Monday, October 7, 2024

More Dr. Seuss Bowdlerization

Found this "improvement" in the second edition of The Tooth Book:


It's not even diversity-related this time, just good old fashioned stick-in-the-muddism.

Interestingly, the 2000 edition with new illustrations by Joe Mathieu, while it has some of the expected diversity tampering (changing the chap with the mega-Irish name "Mr. Donald Driscoll Drew" to a Black man and, more bizarrely, portraying a "little girl named Ruthie" as an ancient Egyptian wearing sneakers), it does restore the "Bite someone else" text to its original purity.

Carrot sticks indeed!

1 comment:

Bruce Charlton said...

Bowdlerized, it's just not funny anymore. Light comic verse (and prose - eg. PG Wodehouse) is very technical in its perfection - one word different and it doesn't work.

Interesting to see what the modern pearl-clutchers would make of Hillaire Belloc's Cautionary Tales

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/27424/27424-h/27424-h.htm

More Dr. Seuss Bowdlerization

Found this "improvement" in the second edition of The Tooth Book : It's not even diversity-related this time, just good old fa...