why you should never read the comments
I wrote something in my 2023 year end meme about how disappointing the internet is, in particular if you try to read anything about a piece of entertainment you liked.
Case in point: The Famous Five.
Now, despite my long Brexit rant in the previous entry, for the first 10 years of my life more or less, i was a Brit through and through. Born in England in a British Army hospital. Posted to West Germany with British Army of the Rhine. Attended British Army school. Lived in British Army housing. After dad left the service we moved to Scotland where my parents did their master's degrees. Then New Zealand where, because of my accent and bookishness, i continued to be teased as a "pom" (Brit) for several more years.
Army brat, check. Bookish, check. Brit, check. Naturally i read The Famous Five. And all the other Enid Blyton books too. They were great. I have no idea how these books hold up in the modern era, but they're a part of my youth and i have fond memories. Weirdly, after not thinking much about them for years, living in Berlin i stumbled across them again, because apparently Germany fell in love with The Famous Five and it's at least as much of a nostalgia kick for German kids as it is for British kids.
Lest i make this too much about Brexit again, and how stupid it was for England to declare itself somehow no longer a part of Europe when it clearly is, let's talk stupid idiots on the internet.
Last year, The Famous Five got rebooted again, in a BBC and ZDF co-production. The first episode aired over the Christmas break, along with all the other British TV specials that come out around Christmastime. I downloaded it, and put it next to my emergency stash of kids' shows that i reserve for when my brain is so utterly mangled that i cannot cope with anything demanding.
This afternoon after a long Skype chat with a friend back in Canada, and after completing a couple more long emails to friends and family members, i felt i deserved a simple, cozy adventure story.
I turned on The Famous Five, and it opens with a curly-haired tomboy sailing a boat somewhere off the British coast. She randomly finds a dog that she promptly decides to adopt/abduct. She also finds a corpse - presumably the dog's former owner - and it does not faze her one tiny little bit because she is a badass, just as i remember. Her cousins come to stay, and also see the corpse, and even though the responsible older brother says they should tell their parents, of course they do not, because they are in the middle of an adventure! They find a secret passage! The water is rising! They escape! They eat sandwiches! The bad guy is a literal moustache-twirling villain! A man on the radio mentions the war brewing in Europe! Dramatic synthesizer stabs!
You guys, it is like someone ripped out my 1980s childhood memories of The Famous Five and put them on screen for the children of today. It's set in a weird historical fantasy era where children walk around with flashlights and rope in their backpack because obviously all children have to be prepared for an adventure at the drop of a hat. The kids are fearless and never suffer any trauma, the parents completely ignore everything that is going on, and the bad guys are so fiendishly evil that they almost turn into comic relief. It is camp as hell. The best part is that despite how absurd and over-the-top every situation is, the characters all react to it terribly earnestly. It is perfect, the anti-Scooby Doo, Enid Blyton to a tee. I was cackling with delight.
And then i went on IMDB to find out who did the score, because i need more of that cheesy arpeggio synth music in my life, the soundtrack to every low budget action/adventure series of my youth. I suspect the intent was to give the whole thing even more of a dreamlike vaporwave timelessness, which is very in keeping with how the books were written.
The Famous Five 2023: The Curse of Kirrin Island End Credits
Well, the IMDB score is predictably low. And there's a bundle of 1 star reviews complaining about how "woke" the reboot is, and how it's tarnishing the legacy of Enid Blyton, and bla bla bla. It's painfully obvious that the people writing these didn't watch the show. Perhaps they saw that one of the characters was cast as black, and apparently that was enough to set them off. Never mind that the story is based in Christian mythology, and there's oo-rah WW2 foreshadowing, and the kids are fantastically self-sufficient - better prepared than Baden Powell himself. Most baffling of all, there is no mention of race or gender or the colonies or anything even the slightest bit "woke" throughout the whole show.
It's fucking exhausting how much people feel the need to shit on stuff for... i don't even know what for. Some kind of performative asshattery, i suppose. I mean. It's a kids' show. It's fun. It's silly. It's exactly what it's supposed to be. I hope the kids of today enjoyed it, but if they didn't, oh well, it entertained this big kid well enough.
Anyway, people on the internet are stupid.
Case in point: The Famous Five.
Now, despite my long Brexit rant in the previous entry, for the first 10 years of my life more or less, i was a Brit through and through. Born in England in a British Army hospital. Posted to West Germany with British Army of the Rhine. Attended British Army school. Lived in British Army housing. After dad left the service we moved to Scotland where my parents did their master's degrees. Then New Zealand where, because of my accent and bookishness, i continued to be teased as a "pom" (Brit) for several more years.
Army brat, check. Bookish, check. Brit, check. Naturally i read The Famous Five. And all the other Enid Blyton books too. They were great. I have no idea how these books hold up in the modern era, but they're a part of my youth and i have fond memories. Weirdly, after not thinking much about them for years, living in Berlin i stumbled across them again, because apparently Germany fell in love with The Famous Five and it's at least as much of a nostalgia kick for German kids as it is for British kids.
Lest i make this too much about Brexit again, and how stupid it was for England to declare itself somehow no longer a part of Europe when it clearly is, let's talk stupid idiots on the internet.
Last year, The Famous Five got rebooted again, in a BBC and ZDF co-production. The first episode aired over the Christmas break, along with all the other British TV specials that come out around Christmastime. I downloaded it, and put it next to my emergency stash of kids' shows that i reserve for when my brain is so utterly mangled that i cannot cope with anything demanding.
This afternoon after a long Skype chat with a friend back in Canada, and after completing a couple more long emails to friends and family members, i felt i deserved a simple, cozy adventure story.
I turned on The Famous Five, and it opens with a curly-haired tomboy sailing a boat somewhere off the British coast. She randomly finds a dog that she promptly decides to adopt/abduct. She also finds a corpse - presumably the dog's former owner - and it does not faze her one tiny little bit because she is a badass, just as i remember. Her cousins come to stay, and also see the corpse, and even though the responsible older brother says they should tell their parents, of course they do not, because they are in the middle of an adventure! They find a secret passage! The water is rising! They escape! They eat sandwiches! The bad guy is a literal moustache-twirling villain! A man on the radio mentions the war brewing in Europe! Dramatic synthesizer stabs!
You guys, it is like someone ripped out my 1980s childhood memories of The Famous Five and put them on screen for the children of today. It's set in a weird historical fantasy era where children walk around with flashlights and rope in their backpack because obviously all children have to be prepared for an adventure at the drop of a hat. The kids are fearless and never suffer any trauma, the parents completely ignore everything that is going on, and the bad guys are so fiendishly evil that they almost turn into comic relief. It is camp as hell. The best part is that despite how absurd and over-the-top every situation is, the characters all react to it terribly earnestly. It is perfect, the anti-Scooby Doo, Enid Blyton to a tee. I was cackling with delight.
And then i went on IMDB to find out who did the score, because i need more of that cheesy arpeggio synth music in my life, the soundtrack to every low budget action/adventure series of my youth. I suspect the intent was to give the whole thing even more of a dreamlike vaporwave timelessness, which is very in keeping with how the books were written.
Click to viewThe Famous Five 2023: The Curse of Kirrin Island End Credits
Well, the IMDB score is predictably low. And there's a bundle of 1 star reviews complaining about how "woke" the reboot is, and how it's tarnishing the legacy of Enid Blyton, and bla bla bla. It's painfully obvious that the people writing these didn't watch the show. Perhaps they saw that one of the characters was cast as black, and apparently that was enough to set them off. Never mind that the story is based in Christian mythology, and there's oo-rah WW2 foreshadowing, and the kids are fantastically self-sufficient - better prepared than Baden Powell himself. Most baffling of all, there is no mention of race or gender or the colonies or anything even the slightest bit "woke" throughout the whole show.
It's fucking exhausting how much people feel the need to shit on stuff for... i don't even know what for. Some kind of performative asshattery, i suppose. I mean. It's a kids' show. It's fun. It's silly. It's exactly what it's supposed to be. I hope the kids of today enjoyed it, but if they didn't, oh well, it entertained this big kid well enough.
Anyway, people on the internet are stupid.