Sujet : _The Hundred and One Dalmatians_ racist?
De : jpolowin (at) *nospam* sympatico.ca (Joel Polowin)
Groupes : rec.arts.sf.writtenDate : 07. Oct 2024, 21:41:02
Autres entêtes
Organisation : A noiseless patient Spider
Message-ID : <5c7f20d3-b93a-47fb-bc27-36cc2ca48bcc@sympatico.ca>
User-Agent : Mozilla Thunderbird
I recently ran across a review (
https://youtu.be/1GxzNj8HO-k?t=788) which compared the original Dodie Smith book _The Hundred and One Dalmations_ with the 1961 Disney animated adaptation, _One Hundred and One Dalmatians_. It noted that the original book had some extremely racist comments, referring to "sneaky awful black-eyed gipsies". (This is in chapter 14 of the book.)
But my copy of the book _One Hundred and One Dalmatians_ (with the altered title, and an image from the Disney movie on the cover) doesn't have that. The worst comment that my book makes is that "gipsies sometimes stole valuable dogs" And the gipsies do indeed try to capture the dogs.
My guess is that the book was tweaked a bit for the post-Disney publication. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find a copy of the book that was published pre-1961. (It's also possible that the changes were due to the book's North American publication, vs. the original U.K. release.) The copies at archive.org are no longer available; the passages available in Google Books don't include that chapter. Interlibrary loan was unsuccessful — although I found a library that had it, relatively close to where I live, the library then removed the book from their catalogue. I guess they discovered that the book was missing from their collection when they tried to find it for me.
Do any of you have a pre-Disney (i.e. pre-1961) copy of the book? I'm interested in comparing the two book versions, or at least that section of them.
Thanks,
Joel