What's the news across the nation? We have got the information!

Let's start our news roundup on the international scene, as Matt comments on the British elections, which are coming up May 7 and, with campaigning just started now, remain more limited and sane than the American system, though they are working to fix that.

However, I'm not going to break my political fast before Easter and certainly not on Good Friday.

I'm more amused by the cartoon itself, because back when I was a kid, we kind of got the impression that lions and cheetahs and such very rarely actually caught anything.

Of course, Uncle Walt produced a lot of the alleged nature documentaries we grew up with, and, just as he assured us that the cute little antelope always escaped, he taught us that lemmings periodically commit mass suicide. 

And if that were the only way in which Walt turned us all into his own streaming pack of lemmings, I guess I could live with it, but I really tried to watch "Saving Mr. Banks" with an open mind, even though, when the project was announced, I thought it was a satirical joke of some kind.

It wasn't satire. It was just more Disneyfication.

I gave it a shot, really, but I only got about half an hour into it before I couldn't take any more and came away convinced that, if you remade "Silence of the Lambs" and replaced Anthony Hopkins with Tom Hanks, people would walk out of the theater talking about what a great guy that Hannibal Lector was.

 

All of which is leading up to this bit of news: Disney is remaking "Winnie the Pooh" as a live-action film.

Which recalls this epic rant and this wonderful Lio from 2007 and another even epicker rant on the same topic, in which, among other things, I said, "Please don't tell Johnny Depp and for god's sake don't say anything about it to Jim Carrey."

And yet somebody apparently did, and it's too late for the cameraman to jump in and save Poor Old Bear now.

But what really knocked me off my chair was Michael Cavna's horrified reaction to the news, which is not that someone is destroying AA Milne but that they are destroying Disney's Pooh.

It's purely generational. I admire Cavna's work and generally agree with him on things but defending Disney's Pooh against exploitation is like complaining about the declining quality of Mrs. Butterworth syrup or Velveeta.

Where I come from, maple syrup comes out of trees, cheese never stopped being artisanal and Pooh is a character in a book.

Yet I really can't complain too much, because it was my generation that screwed up Pooh for his generation in the first place.

We should have rebeled much much sooner than we did.

 

And yet there is hope

Frazz speaks for a significant and heartening change I've long noted in that generation, and I was a bit jealous of my own post-Title-IX boys in high school, when I'd see their female counterparts bopping down the sidewalk with their ponytails sticking out of their ball caps and their sports gear slung over their shoulders. 

Girls weren't the only ones suddenly being offered better choices.

One of those girls, now grown and a mom, was talking about the upcoming holiday weekend, which will include (she gagged as she said it) a trip to the American Girl store with her second-gradish daughter, but then a trip to a place with trampolines all over the floor and walls, and an enormous foam pit over a climbing wall. 

And she was regretting she hadn't known in time of a place where you can experience indoor skydiving on a column of air, because her daughter would love that, too.

It's not just sports, though it is sports, yes, but there are a lot of other ways in which little girls have options not only "possible" but being actively offered to them.

It's not a matter of taking pink out of the box. It's a matter of offering them the Big Box in the first place and letting them see how many colors there are, including, but not only, pink.

 

Sometimes the news is fun

The National Cartoonists Society has announced the nominees for all the various awards that aren't called Reubens but that everyone calls Reubens anyway. 

It's way too many to list here, so click on that and have a look. You'll see some names of people you've seen here and a lot that you haven't in part because they have many more categories than what I cover and in part because their awards are not based entirely on my personal taste.

Yes, of course they should be, but they aren't, so there ya go.

But while we're on the topic of award-worthy work, in today's Super-Fun-Pak Comix, Ruben Bolling offers a selection of things that won't get you the award that isn't named for him anyway:

 

Now, here's your newsworthy earworm of the day:

 

Comments

[Mary in Ohio]

I was raised on traditional Pooh, and was not exactly appalled by the Disney version, but decidedly unhappy. Then I read a biography of A.A. Milne that recounted how he had adapted "The Wind in the Willows" for the stage and would have understood what Disney had done to "his" Pooh. That made me feel a bit better.
There is a brand new book out about the REAL bear in the London Zoo that became the inspiration for Pooh.

[Mike Peterson]

I wrote a piece for a Canadian paper last year and little Winnepeg was one of the topics I thought about, but suspected there wasn't enough to get a 14-chapter story out of unless I left the bear in the zoo and followed his pals into the trenches, so I did something else instead.

Glad someone got a book out of it! Well, besides Milne, sort of indirectly.

[Mary in Ohio]

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0805097155/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o02_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Sorry I didn't include the link yesterday for reference !