And always very curious

Having kids does weird things to your sense of perspective. Not only have I become more risk-averse and less able to enjoy the kinds of books or movies usually described as "harrowing" (because they so often rely on child-in-peril plots to engage the audience's emotions and those are no longer fun), I've also discovered a hearty dislike for kid things I used to think were dandy. We'll get to Babar later, but right now I'm looking at you, Curious George. 

I'm not a huge fan of monkeys, to be honest, but one tries not to prejudge. As monkeys go, George is OK, I guess. It's the books I don't like.

I honestly had no idea how dull they are, so dreadfully dull I can't imagine how I ever thought they were interesting.  I guess what you remember, looking back fondly on read-aloud sessions with a parent and a sibling or two and the monkey books, are the illustrations, which really are that good. I especially loved the one where George has transformed the horrid Margaret Dumontlike lady's living room into a jungle, complete with slipper-chair cheetahs and a broom-and-ladder giraffe. Reading that scene now, though, I'm less enchanted than irritated: if the lady wanted a normal paint job, why did she supply the painters with dozens of very small pots of varicolored paint?? Why not a gallon of eggshell? And why was George looking for work, anyway? Don't they feed him at the zoo?

OK, it's a kid's book. It doesn't have to make sense. but must it bore on multiple levels at once? Sentence to sentence, the Reys bring the dull by constantly de-emphasizing the interesting details in favor of the tedious ones. Do 3-year-olds care that the stuff you drink before an X-Ray is called barium? No, but if you said it tastes yucky you might at least get a laugh out of them. 

On the macro level the authors bore by writing the same book, already on the dull side, over and over and then dying and leaving it to their successors to keep writing it again. I can't do a better summation of the sameness than Alice at Finslippy, so why try?

I had a thing or too to say about how much worse the new ones are than the already-pretty-bad originals but I got scooped there too, by my invisible friend Mimi Smartypants, years back. Mimi sorta liked the original George  because he was a fuck-up, but "In these books CG's fuckups are presented quite differently":

In almost every case, the fuckup actually turns out to be a good thing. If CG hadn't wandered away during a camping trip, he never would have seen and been able to put out the forest fire. If CG hadn't let all the puppies out of their cages, the missing one would never have been found. The minor characters in these newer books always end up elaborately thanking CG and his yellow-hatted handler for obliquely saving the day through the magic of simian curiosity. I think this signifies some weird, Hollywood-ized narrative shift, where every thread has to have an overtly feel-good ending, and where child (or monkey) behaviors cannot be undesirable or even morally neutral. 

What she said. 

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