(LifeSiteNews) –– As I have reported many times in this space, the LGBT movement is successfully taking over classic and beloved children’s entertainment franchises, one by one (and, as I detailed in a recent essay for The American Conservative, producing many potent propaganda stories of their own in nearly every genre of film and TV).
I have tracked these capitulations closely, because many parents allow their children to watch the same cartoons and familiar characters they watched when they were young – and because they are not generally watching, say, Peppa Pig with their children, they are usually unaware of the LGBT content that has been smuggled in. Many parents have contacted me after reading these columns to say as much.
In addition to creating new LGBT storylines in long-running children’s franchises, activists are also retroactively attempting new, perverse retellings of old classics, as well – or simply claiming that these beloved classics contain queer subtexts that were there all along. Consider just a few examples:
Some writers have insisted that Tintin, the European reporter created by Georges Remi (better known by his penname, Hergé), was gay due to the fact that he inhabits an almost entirely all-male world in the world-famous series of adventure albums (similar theories, predictably, have been circulated about Asterix and Obelix).
Academics have long claimed that the Canadian icon Anne of Green Gables was lesbian (yes, they are aware she is fictional), with Canada’s “paper of record” the Globe and Mail asking: “Does lesbianism underlie Anne of Green Gables?” Another outlet put it more bluntly: “Anne of Green Gables is obviously bisexual.” The subject has attracted endless speculation from a certain sort of literary scholar.
A recent modern retelling of Little Women portrays Jo March, the undisputed heroine of the story, as a lesbian. Her husband – a central character in the original novel as well as the rest of the series – is a minor irritation to be dispensed with.
And of course, the work of J.R.R. Tolkien has been thoroughly worked over as well, with the queering of the great writer’s canon already well underway. Amazon has refrained from including LGBT characters in its billion-dollar flop thus far, but I find it difficult to believe that they won’t cave eventually. Why wouldn’t they?
The latest classic to get the revisionist treatment by LGBT activists is Frog and Toad, the award-winning four-book children’s series by Arnold Lobel.
Apple TV+ has just released a new animated kids show, and The Daily Beast was eager to feature an interview with the creator Rob Hoegee: “Frog and Toad Are Still Gay In Apple’s New Kids’ Show—If You Want Them to Be.” The series follows the books and attempts to render the characters identically to how Lobel portrayed them – with one exception. As The Daily Beast explained:
[Hoegee] found it important to consider the queer subtext of the Frog and Toad books. A ‘significant number’ of his cast and crew identify as LGBTQ+, Hoegee says, and he aspired ‘to make sure that everyone felt that they were being heard and their contribution – their Frog and Toad – lived on in whatever shape that was.’
‘You can’t deny it,’ Hoegee says. ‘It is part of the books, it’s part of the legacy.’
The author, Lobel, was gay himself – but wrote the series about two creatures who were simply friends. That wasn’t good enough for the creators:
‘What we wanted to do here is create a faithful adaptation of the books,’ Hoegee says. ‘For people, a lot of readers of a certain age, Frog and Toad as characters seen through a queer lens is hugely important to them. We can’t deny anyone that meaning to them, as far as these characters go. If that’s how you see these characters in the book, it’s fair to say that you will have the opportunity to see a similar viewpoint in the show as well.’
Indeed. We’ll be seeing a lot more of this over the next few decades. Those franchises that can’t be co-opted – like Sesame Street, or Blue’s Clues, or Scooby-Doo – will be rewritten to suit the new governing ideology.
