Several of the bloggers I read daily are in a snit this afternoon because of news that the creatively bankrupt suits at the Disney Channel have decided to make Christopher Robin into a girl in an upcoming Winnie the Pooh TV series. The spokesperson for this astoundingly lame decision says that, “these timeless characters really needed a breath of fresh air,” and the new series is not an “abandonment of an old, familiar world, but rather an alternate universe for Pooh and his crew.”
Uh-huh. Alternate universe. Gotcha.

This is the sort of boneheaded, focus-group-driven nonsense that made the otherwise mediocre movie Office Space into a monster cult hit.

Here’s a sampling of how people are reacting to this “breath of fresh air”:

Scalzi picks up on this spokesdrone’s remark that “Christopher Robin is still out there in the woods, playing” and spins off a sad, frightening tale of a little boy all alone in a suddenly empty world. Meanwhile, Neil Gaiman informs his readers that “after five years of me blogging, we’re alienating a whole new generation of blog-readers for whom a middle-aged male author maundering on about writing stuff is, frankly, pretty stale,” so he is going to be replaced by “Skippy, a fictional six-year-old tomboy and computer genius, with a small number of endearing catchphrases.” And, as usual, Wil Wheaton says it like it is:

You stupid corporate jerk. Timeless characters do not need “a breath of fresh air” BECAUSE THEY ARE TIMELESS! What the fuck is wrong with you people?

 

…this is fucking ridiculous. This has nothing to do with “breathing new life” into anything; it’s entirely about squeezing a few more pennies out of a successful franchise, and exploiting the anniversary of a cherished work of literature.

Testify, Brother Wil!

As for me, I have no particular attachment to the Pooh stories. They are among the childhood classics that I somehow missed while growing up, so I don’t feel any nostalgia or love for them at all. But I do have a strong attachment to the idea of leaving well enough alone. I don’t believing in fixing the unbroken and I think beloved classics ought to remain in their original, unaltered, unrevised, unimproved, un-Special Edition’d forms. Beyond that basic policy statement, I can’t summon the words to even acknowledge this, this… thing.

Oh, wait, that’s not true. I can think of one word, one very apropos word that sums up everything I feel and think about DisneyCo in six compact, concise little letters:

Morons.