Disney’s proposal for a cartoon update of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five stories is either “jolly good news” or “awfully bad luck”, depending on your view. It’s either hurrah for Disney, or it’s the queasy prospect of Five Go to Smugglers Top in a Hoody. With lashings of Diet Coke, presumably.
If you were really intent on making the Famous Five chime with the culture in 2006, you would probably need to rebrand them the “Celebrity Five”, but there is no sign that Disney intends to go that far. The company does, however, mean to bring the Five forward a generation and rename them. Timmy the dog is still Timmy the dog because . . . well, because some things, obviously, you don’t mess with. But it’s farewell to Julian, Dick, Anne and George, apparently, and hiya to Jo, Cole, Allie and Dylan.
If this seems like a faintly worrying development, it is not just because one fears for the vulnerability of Blyton’s 60-year-old plot mechanisms in a fast-paced modern setting — though it is true that there isn’t a Famous Five book in print that couldn’t be halted on page 14, or thereabouts, if one of the children simply pulled out a mobile phone and called the police.
More importantly, one worries about the wisdom in general of making old stories “more relevant”. When modern children like the Famous Five, it is not because George and Dick speak to them about their lives, but exactly because they don’t. These days, in fact, the Famous Five (who, let’s face it, were never intended to be a real-life study in the first place) can only seem wildly exotic. They inhabit, after all, a world in which grown-ups were content to hand children a tent and a packet of sandwiches and happily dispatch them into cave-riddled countryside with nothing more than a firm handshake and an instruction to be back before the start of the new school year.
What shackled modern child wouldn’t be enthralled by the prospect of that — or, indeed, of a time when smugglers routinely brought their contraband ashore in rowing boats on perilously moonless nights, rather than popping it in a condom, swallowing it and heading up the Nothing to Declare lane at Stansted? The appeal of Julian these days, in as much as he continues to have any, is not that he reflects the world of modern children on their behalf but, on the contrary, that he is a roaring stuffed shirt from pre-history.
Say what you like about him, he’s different. Whereas if Cole, Dylan, or whoever the new Julian may be knows all the cheats for the computer game Age of Empires and spends his evenings updating his Bebo site, then he will be pretty much like every other kid in the class.
It’s a delicate area, but the best advice for Disney would surely be: for the sake of the children, keep it unreal. Modern relevance? They get quite enough of that at home. Lashings of it, in fact.
Giles Smith