![]() ![]() Dolittle adaptation perhaps wisely opted to break with its source material almost entirely, aside from the title character's ability to speak to animals - well, and the cameo of the pushmi–pullyu.īecause, if there is anything worth revisiting in the Dolittle story today, it's maybe that alone: its fanciful characters. ![]() Alarming stories even emerged on the set of the 1967 film, where actor Rex Harrison, who played Dolittle, reportedly verbally abused his Jewish and black costars. Dolittle reluctantly agrees to transform Prince Bumpo into a white prince so that the Sleeping Beauty, his favorite fairy-tale character, will agree to marry him." While Lofting's The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle questionably won the 1923 Newbery Medal for best work of children's literature, contemporary publishers have since bowdlerized the original texts to better suit modern times.Ĭinematic adaptations of Dolittle have likewise failed to grapple with the story's racist and colonialist history. In a 1968 bulletin, New York librarian Isabelle Suhl described Lofting as "a white racist and chauvinist, guilty of almost every prejudice known to modern white Western man." His books were riddled with "gratuitous racial epithets," adds The New York Times, and The Story of Doctor Doolittle even included a "discomforting scene in which Dr. But despite the pushmi–pullyu's twee appearance, the original Doctor Dolittle was nothing of the sort. ![]()
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