Kids’ classic shouldn’t be watered down
“IS it a kind of dream,” wondered Art Garfunkel as bunny after cute bunny met a violent end in the bloodthirsty children’s epic Watership Down.
This year, the television adaptation of Richard Adams’s novel has been rebooted for the 21st century and will be shown just before Christmas.
It’s nice to know a whole new generation is about to be traumatised by the spectacle of bunny slaughter.
Two years ago there was a bit of a controversy when Channel 5 showed the original 1978 film at Easter – sparking a flood of calls from the outraged parents of weeping children.
Watership Down, the 1978 version anyway, is dark, violent and scary.
But that only serves to hammer home its obvious environmental message about the damaging effects of the actions of man on British soil.
I’ll be watching the new version – and I’m looking forward to the reaction on social media. Will parents be as outraged as they were by the original two years ago?
Children are tougher than we imagine, and there may well be more than a few tears at the fate of Hazel, Fiver and the rest of the rabbits. But they’ll soon get over it.
I remember seeing the original as a child and getting quite upset. But it is still a brilliant story – in fact, I read the novel at least twice.
Growing up in the 1970s, children’s TV was often weird, dark and traumatic.
If there was anything involving an animal which wasn’t produced by Disney, there was a fair chance something bad would happen at the end.
Remember Tarka The Otter, released in 1978, the same year Watership Down was reducing kids to blubbering wrecks?
Spoiler alert – Tarka gets killed by a particularly nasty hunting dog at the end.
Ring Of Bright Water was actually made before I was born, but I remember watching it on TV as a child.
It’s a charming story about a Londoner and his pet otter, Mij, living on the Scottish coast.
Until Mij is brutally clubbed to death by a ditch digger, for no apparent reason.
Then there was Hugo The Hippo, a weird psychedelic cartoon with a soundtrack by The Osmonds, which was shown one 1970s Christmas.
If you don’t remember it, Hugo and his family are kidnapped from their home to deal with a shark problem off the harbour of Zanzibar.
After they’ve driven off the sharks, there’s a strange dream sequence in which the main villain wanders round shooting hippo shaped clouds.
Which would have perhaps disguised the horror, except for a tear-jerking scene with baby Hippo swimming around the corpses of his family at the bottom of the sea.
So yes, I admit it, children’s TV made me cry many times when I was growing up – yet I don’t feel particularly damaged by the experience.
But then nature is brutal – as anyone who watches real animals tearing each other to pieces on the David Attenborough documentary Dynasties can testify.
The fate of cartoon animals is surely not as traumatic as the fate of real ones like the poor lions, penguins and painted wolves.
Parents know the character of their own child and whether they can cope with a cartoon rabbit tragedy.
Anyway, I think Watership Down has an important message that would be good for this growing generation to see – maybe they can be inspired do something to halt the steady slide to extinction faced by so many species of wildlife.