Cultural Fat

Power Of Babel has a good read titled Living On Our Cultural Fat:

This is all part of an alarmingly increasing trend of what I call living on our cultural fat. Instead of producing new works, publishers are all too often choosing books with "name brand recognition" (like The Wizard of Oz or Peter Pan) and turning them into franchises or re-visionings, dumbing down longer books for modern children who no longer have parents to read to them before bed-time and explain the harder words and passages, or removing any politically incorrect elements from the past (Doctor Dolitttle in his original form is almost completely extinct). The point is that works of genius are bastardized or pastiched to become sellable with little care for the original author's intent or talent, and the millions of dollars projected for this Pooh project is a hefty profit even minus the charity.

You don't have to be a bibliophile to know that modern story-telling is going straight down the toilet.  Just look at the movie industry.  How many new, original stories have been released in the past few years.  Some?  Now, how many sequels and how many remakes?

By the way, here is an official declaration that you may mark:  The movie industry will be officially dead when the original Star Wars is remade.  You don't think it will happen?  Just wait.  I will be vindicated.