DANGERMOUSE VS DUCKULA: YAWN OF INJUSTICE

OK, calm down everyone. I know we're all very upset. I know we're all sick of hastily and expensively assembled re-launches, re-boots and re-imaginings of classic material, of the heroes of our youth being butchered and forced through a dreary corporate sausage factory where all the spirit and juice of the original is extracted and replaced with brain-numbing committee blandness and ill-judged stadium popcorn-munching media vomit. I know we are utterly exhausted by every attempt by some jumped pseudo-boy-wonder director or cultural supremo to stamp their mediocre authority on a major artistic creation by dumping a whole septic tank of postmodern baloney all over it. We can all agree that these moronic failures should be stopped before they ruin every original idea that humanity has ever had.

We need to draw the line at the latest dreadful error of creative entropy. We must mark it out as a particular example of everything that is wrong with the planet in the twenty-first century.

So - what the fuck happened with the crime against humanity that was the Count Duckula reboot? Duckula was resurrected to go ducko-o-rodento with Dangermouse in the latter's own relaunched show. The results were truly appalling. How long must we allow these shallow TV and film executives to get away with such dreadful attacks against art?  [POW! Right in the childhood! - Editron]

Granted, Dangermouse's reboot was only mildly execerable - a taller, vainer, more pompous metrosexual version of his previous self perhaps, but still essentially the same moderately successful secret agent that he basically always was. But the gross misrepresentation of the new Duckula is an abberration. The original Duckula was vegetarian, peaceful, adverse to conflict, and although deluded and conceited and filled with hubristic aspirations to artistic greatness was essentially just a harmless if eccentric landed nobleman. But the new Duckula was actually violent, megalomaniacal, aggressive, spoke in an incomprehensibly camp American accent and acted in a manner so completely at odds with his noble heritage as to be an affront to his entire lineage. This was slander, pure and simple.

The total disrepect shown towards the Count here is outrageous. Sure, Duckula may have his foibles but he was one of the most impressive political figures to emerge from the Carpathians in centuries; if it hadn't been for that notorious fake bond scandal he could have been the best president Romania ever had, and nobody has done more to promote Transylvanian culture than he has. Not since Vlad Tepes himself has a Romanian national hero been defiled in such a callous and demeaning manner. This is nothing more than a cultural atrocity.

So please - stop the madness. No more reboots, no more resurrections or relaunches. If you can't think of any original ideas then go away and play PS2 in a dungeon somewhere. Just stop it. Now.

(The writer wishes to make it known that he would rather chew off his own arm and feed it to a goldfish than watch 'Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice'.)

Posted in: Column2,Joel Heyes