Re: The Super thread of literature, art, music, life, and the universe in general
Posted by:
Platypus (IP Logged)
Date: 30 March, 2023 10:51PM
Dale Nelson Wrote:
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> It was a no doubt abridged version of Great
> Expectations in a 9th grade reader -- how I wish I
> could get my hands on that book now, over 50 years
> later -- that was perhaps my first experience of
> reading Dickens. I liked it! Even Classics
> Illustrated adaptations of Wells and Verne, I
> suppose, helped to prepare me to enjoy these
> writers and the genre of science fiction.
There surely must be instances where an adapted work is better than an original. But the only thing I can think of at the moment is Galland's MILLE ET UN NUITS, which created a classic of Western Literature, by a free adaptation of certain source texts. Galland's versions focused on the magic and mystery, as opposed to other distractions. But Galland did not so much adapt a classic as save a forgotten text from obscurity.
Works for hire have always been subject to updates. My brother as a child enjoyed the Hardy Boys books, and particularly the original of THE MISSING CHUMS, and was rather shocked to find an altered version in stores which changed the tone and characters. Similar updates were regularly done with Nancy Drew, I heard.
I never got into the Hardy Boys as a child, but I did enjoy the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators series. These children's novels were works for hire, for Random House, originally penned by Robert Arthur. When Robert Arthur stopped writing, after about 8 or 10 novels, me and my brother stopped reading, because it was obviously not the same. More recently, I have heard that the books have been reissued with edits by Horace Sebastian. One change is the removal of any references to Hitchcock, supposedly because the license to use his name expired, though I suspect other reasons, and other changes. I would bet good money that if I buy the new versions I will find that all non-native English speakers now speak perfect English, because anything else would be "racist". The copyright owners can do what they want, of course. But the blurb "text by Robert Arthur" is no longer entirely true.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 30 Mar 23 | 10:52PM by Platypus.