{"id":422,"date":"2005-12-08T19:55:54","date_gmt":"2005-12-08T19:55:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/?p=422"},"modified":"2005-12-08T19:55:54","modified_gmt":"2005-12-08T19:55:54","slug":"christina_robin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/2005\/12\/08\/christina_robin\/","title":{"rendered":"Christina Robin?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Several of the bloggers I read daily are in a snit this afternoon because of news<\/a> 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.”
\nUh-huh. Alternate universe. Gotcha.<\/p>\n

This is the sort of boneheaded, focus-group-driven nonsense that made the otherwise mediocre movie Office Space<\/i> into a monster cult hit.<\/p>\n

Here’s a sampling of how people are reacting to this “breath of fresh air”:<\/p>\n


\nScalzi<\/a> 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<\/a> of a little boy all alone in a suddenly empty world. Meanwhile, Neil Gaiman<\/a> 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<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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?<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

…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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Testify, Brother Wil!<\/p>\n

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<\/i>.<\/p>\n

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:<\/p>\n

Morons.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pop-culture-miscellany"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=422"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/422\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=422"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=422"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=422"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}