Minus the Spine

Strawberry Shortcake and her perfumed-haired buddies are totally back in style now so I recently gave my 4-year-old niece my old Strawberry Shortcake toys like the Trolley (though kept the glassware for myself, thank you). But then noticed that when she put it with the rest of her SS toys, it looked helplessly old-fashioned since all the new stuff has a very different aesthetic–bright purples and rounded, intricate parts. In today’s NYT there’s an article about how children’s characters like Strawberry Shortcake and the Care Bears are getting a 21st Century Facelift. And it made me think–what if beloved characters from novels were given a 21st century makeover too?

Like Jane Eyre… maybe now she’d be a Serbian 18-year-old who loses most of her family in the war and decides to ditch her uncle’s abusive family and shitty makeup factory job in Novi Sad where her boss is constantly hitting on her and the other female workers and then bankrupts the factory after embezzling money. She applies online for an pair job and moves to England to care for the only child of a rich Russian mobster who also has an old Welsh housekeeper in his employment. He’s often gone, travelling in Eastern Europe, but when he’s there, they begin flirting and he asks her to marry him, but finds out one day when she accidentally opens his email that his psycho ex-wife is living in St. Petersburg and is extorting him for money because she knows about a lot of his mobster crimes. The truth is that he has really reformed since the old days and now only makes retail deals on the black market in order to fund his legitimate investments in the oil business. But Jane (or Jana) is scared by his dark past and runs away from the house and finds herself at the London Serbian Community Centre in Notting Hill in London. There, she happens to reconnect with old family friends of her parents’, who take her in until Rochester finds her…

Or how about Holden Caulfield? My guess is that he’d be this totally emo skater kid who gets thrown out of boarding school in the Northeast. After getting chewed out by his teacher, he goes back to his dorm room and plays video games with his roommate who beats him soundly in Wii Boxing. He then hops on Amtrak and goes to New York where he gets a room at the Gansevoort using his father’s credit card. Wandering around the Meatpacking District late at night, he starts talking to a trannie prostitute that he takes back to his hotel. The next morning he meets some LaRouche activists on the street and gets to talking to them and thinks that he might join the ever-continuing LaRouche presidential campaign and that will giving some meaning to his life, and later at a Lou Reed show at the Beacon Theater, he invites his ex-girlfriend to join him but she’s already planning to work for the Obama campaign in the summer and declines. He decides that he’s going to work on an organic farm in Montana and plans to leave the next day…