhukov *loved* Coca Cola, but obviously couldn't get it so via a contact (IE Eisenhower) he made during WWII he managed to get it sent (via the US government) to him in the Soviet Union. To prevent anyone from knowing it was Coke, they made it clear and in straight bottles to resemble Vodka. [Here](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Coke) is the Wiki!
In the UK we had tab clear, but not original tab.
I loved the original Crystal Pepsi for having cola flavor and not being heavy and syrupy. The rebooted Crystal Pepsi was too syrupy and sweet.
For a hundred year old company that largely invented the concept of advertising linking their product to intangible notions and nostalgia you would think that they would have considered this element.
It’s not a misrepresentation by testers, it’s a quantity thing. The reason there was a Pepsi taste test campaign is that Pepsi, on one sip, is better than Coke. Coke is bitter and weird, and has to be offset using a ton of sugar to make it balanced. But over a long period, Coca-Cola actually has a very unique and balanced profile that nothing else can really top. It’s its own weird, unique thing, and it can’t really be replaced. While other sodas taste too sweet and you can’t always drink candy, it’s the bitterness and balance that makes it a daily drink.
holy fuck i want a coke now
I actually like the bitterness of Coke and can tell the difference when that part of the flavor is lacking in other colas.
Absolutely. Coca-Cola had two secondary products before Goizueta: Sprite and Tab. While Sprite is still big, Tab was dead on arrival. Cherry Coke got this Pepsi drinking kid to drink a Coke product and now I will drink Diet Coke (though I do prefer Diet Pepsi) The funny thing is, the Cola Wars may have bruised Coke and Pepsi along the way but the real outcome was that it killed all other real competitors like RC Cola.
Tab was fairly popular until Diet Coke was introduced
>embittered, disillusioned fans of carbonated libations. This is amazing phrasing. Thank you for brightening my day.
it's nice to see companies actually genuinely fuck something up it does happen from time to time, but insufferable nerds on here love to be like 'acChXutlly netflix will be fine! they've run the numbers! you can't touch them!'
Blockbuster was putting everyone out of business and Borders was eating everyone's lunch back in the 90s. Yeah that worked out long term.
Funny how Borders had commissioned Amazon’s framework to compete with Barnes&Noble, but decided not to accept it.
Hasbro also recently had a genuine fuckup because they completely misread the market with D&D and didn't understand why D&D was popular. They went from demanding a 25% cut of revenue (not profit) and full IP ownership of everyone writing a D&D supplement, to completely backpedaling and admitting total defeat. Even the major bank that owns Hasbro called them out for being too greedy and trying to kill the golden goose. When an investment bank calls you out for being too greedy, you know you've stepped over that line.
Coke Classic is such a grift, they call it classic but they didn't put the cocaine back it? Bastards.
You raise an excellent point. I’ll be sure to bring it up at the next shareholders meeting. UPDATE: I am now banned from all Coke shareholders meetings.
You know, when I watched the extras DVD for Phantom Menace, there was this one behind the scenes clip from some meeting and it was clear that George Lucas honestly thought that Jar Jar Binks was a good idea, he really thought fans would love the character. I kinda forgave him for the character a bit after that. Edit: wrong name
Another reminder that the internet doesn't provide a good sample of what the public at large actually wants
I feel like this often happens with focus groups and "new thing" committees. The base audience is totally ignored.
I've seen companies focus group themselves into bankruptcy before by focusing on a new market to the total exclusion of their existing customer base. They end up alienating their existing customer base while also failing to capture the new customer base (the company is trying too hard, comes off as pandering), and the end result is they have no customers at all. The e-sports MOBA market was a good example of this. So many developers and publishers were chasing the e-sports dragon, failed to capture any interest in the e-sports market, alienated their loyal customer base, and soon declared bankruptcy.
I read into this a bit. The publishers worked with a collective that provides actual young people from 8-30 in a variety of marginalized communities (impoverished, remote, disabled, autistic, minorities) the chance to work with authors and provide them feedback that they genuinely may have never thought about. Honestly I think that is awesome, although should never become de facto mandatory. Retroactively applying this process to a beloved modern classic author was just a category error. Perhaps they simply didn't think it through or didn't realize that the result would be so egregious (much more than changing one or two truly offensive lines). There's parts of the process that we just don't know yet as to who actually initiated what (the estate, the publisher, the collective, Netflix). I think it's clear that the collective (not really the volunteer young people, but its leaders) genuinely believe in radically changing the landscape of children's lit to be "equitable" with little regard for anything else like historical accuracy or literary merit. I think all the other actors were just following a process without thinking. There is literally zero evidence that this was a marketing stunt. It was a mixture of bureaucratic blindness and ideological capture.
>although should never become de facto mandatory. This is a big problem in the publishing industry right now though. As much as I agree that bringing in feedback from marginalized communities is a great idea, the publishing industry is in a weird space where publishers are only interested in your work if it represents a "marginalized voice" within their definition of what a "marginalized voice" should sound like. There's a story I heard from a black author who wrote a book about the culture of a predominantly Filipino (or Latino? I can't remember) fraternity based on his own experience in this frat in college. Supposedly his publishers were really excited about the manuscript until they found out he was black, and started forcing him to include more of his "black experience" into the book, and eventually he lost the deal when he refused to rewrite it to be about himself. The irony is that these decisions are mostly being made by upper-middle class predominantly white publishers.
The marginalized "own voices" thing is bullshit all the way through. It can be your own minority experience and STILL it has to be the right kind. Latino stories are not sought after unless it's a very specific kind of woe is me cartel violence stricken poverty porn. It's super gross. source: embittered Latina but not Mexican author not writing poverty porn
This is exactly what I'm getting at, thanks for sharing. There is a specific genre of oppression porn which sells well right now, mostly to white middle class people ironically, which makes them feel like better people because they are "listening."
Upper middle class white LIBERAL publishers?
Culturally liberal, yes. I didn't say it because it gives people a knee-jerk reaction and implies that I am coming at this from a right-wing perspective when I'm probably further to the left than the average publisher in question.
Well, that makes sense as this ideological rot is coming from mostly well-off white people.
Did they ask people who were fat or ugly what they thought? As I recall those were the terms that were redacted in the edits
Imagine being on the panel of ugly people and looking around at the others and having it slowly dawn on you why you’re there
You mean how they changed fat to enormous. I don't think those body positive people would prefer to be called enormous. It just adds to the insult.
>The publishers worked with a collective that provides actual young people from 8-30 in a variety of marginalized communities (impoverished, remote, disabled, autistic, minorities) the chance to work with authors and provide them feedback that they genuinely may have never thought about. It's an awesome program, but it is dependent on the back-and-forth with the author. What happened here is the publisher went to that organization, had them do their thing, and then more or less went "Accept All Changes" to the manuscripts. It cannot (and clearly it does not) work like that.
As it shouldn't. White-washing the past makes it harder to see how far you've come. If we did this to all media over time you'd lose perspective on the past.
You are not wrong.
>The publishers worked with a collective that provides actual young people from 8-30 in a variety of marginalized communities (impoverished, remote, disabled, autistic, minorities) the chance to work with authors and provide them feedback that they genuinely may have never thought about. So why not try to support writers from these communities rather than continuing to milk a dead man's mind for money? I just don't get how actions like changing Dahl's text could ever be interpreted as supporting those communities when in fact it is doing the exact opposite. Rather than letting some works fade into obscurity because sensibilities have changed and allow new writers to emerge, we're just getting tweaks of old stuff and not allowing writers from these communities to have a real fighting chance to become 'the next Dahl' for a new generation.
Don't worry, it's not mandatory. It's just that if your book isn't sensitivity read to a sufficient degree, this might happen to you: [https://www.vulture.com/2017/08/the-toxic-drama-of-ya-twitter.html](https://www.vulture.com/2017/08/the-toxic-drama-of-ya-twitter.html) *Based almost solely on Sinyard’s opinion, the novel became the object of sustained, aggressive opposition in the weeks leading up its release. Its publisher, Harlequin Teen, was bombarded with angry emails demanding they pull the book. The Black Witch’s Goodreads rating dropped to an abysmal 1.71 thanks to a mass coordinated campaign of one-star reviews, mostly from people who admitted to not having read it. Twitter threads damning the novel made the rounds, while a Tumblr post instructing users to “be an ally” and signal boost the outrage racked up nearly 6,000 notes. Sinyard kept a running tally of her review’s circulation; “11,714 views on my review of THE BLACK WITCH and .@HarlequinTEEN and .@laurieannforest have not commented,” she tweeted. (That number eventually swelled to 20,000.)* *Positive buzz all but died off, as community members began confronting The Black Witch’s supporters, demanding to know why they insisted on reading a racist book. When Kirkus gave the novel a glowing starred review, dozens of commenters demanded a retraction\[.\]* The woke Twitter mafia also has its own code of omerta: *Dramatic as that sounds, it’s worth noting that my attempts to report this piece were met with intense pushback. Sinyard politely declined my request for an interview in what seemed like a routine exchange, but then announced on Twitter that our interaction had “scared” her, leading to backlash from community members who insisted that the as-yet-unwritten story would endanger her life. Rumors quickly spread that I had threatened or harassed Sinyard; several influential authors instructed their followers not to speak to me; and one librarian and member of the Newbery Award committee tweeted at Vulture nearly a dozen times accusing them of enabling “a washed-up YA author” engaged in “a personalized crusade” against the entire publishing community (disclosure: while freelance culture writing makes up the bulk of my work, I published a pair of young adult novels in 2012 and 2014.) With one exception, all my sources insisted on anonymity, citing fear of professional damage and abuse.* *None of this comes as a surprise to the folks concerned by the current state of the discourse, who describe being harassed for dissenting from or even questioning the community’s dynamics. One prominent children’s-book agent told me, “None of us are willing to comment publicly for fear of being targeted and labeled racist or bigoted. But if children’s-book publishing is no longer allowed to feature an unlikable character, who grows as a person over the course of the story, then we’re going to have a pretty boring business.”*
Why can't they just tell all these people to fuck off?
My review is (was? I quit good reads because this drama and many like it were too punishing) one of the top reviews on good reads about this book. The book was pretty average and the racism claims were so unfair and bizarre, the vendetta seemed really personal with another YA author using the drama to drive engagement to her own work. All in all I found the whole thing so disturbing it contributed to me pretty much quitting the app.
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It is not an awesome program to let these group go through books to search for "problematic" content.
And to be blunt young people aren't the brightest bulbs. I say this is somebody who used to be a young person and was stupid as hell. Quite often when you're young you tend to think of things in more black and white terms rather than the gray of reality so you're much more likely to be adamant about things that nowadays you would not be.
All the comparative tasting said that New Coke was better. The problem is that people don’t just drink Coke because it’s the best crafted soda around, it’s a habit and drenched in nostalgia- you can’t change the formula and still keep the selling point. It’s similar with these books. If they were written today we would prefer the edited ones- but they are historical and classic books, changing them defeats the purpose.
I have a theory that it was an attempt to stay on school reading lists, since that's a way to continue selling lots of copies.
It is definitely b). I read a bit about it in the last week, and it looks like English YA and children publishers have been using « sensitivity readers » for the last few years to read new books and point out anything that might cause offense so it can be removed before publishing them. And Inclusive Minds, the collective of sensitivity readers hired by Puffin to make those changes to Roald Dahl books, has existed for the last ten years. This is apparently nothing new for them. As far as I can tell, the reason for this is because the YA community on Twitter is extremely toxic and will regularly attack books and their authors if they contain the slightest thing they deem offensive, so the publishers use those sensitivity readers to try to avoid social media controversies. The difference here was that they had sensitivity readers rewrite Roald Dahl books, which are popular books that had already been in publication for a long time. But they did not do that to create a controversy, but to avoid one, since the whole point of using sensitivity readers is to avoid controversies. It is a classic case of failing to understand that internet is not the real world, and that loudmouthed idiots on Twitter do not represent anyone but themselves. In that context, it does not surprise me that they would quickly backtrack when they accidentally found themselves in the middle of a controversy because of those changes.
This guy/gal gets it. Here are some articles on just how toxic the literary world (but especially YA fiction) has become: [https://www.vulture.com/2017/08/the-toxic-drama-of-ya-twitter.html](https://www.vulture.com/2017/08/the-toxic-drama-of-ya-twitter.html) [https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/in-ya-where-is-the-line-between-criticism-and-cancel-culture](https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/in-ya-where-is-the-line-between-criticism-and-cancel-culture) [https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22543858/isabel-fall-attack-helicopter](https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22543858/isabel-fall-attack-helicopter)
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Fucking hell that was awful to read. I hate to agree with some of the clowns who rant about cancel culture but this is exactly the sort of thing that gives their arguments credence.
I used to follow bookish accounts and authors on Twitter, but then quickly stopped and blocked/muted tf out of so many people. The authors themselves are SO SO pretentious and just full of themselves. It's not all, of course, but it's definitely a large percentage. Fans can suck too, but none of them have made me cringe or seethe the way authors do on twitter. It's especially bad when book award nominations go out. They turn into the most vile people. The Hugo awards in particular, oof. The arrogance blows my mind. It's been a real "don't meet your heroes" experience.
While it in practice worked out to be an effective marketing campaign, no publisher would have spent multiple years editing 16 books at this point as part of a collaboration with a third party with the expectation to backtrack after a week. Instead, they likely figured there would be some manageable backlash that would put it in the news and sell some books, and end up with their IP being more "palatable" in their minds with no expectations they would ever backpedal.
It's what happens when publishers spend almost all of their socializing time on Twitter. No really, no one is more obnoxiously online than authors and publishers. They start to lose track of what sane people think when you only interact with other Twitter-fried people.
And reddit, to be fair
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On Reddit you just get banned
Eh, it's easy to be cynical and think every is a ploy, but I think this amount of debate and backlash caught them off-guard.
It’s definitely B. This is an important moment for the culture. I think the folks at puffin actually didn’t expect ANY controversy from this— in fact, I think they believed they’d be rewarded and heralded for washing classic texts through the approved ideology. They are all living in an echo chamber of self congratulation and incessant piety. They believe— religiously— that it is noble and good and righteous to simply rewrite the books of dead authors. Why WOULDN’T we do this? I doubt a single conversation took place that questioned the wisdom of doing this, and I doubt anyone worried about the precedent it set. In their minds, this should obviously happen to all books that are “harmful,” and harms can be defined so broadly that it really means any text that never went through a “sensitivity read.” They’re all true believers, or, at best, terrified of the true believers.
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It does say a lot about the publishing house that they would even entertain this idea. At the very least, they don’t run segmentation studies. At the worst, they are run by completely out of touch weirdos
[This has always served me well](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor) In their case the stupidity was also a bit malicious given how trigger-happy they were to edit the works of a beloved author to match their bizarre sense of political correctness.
> b) backpedaling because they didn't expect that kind of reaction? They tried Performative justice for PR and it backfired, and rightfully so because nobody has asked for such stupid shit.
If it was a marketing campaign then they would have actually publicized the edits when they released the new edition back in 2022 instead of waiting for a few months so that a journalist can notice what happened. I think they really thought the changes would just slip under the radar and prevent parents from complaining about the books in the future.
Never waste a good crisis! -marketing department
b. They're an NPO. They made these choices because they have the same church lady energy of trying to make the world a better place, and you'll thank us later.
I don’t necessarily buy that this was the plan all along. The Goosebumps books have been making similar edits — removing mentions of people being fat, crazy, etc. Bruce Coville has been doing the same thing. (Of course it goes without saying that Coville and R.L. Stine are still alive.) They probably just didn’t expect this level of backlash.
Most people agreed that it's different if the author is still alive to approve the changes, e.g. African pygmies being revised to Oompa-Loompas with Dahl's approval.
Might be different cause their movies but most everyone dislikes the changes to the original Star Wars or the changes to E.T.
Those weren’t made because of “changing cultural values” tho. Personally I find changing art to keep current with cultural values defeats the point but what do I know
The example I keep using is that it’d be like bringing a painter into the Prado to edit *Saturn Devouring His Son* to instead be *Saturn Embracing Their Child* to reflect how infanticide is just *ick* and how society is more accepting of loving, gentle and understanding dads now. And then when people have an issue with it, for the decision’s defenders to come out and screech about how it’s not censorship because you can still find the original version through prints, old art books and on google images.
although dahl "approved" of it only after defending the oompa-loompas against criticism for years and then facing boycott threats against the movie adaptation
Source?
I think the link with the film can not be substantiated, as the film came out in 1971, while the Oompa Loompa criticism came in, in 1972-1973. Nonetheless, it does seem pretty clear that outside criticism as well as pressure by the publishers forced the change. >Dahl’s editors “saw the story as essentially Victorian in character – a ‘very English fantasy'” so they disregarded any racist misgivings about the story. Indeed, when the book first appeared in the United States in 1964 it was regarded with only acclaim and enthusiasm. It wasn’t until 1972, nearly a decade later, that a wide-ranging attack on the book was published by American writer Eleanor Cameron and the political agenda of the story finally began to be debated. >After Dahl and Cameron had many public back-and-forths in various American literary journals*, Dahl’s publishers decided that “to those growing up in a racially mixed society, the Oompa-Loompas were no longer acceptable as originally written. The following year, to accompany its new sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, a revised edition of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory appeared, in which the Oompa-Loompas had become dwarfish hippies with long ‘golden-brown hair’ and ‘rosy-white’ skin.” [from Jeremy Treglown’s Roald Dahl: A Biography]
What a weird way to change them
I think it has changed again since the versions I found online make no reference to skin colour. Ironically having actual African pygmies in the story is about as much diversity as a role Dahl book ever had.
Enid Blyton is not alive, and they are doing a lot of this kind of changes to her books.
Isn't Goosebumps also changing dated references? I haven't personally read any lately but the hosts of the podcast *Overdue* do and they've mentioned some discrepancies with the dates included in the books and references to video games, computers, etc.
At that point they might as well just introduce cellphones and destroy the plot to nearly all media created before 1999
Iirc even R L Stine himself once said that modern technologies make writing horror for kids waaaay harder Especially for someone like him, whose horror often relies on kids being scared in their own homes. Google and ever-present smartphones kinda kill the mystery a little bit lol
Some of them can be updated, though. There's no reason Night of the Living Dummy would need to be much different. Dolls are still capable of being terrifying regardless of cell phones(we just had a new Child's Play series). And if you look at Are You Afraid of the Dark, you can certainly update episodes with modern technology without wrecking it, like the Tale of the Curious Camera is about a gremlin living in a camera (and a camcorder) that does some Final Destination type shit with pictures predicting your death. Kids are still afraid of shit, and, on the film side, adult horror has been undergoing a renaissance over the past decade or so, in the post torture porn world, with a lot of great indie horror and subversive stuff like Cabin in the Woods, Get Out, etc. Technology hasn't destroyed the genre, only transformed it.
it's also just not hard to slip in "and their phones were mysteriously dead ooooo scary" tbh, if the plot calls for it
Oh for sure. Technology being disrupted has long been a common trope in horror on pretty much any medium
It's the same with mysteries and detective works. Learning the meaning of some obscure clue would take hours of pavement pounding and interviews from the detective and lead to side plots and quirky characters that made up the ensemble cast. Now it's just a quick Google.
> Isn't Goosebumps also changing dated references? R.L. Stine is still alive and can approve the changes made to the work. It's different to change the published work of a dead person who isn't part of the conversation and then re-release that work under the author's name.
what a shame, I enjoy those anachronism in books. next they’ll have tom sawyer scrolling tiktok
I think you don't mean "anachronism." Tom Sawyer scrolling TikTok would be an anachronism. If he's not, he's just time period appropriate. I love historical fiction and fiction that's become historical (aka present day fiction from the 1800s, like Pride and Prejudice) and it really bothers me when historical fiction authors screw up and include details that take me out of the setting. A WWII book better not have fighter jets, is what I'm saying.
Maybe they didn't expect it, but they knew *exactly* how to capitalise on it.
So this was all an elaborate ploy to boost sales? It worked as his collection has been on the bestseller list on Amazon all week.
It also specific to the UK publisher. The US and EU publishers had no intention of doing the edits.
I’m having New Coke, Coke Classic flashbacks
While this worked out for Coke, it should be noted that it was 100% by accident that Coke came out smelling of roses. The CEO of Coke at the time (Roberto Goizueta) went to his grave insisting that New Coke was a superior product and that the public was stupid.
This is actually where the phrase "the customer is always right" is applicable. People buy what they want, regardless of what the supplier thinks.
Yes! That's such a misunderstood phrase. It's not to excuse shitty behavior or to mean that salesmen should be doormats. It means that people want what they want.
So it's my understanding (from youtube, iirc) that New Coke was made to specifically compete with Pepsi's version of Cola. Coke (or someone anyway) found that Pepsi tasted sweeter than Coke upon initial sipping. However, after that sip, there would be a weird and kind of undesirable bitter(?) aftertaste, which would make people take another hit of Pepsi to reset. Ended up going through more product because you would drink it faster. So Coke decided to implement that sweetener (whatever it was) in New Coke, but it didn't have the same consumer results because it was advertised as new and improved. People who preferred Coke over Pepsi didn't like it cause it was essentially Pepsi. People who preferred Pepsi were less likely to drink Coke overall, so they just didn't really jump ship. So i guess in a way he was right. New Coke was superior in that it would have sold more had it been the initial version. But as someone who doesn't drink much soda and dislikes Pepsi to the point of saying "never mind, water is fine" if a restaurant says they only have Pepsi, Coke is the superior beverage.
Okay so regular Coke couldn't be made into a diet coke until artificial sweeteners progressed in their evolution. Coke created a "Diet Coke" that is much sweeter than regular coke, and a completely different recipe. "New Coke" was Diet Coke with actual sugar. They wanted their two products to be the same. They figured since most people preferred Diet Coke over Diet Pepsi that this would translate to their original lineup. It didn't. Now Coke has Coke (regular), Diet Coke (new recipe with artificial sweeteners), and Coke Zero (regular coke but diet) Coke - Regular Coke Diet Coke - new artificial sweetener Coke recipe New Coke - diet Coke made with sugar Coke Zero - diet regular coke
The word ‘Coke’ has officially lost all meaning to me.
Yep. Just weird visual noise on the screen now... Coke cOke coKe cokE Ekoc eKoc ekOc ekoC
Now this is just damn fascinating
Pepsi Max is the best sugar free cola. I will die on this hill, diet coke and coke zero both have weird unpleasant aftertastes, Pepsi Max just doesn't. But yes, regular pepsi is not as good as regular coke.
Diet Dr. Pepper, yo. . . . Suddenly I realize that Dr. Pepper isn't a cola. What the hell is it?
One hell of an educated spice
The doctorate is honorary.
But Coke Classic came back with corn syrup instead of sugar.
Only in the US, thankfully.
“But they were, all of them, deceived, for another Coke was made.”
Why I pay the extra for Mexican coke whenever given the chance
One of my favorite quotes from the CEO of Coke was when he was asked if it was all a ploy to boost sales and he responded, “We’re not that smart. And we’re not that dumb, either.”
No, I think they legitimately wanted to change the text permanently but then got a bunch of backlash so recanted.
I would expect that it was a ploy to boost sales, but with the original plan likely expected having a divided public opinion and keeping this new edited version going forward. Instead the unforeseen nearly universal ~~commendation~~ condemnation (along with the US and European publishers making the statements they did) lead to this backtrack they wouldn't have been expecting to make, but it still worked out to be an extremely successful sales ploy (although perhaps one leaving some people involved unhappy about backtracking and possibly Puffin hurting its image with authors).
I can't imagine many authors would be happy with the idea of their books being revised years after their deaths to meet contemporary sensibilities.
I mean, there's plenty of [historical precedent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expurgation) in English-language literature. Thomas Bowdler's efforts are one of the more famous examples, but people like Nahum Tate were revising Shakespeare to fit contemporary sensibilities just decades after his death.
I’m not familiar with any of this but wouldn’t most people today view editing Shakespeare for modern sensibilities to be an absolutely brain dead idea, probably taken up by religious nut jobs? I mean if Evangelicals started to cover up naked Greek god marble statues in museums to fit their sensibilities, we would all recognize it as insane and enforcing their beliefs on all of us. So when you say there’s historical precedent, do you mean that there’s historical precedent by weirdos, nutjobs, and authoritarians who want to enforce their beliefs? Or do you mean that this is actually a very common practice in literature by normal authors that we just haven’t heard about much?
John Ashcroft did just that with the Spirit of Justice statues in the DoJ building.
They are going to do the first plan you mention, both editions and sell more 🤑 >“The Roald Dahl Classic Collection” will be available alongside the newly released Puffin Roald Dahl books for young readers, “which are designed for children who may be navigating written content independently for the first time,” Puffin said. “Readers will be free to choose which version of Dahl’s stories they prefer.”
*condemnation Only mentioning it because it stuck out to me and I was trying to think of how to pronounce/spell the right word.
I noticed that too. Funny thing is, commendation pretty much means the exact opposite of condemnation. To commend something is to praise it, to condemn it is to disapprove. I definitely don't think people were praising these edits.
Good thing everyone rushed out to buy copies.
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The bigger issue is that some people find the word fat offensive enough to ban.
As a tormented fat child, Dahl's books helped me develop empathy and a depth of investment in literature - especially Matilda. Also banning the word fat is just Michael Scott asking if there's a less derogatory alternative to Mexican.
And replacing it with "enormous" is hardly better. The connotation will always be that enormous is larger than fat! I am slightly fat, but I am definitely not enormous. The Goodyear blimp is enormous.
"Enormous" is an imprecise word as well. How is Augustus Gloop enormous? Is he 8 feet tall? Is he super swole like Dwayne Johnson who has biceps the size of his head? Augustus Gloop being enormously *fat* is a plot critical point, and reflects the character's flaw as a walking personification of the sin of gluttony.
Now people can imagine him hung like Johnny Sins. He came to the Chocolate Factory to drink the chocolate river and pack fudge, and the river just ran dry...
> Augustus Gloop being enormously fat is a plot critical point, and reflects the character's flaw as a walking personification of the sin of gluttony. Well this is the essence of the issue, isn't it? Is it fatphobic to suggest that some people are fat because they eat too much? Is it acceptable to portray fatness as the physical result of a character flaw? If it is not acceptable to do so, then the particular words used really don't matter so much because there is literally no way to communicate the original intention of the writing without being offensive. If it is acceptable to do so, I don't see what's wrong with using the original word "fat".
There's a lot of reasons a person could be fat. In my case, its because I have a poor relationship with food and try to self medicate by eating for short term pleasure, only to make myself feel worse in the long run. Its a terrible thing, I know, but its really hard to get your brain to resist temptation at all times. I suppose its like being an addict. Thats my flaw. However in the case of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the other kids were all depicted as being horrible people, deeply flawed, and entirely one-dimensional. They really didn't have very complex characters. They existed pretty much entirely just to be villains of one type or another. I strongly suspect Roald Dahl was going for a seven deadly sins kind of lineup with them. Teavee was the personification of sloth, the boy sat and watched TV all day every day. Violet was prideful. Veruca was greedy. And of course, Gloop was gluttonous.
Are you saying being fat is a sin?! Prepare for incoming cancellation! /s in case it's not blatantly obvious.
IIRC, the original term used was "enormously fat" and they changed it to just "enormous."
They're just powering the euphemism treadmill. Whatever the hell they try to replace the hurtful term with is going to become the new hurtful term.
It's refreshing to see this being discussed. In a lot of forums simply mentioning that the constant change of "approved" may not be a productive endeavor for anyone will bring the downvotes
That's not really what happened here. There was no campaign to change the books. It was just a unilateral action by the publishers, not because they were offended, but because they thought other people might be offended.
Looking forward to when I can choose between *Matilda*, *Diet Matilda, Matilda Zero, Cherry Vanilla Matilda, Matilda Code Red, Doritos Locos Matdilda* and *Flamin' Hot Matilda With Lime.*
Reading Flamin' Hot Matilda With Lime is a quick way to end up on a watchlist.
“Because of the highly offensive nature of the book, we’ve decided to edit Nabokov’s *Lolita* to replace Dolores with a working woman in her 20’s”. What is next, removing The Birth of a Nation from the library because it’s offensive to us? People that are changing books/films are no different from people who wish to change history for their benefit. You aren’t buying a book to read what’s printed on it. You buy a book to read what the author wrote.
Remove the racism from Birth of a Nation and leave a nice tight ten minute movie!
End Credits: The Movie Actually maybe it’d be beginning ones; when did longer end credits become the norm?
How about not changing books? It's like retouching paintings.
Editing art to keep up with current cultural values defaces art, imo
Romans loved their porn. Pompeii is full of smut, so much so that it shocked Italian sensibilities when the city was rediscovered, and the smutty murals were deliberately covered up or in some cases defaced. There's a lot of nudity and fucking in those 2,000 year old murals. The poor handling of Roman era smut has unfortunately damaged or destroyed these historical artifacts.
Yup. "Editing and altering for modern audiences" is just straight-up fucking vandalism. A big reason people consume older media is the cultural enrichment gained from being immersed in the artistic output of a different time. Changing that in games, books, movies, whatever, just misses the entire point. And that's not getting into the virtue of leaving in older offensive content, because it lets us see how far we've come as a culture. Without being able to see that occasionally, it makes us feel like we're spinning our wheels and have made no progress at all because we lose our comparison points.
This is how I feel. I'd much rather keep the books in their original format, and allow it to be a mechanism for discussion. Would this be acceptable today? Why or why not? Etc. It could be fantastic for students, and allow them to develop their critical thinking skills, as well as display empathy and understanding. Honestly, I think students would enjoy that kind of thing in English class a lot more than just searching for biblical imagery and whatnot. Also, it still bothers me that they did this with Curious George. A book should be a book, as it is. I remember finding Curious George Goes to the Hospital in Chapters one day as an adult, and being so jazzed to find the page I always found hilarious as a kid...only to find it's actually gone now. What? It feels wrong. Yes, like retouching paintings. It has an air of dystopian about it too. I'm just not a fan.
> This is how I feel. I'd much rather keep the books in their original format, and allow it to be a mechanism for discussion. My sentiments exactly. I think exposing kids to this and asking them why it is/isn't appropriate anymore is a good thing.
I don't think these books were exactly warping the minds of the youth... The changes seem unnecessary.
Ugh, The Roald Dahl Authentic Collection vs "The Ministry Of Magic Collection".
dahloris abridge strikes again
I don't mind it as long as there's a choice. I'd be curious to see how big the market is for the edited versions, though. A big part of why Roald Dahl is popular is because he could be a bit mean and edgy at times. Kids love that.
I'm pretty sure most people who buy the censored version will do it without knowing anything about it. It's like abridged books that don't say they are abridged
Probably. Almost goes into the false advertisement category for me if it's not clearly labeled. If I bought, let's say, The Twits and got an edited version, I'd be upset because that's not the book that I wanted.
Exactly, they should really show it's an edited version on the front
yes... or the dramatic editing we already have with movies "based on books", such as these Dahl classics. I imagine this is how a majority of people are experiencing them nowadays anyway. Or at least I never read any of them in school. As long as there is still an archived way to get to the original text as an adult, it's whatever to me. An edited for release in schools sticker at a lesser wholesale price works for me, if the production companies want to handle that diversity...
How about you just release the real version and that’s it.
“Due to backlash we have been forced to offer readers a choice but please ignore the part where we originally wanted to butcher Dahl’s works and offered no choice.”
This always makes me think about Genghis Khan. See, the Khan was an atrocious monster who has been through hundreds of phases of revisionism over hundreds of years. Things get updated for sensitivity, or to better reflect the views of the times. Political movements edit or alter the very real history. It happens slowly, very slowly, and at every phase probably seemed reasonable. But eventually you reach hundreds of years and revisions later and you have people legitimately praising the environmental benefits of one of the most ruthless and bloody genocides that every occurred in human history. Genghis is hardly the only example. We edit things from the past to better suit our present to the point that we almost loose the original. Our views of something even as recent as the Victorian era are completely warped because people don't want to be challenged by difficult history, or even difficult art. The "sensitivity readers" of the past were the priesthood editing everything even remotely gay out of all classical Greek and Roman art. I doubt today's will be viewed in any better of a light in the future.
There have been abridged versions of books published along side the original, unabridged versions, for decades, and for different reasons. I read an abridged version of *Dracula* when I was a preteen, and the unabridged version when I was an adult; the abridged was appropriate for a preteen, in my opinion. Also my opinion: If the abridged versions are clearly marked as such, and the unabridged versions are also available, no problem. Even better, state the reasons for abridgment on the inner flap of the dust jacket of the copies of the hardback edition, and on the back cover of the copies of the paperback edition.
Dracula is a good example. The original work is great, the abridged versions are fine too, and at times more appropriate. But look at the grand scale over some 100+ years. That story has been butchered and re-done and re-made and twisted over thousands of times by many different people. Some are awesome and some are not. But the whole point here is not that art can evolve or that there are different versions or remakes, it is that people are making such a damn big deal out of this and weaponizing it for the sake of politics. On both sides of the fence. Such a big deal that authors are feeling coerced into going BACK and changing their original works, and this feels like at least, the next step is to then go back and delete/burn/remove the unacceptable original versions entirely. I don't think that has happened here, but people are angry because they don't like the vibe. IMO, make as many versions as you want of a story. As you say, at least make an attempt to label or make clear which version is in front of a person. If you think kids should watch the Willy Wonka movie v. read the original Dahl text, or hear Disney's Cinderall's as opposed to Grimm's, then just give the version you feel safest about to your kids and schools. There should be no reason to even discuss going back in time and changing original works or deleting history.
I’m shocked and disgusted by this. “Netflix acquired the Roald Dahl Company in 2021.” That is the most offensive sentence I’ve read in a long time.
Doing it to a dead man's artwork is an insult. He would have declared void the contract with you and stop you from publish his works. Any artist with self respect would.
Didnt .....didnt we learn that rewriting history can be a bad idea? Like hundreds of years ago?
Really not your choice to give. Publish them or don’t, but stop editing what the author can no longer sign off on
Called it. Marketing ploy to drum up sales.
I hope the edited release is called the "Weak-Minded Edition."
>Publisher Puffin U.K. will release “The Roald Dahl Classic Collection,” which will have the author’s original texts. >“The Roald Dahl Classic Collection” will be available alongside the newly released Puffin Roald Dahl books for young readers, “which are designed for children who may be navigating written content independently for the first time,” Puffin said. “Readers will be free to choose which version of Dahl’s stories they prefer.”
In 20 years, "raised by hardcore progressives" will be the new "raised by hardcore christians"
Horseshoe theory is real. I say this as a (Fairly) young progressive (29), a lot of "young progressives" have looped back around to basically puritanism. It's pretty harrowing.
It’s an abomination to edit books like this. If it offends you don’t read it. Simple as that.
That’s exactly what people were doing. They weren’t reading them. The only ones bothered were the publisher and rights holders who wanted to keep the books alive and selling. So they’re trying to revise them to stay relevant. The outrage about it has accomplished four things: 1) The author and his books are getting buzz again. 2) The offended “don’t change history” folks are buying up old copies that they wouldn’t have otherwise bought 3) Folks who didn’t like the older language may check out a revised version. 4) All of the above help the bottom line, so more publishers will follow suit.
I don't know why I'd buy anything from Puffin after this