This time ’round, I got to test it out on my 6-year-old son. How would Steven Spielberg’s BFG do whizzpoppers? I figured I’d better reread the book first before letting the movie version pave over my childhood imagination.
It’s no wonder parents once had the book banned from some elementary schools, though it’s tame compared to, say, James and the Giant Peach. I was also titillated by the more horrific elements, like the other, grotesque giants who snatch people while they sleep and eat them alive. I delighted in the giant’s half-made-up language - snozzcumbers! frobscottle! - and the subversive way he would use that language to take the gas out of everyday taboos like “whizzpoppers” (farts), a favoured pastime that he persuaded the reluctant Sophie to try. When I first read it in paperback as a preteen, passed to me by a friend eager to have someone share in its weirdness and wonder, it was a revelation and instantly became my favourite book I had ever read up to that point. A 1982 children’s book by Roald Dahl, on which the new Steven Spielberg-directed movie is based.īy now the world knows about The BFG, the offbeat fantasy about an orphan girl abducted in the night by a big freaking giant.Īs it opens in multiplexes across the globe this weekend, it is the effects-laden Disney movie that will be the first experience many have of the sometimes scary, often funny tale that began life as a Roald Dahl children’s novel in 1982, and before that as a short story told in Danny, the Champion of the World.
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