I'm becoming less and less interested in CBC in the afternoon. The other day, the hostess, Gill Deacon, was talking about the up-coming 3D version of Peanuts, and describing how she can't wait to see Lucy pull the football back when Charley Brown tries to kick it.
She wants the movie to be the one she already saw? She can't wait to laugh again at an old, old joke? She is excited about the idea that the producers of this movie will not be able to come up with a new idea but will have to repeat an old one?
I'll bet she actually tunes in to see reruns of "Happy Days" and gets wet just thinking about Fonzie going "EEEHHEHHHH!". Again. And again. And again. And again. And do it again, Fonzie, it was so funny. Please? Do it again. "Eeeehhhh!". Oh! (Hysterical giggles).
So this woman wants to go to those parties where your Uncle George tells you the exact same story for the 30th time. So she wants to go see the Eagles on tour doing the same hits they first performed in 1979. And Carol Burnett do her mugging, and Tim Conway, and Jerry Lewis. Thank you. It is people like you who are responsible for the fact that TV is a wasteland.
Disney Pops P. L. Travers
P. L. Travers absolutely hated what Disney did to her book (Mary Poppins). You have to be pretty shameless to make a movie about her in which you simply rewrite history and reverse her attitude. Even more shameless to claim, in interviews, you didn't do it. (Marineland should learn from them and make a movie about a killer whale who longs to come live at Marineland.)
So we have "Saving Mr. Banks" in which we are told that P. L. Travers (the "P" stands for "Pamela") had reservations about the Disney version of "Mary Poppins" until she sees the results and begins to understand how honorable and wonderful and edifying it is to believe that most people really can't bear reality and so must be drugged into infantile fantasies or bribed with sugar and so finally understood and approved of Walt's vision of a sweet, white, oblivious America.
She did not. She didn't like what they did to her book at all and tried to withdraw consent for the movie. She did not like the animation injected into the story. She didn't like the sticky sentimentality, or the fact that they white-washed the Mary Poppins character to move into that "lovable" mischievous rogue category so well-inhabited by the American popular landscape with all it's Lucys and Gilligans and Jethros and Mr. Haneys and Fonzies and-- oh, my god, it's absolutely sickening just how dominated our culture is with treacle and feyness and posturing.