Who else noticed the url of this story????????

Is it only here because of the clearly crow-barred in reference to mobile phones and laptops?? (No mobes or lappys though)

In other breaking news;

Kirrin Bay is now Kirrinatoga, California!

They all have superpowers!

Everyone enjoys lashings of Coca Cola at the local McDonalds!

Timmy's a robot!

George's dad is a scientist working for an evil maniac in the secret volcano lair on Kirrin Island!

The American kid saves the day!

five go mad on mescaline

I think I am going to be sick

disney *shudder*

Well, we'll just have to wait to see how they fuck it up.

How can you report on the Famous five without mentioning the presence or not of Ginger Beer? Or lashings for that matter.

All they have to do is change the target to people with ginger hair, Americans, Israelis and fundamentalist Christians and no-one would mind one bit.

Well, I'm for lashings and lashings of ginger beer before venturing onto the train for the weekend rush...

I made that comment before looking at the URL!

This story reminds me of the comic strip production in the title. Wonder if it's kicking around on the net somewhere, be good to see it again..

Presumably the 'lashings of ginger beer' will be replaced by alcopops in the modern version, Joyoto will be happy-slapped and the dog will savage a small child and be put down. I think I'm getting the hang of this user-generated story thing, off to submit it now.

I always though she was a lesbian.

Hear that loud humming noise?

It's Ms Blyton rotating quickly!

Damn, you are on a roll.

Lester, you are debunked as top tongue-in-cheek hack. Make room for the bird.

Huh?

I thought 'George'ina preferred butter side down?

My childhood has just been destroyed in one go! Why can't these people stick to the originals. Phones??? Laptops??? What happened to a buried map and a compass??? Postman Pat's already been buggered up completely so why don't Disney stick to the mouse. He seems to have worked fine for them in the past!

With th new phones and the anti-nanny state stance it sounds like it'll be a film about a bunch of asbo-wannabes! Grrrrr!

I'll be happy if the mad but clueless boffin "Uncle Quentin" turns out to be Tarantino in the movie.

Educate these women and soon yer out of a job.

(It is Famous Five after all)

one of the girls should be asian and smart, the other should be white and one step away from Vicki Pollard, both should be smashed on alcopops. The dog should be a banned breed, one of the boys should be on an ASBO for giving a rival football supporter a kicking, the other afraid of his own shadow due to the "hide them away" parents he has. All should be shiftless, lazy, self-absorbed and have only 10 adjectives in their vocabulary (most of them obscene).

It doesn't preclude you from having offspring now apparently...

We've all seen Jurassic Park now haven't we?

/Mine's the one with the test tubes

I think it's great, but they could do so much better..

Forget ginger bear, making it russian vodka, or pints of cider. 'George' could have just come out of the nick for prostitution, Jo's got a few asbo's already, and ain't afraid to use em. You just need a mechanic who sorts out nicked cars, the one who's smartly dressed (repeat hitman) and an oliver twist type. They all wear hoodies, carry knives and guns, the laptops and mobiles are all nicked (why pay when you can 'borrow'?) and the task of the day is to find the local snitch and teach em a lesson, and get some cheap smack while they're at it

Isn't that more modern? Or am I just a bit cynical? Oh sorry it's disney, reality doesn't exist (except when bambi's dad got shot for dinner...)

Old man rant over. mine's the one with gramophone receipt in

The BBC article is either a: the funniest thing you've ever read, or b: the raping of your childhood.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7306752.stm

Now am I just being unduly cynical or do they all look more than a little like the cast of Scooby Doo?

If the two girls end up as teenage mothers after a drunken fumble with the lads after a few blue WKDs and they all go into hiding you could call then the secret seven.

Read this:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/childrenandteens/story/0,,1672558,00.html

I think it needs more depth.

Something like George decides she wants a sex change because she has always felt more comfortable as a man. Anne is upset because she had fallen in love with George, and didnt know if she could still love her as a man.

So Anne leans on Julian, they end up sleeping together and Anne gets pregnant. Dick is upset because he was in love with Julian.

Love triangles for the win.

Must not be very famous. Never heard of them on this side of the pond. What we really need is a movie of the Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, and Encyclodedia Brown. Throw in Johnny Quest, Hadji, and Bandit to make it PC.

I would read those books over and over. I was very happy the day I inherited them from my sister.

Happily read a whole SS book before I got up on a Sunday morning.

Why is that updates of certain stories fondly remembered from childhood, e.g. Thunderbirds and Famous Five, trigger great wrath, and others not, e.g. Robin Hood, Sherlock Holmes and, for that matter, the Gospel of John? When the BBC updated Robin Hood there were a few "lol Robin Hoodie and what's that towelhead doing there" sniggers, but there wasn't this much "oh noes my childhood" stuff.

Stories get updated. Since pretty much every story is a variant on the same three different plotlines (1. man meets woman 2. man fights man 3. man fights world) anyway, the only difference between an update and a supposedly 'new' story is the degree to which they admit that there are no original ideas, ever, anywhere.

When someone chooses to update a story and its characters, it may be laziness and it may be a pale imitation, but no matter how bad it is it's a tribute to the enduring appeal of that story that someone wants to update it. Now this being Disney, I'd put my money on it being actually lazy and a pale imitation, but even so I do have to give some some grudging kudos for writing a story in which kids go out on a moor without GPS and filling in a risk assessment first. And to a lot of people the 25% ethnic minority proportion is conservative compared to reality.

Saw that coming...

According to the beeb "their enemies include a DVD bootlegger"

So basically the whole thing is a big long anti-piracy advert. Next week they'll be fighting the evil MP3 downloaders !

I remember kids programs used to have some sort of 'moral message', nowadays that appears to have been replaced with a 'corporate message' !

What other brainwashing and subliminal messages can we look forward to?

umm did anyone else notice

Jo (short for Jyoti) is the daughter of tomboy George, now Aunt George, surely if Jo's mum was George, she would not be Jo's aunt?

unless the famous 5 are all now rednecks.....

mine is the one with the doglead, and bottle of ginger beer in the pocket

ta

George was not a lesbian, I think the euphemism is "greedy" today. (ie fucks anything)

G. Oh Timmy your sooo licky

A. Dont let him do that George,

G. But he likes it,

Dick was gay though and had a massive crush on Julian the team leader of the group, no matter what the BBC says.

(from the BBC article) "their enemies include a DVD bootlegger"

Great, company shills denoucing piracy for the good of the corporation. The 10yr old viewers will love that.

Can't wait for the one where they defeat Al Qaeda.

Maybe it's just me not concentrating as it's the end of a short week. But did anyone else have to read this bit twice?

"The team is completed by adventure junkie Max, who is 13-year-old Julian's son; Dylan, the 11-year-old son of Dick, and dog Timmy."

Perhaps I should just go to the pub and forget about it....

Bubble

I was reading the posts bottom to top for some reason and came across:

"Happily read a whole SS book before I got up on a Sunday morning."

Thought thats being a Nazi and Proud.

Sounds to me like someone here spent too much time reading the entry for "Monomyth" on wikipedia and can now no longer enjoy anything!

What updated 21st Century look? They don't look like Hoodies to me.

For an orgy. 5 is just a threesome with two camerapeople.

...

...

...

/speechless

/PH

Is it just me, or do I detect a scent of Scooby Doo in the characterisations? Appropriate now that Scooby is rather long in the canine tooth methinks. Ann's daughter=Daphne, Max=Fred (though less glamrock and obviously more intelligent), Dylan=Velma and...well there's never going to be a 'light relief' character in the FF so Jo must be the sincere, intense token PC character.

And since when was George the leader of the group? She was petulant and spoilt, hardly leadership qualities although courageous and loyal to her friends. I bet she never made the butties for them.

Everyone knows that Dick, Julian, and Anne were siblings and that George was their cousin...

@ Darren B

"Happily read a whole SS book before I got up on a Sunday morning."

Five go mad in Poland?

Without the newspaper?

Disney is the reason that, one day, someone is going to nuke the entire USA out of existence, figuring the deaths of millions of wonderful, and mostly innocent, citizens to be "a small price to pay" to dispose of the evil that is Disney.

Every story Disney touches is turned to shit. When will people learn: "DO NOT sell the film rights to your stuff to Disney!"

As a kid, I used to love the Famous Five books but grew out of them pretty fast when I twigged how contrived and simplistic the plots were (never mind the racism, classism and sexism; they were just plain formulaic) - but not even predigested-pap-in-a-can crap like TFF deserves to be Disneyed!

For my money, Comic Book's "Five go Mad in Dorset" and "Five go Mad on Mescaline" were brilliant, having captured the repeated "plot" elements of the books brilliantly.

Laughed myself silly - good story.

Can I have your babies?

...Three Golliwogs film now.

Another Enid Blyton fave.