Oompa-Loompa Revisionism
You'd be hard-pressed to find someone less excited than me about Tim Burton's remake of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Hell, I even hated the now-revered Gene Wilder version when it first came out because it deviated so much from the book (it's grown on me over time). I also got called "Oompa-Loompa" at school quite a bit after that movie came out, which didn't help endear it to me at all.
I've loved reading Roald Dahl since I was a kid, so I was quite surprised to discover that his books were rather controversial back in the 70s, and that critics often attacked him as insensitive in his treatment of children. Another writer of childrens' books named Eleanor Cameron even accused him of racism in the press because he had portrayed the Oompa-Loompas as African pygmies, so Dahl's publisher went so far as to replace them with little hippies (which I find far more offensive)! You can see the before-and-after illustrations above, and read about the entire episode, along with the letters that Dahl and Cameron exchanged, here at the wonderful Roald Dahl Fan site.
Now if there's one thing that really cheeses me off, it's literary revisionism, because it tries to deny me the right to make up my own mind about what I read. As far as I'm concerned, the kind of nosy do-gooders who want to pull Huckleberry Finn off the school library shelf for its alleged racism are no different than the people who want to ban Catcher In the Rye for its nihilistic, anti-authoritarian slant.
Update: Screenhead links to the hilarious Chocolypse Now, the comic-book tale that picks up where the book and film left off.
via GreenCine Daily