My pupils will be dilated like this all day, and that will be a problem. The good news is, I’m in no immediate danger of going blind and I don’t need new glasses: everything shipshape, glaucoma held at bay. I don’t have any bad news.
I was rescued from the waiting room just as I was about to dip into Treasure Planet, a hardcover children’s book version of the 2002 Disney movie. I only had time to notice two things: they’d turned Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic Treasure Island into a thesaurus of science fiction cliches, and transformed the character of Captain Smollet into a female.
They didn’t stand over Stevenson’s grave and make rude noises and disrespectful gestures, but only because that would have been superfluous, given the contempt they’d already shown for an immortal work of story-telling.
Look, if you want female action heroes, fine–write ’em, film ’em. But don’t trash the work of a dead author who’s not here to defend himself; and for the love of all things holy, don’t rewrite the classics! Created by a genius and modified by idiots: never a pleasing combination.
“Hey, why don’t we make an animated science fiction cartoon of The Iliad?”
“The what?”
“The Iliad–the story of the Trojan War.”
“They had a war over Trojans? Couldn’t they just use another brand?”
“We could make Achilles a transwoman!”
“Ak-who?”
Make that “modified by illiterate idiots.”