As the Snow White drama rumbles on, Tim Rice saying it's unnecessary recently, I wanted to show a case where it was retold in a better way.
Been reading 'I’m the Stepmother, but my Daughter is too Cute' which is the 'reborn as the story's villianess' trope in a Snow White setting. Snow White (Princess Blanche in this) is around only 10 in this take and the focus is more on the family relationship side with the stepmother now trying to repair and rebuild a relationship with her stepdaughter and more insisting her father, the king, BE a father (spoiler, he despises all women as Blanche is a product of when he was raped to 'continue the bloodline' when he was 14 by the former Queen).
Now let's compare this story to Disney’s projected train wreck. It doesn't belittle the male characters (in fact it provides more depth behind them), it isn't recasting characters for 'diversity' and clearly markets itself as an alternate take on a classic than 'a modern interpretation' subtlety implying the past version is inferior.
A western version I would also add is the Snow White tale in Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes where it's a straight up parody and takes the piss in a very humorous way. Kinda expected when Red Riding Hood pulls out a gun from her knickers and caps the wolf to make a new fur coat. But this does the same thing as the previous story, it honours the original and then goes in it's own direction.
The modern issue we are having is that modern, Hollywood especially, writers have the hubris to assume they can supplant a story that was passed through multiple generations than just provide their own take. Maybe it was started as a disenfranchisement campaign but seeing how many of those same writers are on the street striking because AI looking really good right now, hasn't worked out that well for them.
Anyway, thought I'd show how to do an alternate take of an old story well and just how shit mainstream western writers are. Have you guys got any good retellings you can list compared to Disney trash?
I just finished Mauler's critique of Ant Man 3 and something that struck me was that Disney/Marvel hired a screenwriter for that movie who had never done a screenplay before. I don't think it's "the writers" causing this issue, it's studios intentionally hiring bad writers, possibly to justify AI.
When I was a kid, there was a show called Wishbone, about a dog who would reenact classic stories as a dog. They would be cut down to less than 30 minutes and the protagonist would always be a talking dog and every single one of them was better than any of the ones Disney made retelling their own movies.
I think it's pretty obviously intentional, at this point. You don't lose a billion dollars over three years and say "maybe we'll market it differently" if you're trying to make money. If Disney (and Warner, and Comcast, etc, etc) were worried about making boxoffice numbers, they'd be gutting and reworking their studios from the ground up and firing wokists left and right.
If they aren't, it means revenue isn't the goal. We know they have money coming in through ESG investment, and we know that Hollywood is as evil and degenerate an institution as any we have, always has been. I think their goal is nothing less than the destruction of Western values, including our stories, at the behest of their investors who are always lurking in the background.
Tl;dr: Terrible retellings of classic stories is not a bug of Hollywood, it's a feature.
The problem is that a lot of people here live for that ragebait.
They HAVE to watch some YouTuber making a video "destroying" the new woke release.
Not only dd Wishbone work within a 30 minute framework, but it worked with the "book" part of it having to share time with the "framing" story that was Wishbone's RL goings-on that paralleled the book being featured.
But they still managed to capture the raw essence of each book without totally gutting them with only maybe 10-15 minutes to work with!
That seemed familiar and looked it up, from the intro I immediately remembered this from MY childhood
This is in the same bracket for me as Muppets Christmas Carol in that it presents a classic story but to a younger audience which is perfectly fine. Compared to current Hollywood that says you HAVE to be the audience no matter how unappealing they make it or you're a bigot
I unfortunately agree that bad Hollywood retellings of classic stories is a feature, I'm not young enough I don't remember that Romeo and Juilet film with Leonardo DiCaprio, I couldn't stand that film even as a kid, favourite Shakespeare film is still Henry V with Kenneth Branagh. The key thing that needs to be watched if they use the words 'updating, modern, current times' as that usually means 'we hired shit writers that can't write in a time period not their own'
Oh, if anyone wants to watch Henry V, it's on YouTube in full along with Wishbone season 1 if you want to see a cute dog in stories.