As many of us know, Hollywood has gotten a bit lazy with their shows. With all the remakes of shows and live action reboots of every animated Disney movie ever, it’s no secret that producers are not willing to take the risks of having original ideas anymore. The message I have for those producers is to either make new shows, or leave the old ones alone. 

My biggest qualm with this practice of just drastically changing a show in the new age is the children’s TV show “Max and Ruby.” For those that are not familiar, “Max and Ruby” is a Canadian kids TV program about two siblings in a world where everyone is a rabbit. Max is a three year old rabbit boy who speaks one to two words per episode (usually the word is about the subject of the episode) and gets into trouble which frequently has to be fixed by his seven year old older sister, Ruby. They are both little white rabbits and Ruby assumes a motherly role to her younger brother. Usually she has to take care of him like cooking his meals and bathing him.

Most of the episodes would take place at their home with only Max and Ruby, but occasionally would involve Ruby’s friends, or their grandmother. But as you notice, two members of the family are missing, Max and Ruby don’t have parents. Many people would question this fact like it is a flaw of the show, but I see it as a good part of the show. 

Max and Ruby do not need parents, much like how the children of the Peanuts world do not show parents either. The original author of the “Max and Ruby” books, Rosemary Wells, did not include any parents in the books deliberately. I personally own the book “Bunny Cakes”, in which Ruby wants to bake a cake and sends her little brother to get ingredients for it. Not one time do we see even a sign of the parents, because this was not the author’s vision for them. 

 “We don’t see Max and Ruby’s parents because I believe that kids resolve their issues and conflicts differently when they’re on their own,” Wells stated. 

This to me proves that they were not meant to have parents in the show, aside from the family photo that hangs in the living room. “Max and Ruby” is meant to show how kids can function on their own without parents. They are essentially living independently like latch key kids. If you really want to you could decide in your mind that is what they are. I don’t understand why so many people were getting on this show and coming up with theories that their parents are dead, when no one thinks about that when they watch Charlie Brown and we never see the parents there either. 

But I guess that is thrown completely out the window in recent seasons, because now they not only have parents, but they added two twin siblings out of nowhere. Now Max, who is supposed to be a roughly two to three year old child, now says full sentences with complete clarity. Ridiculous. 

Hollywood should also stop trying to make shows that were not edgy in the slightest, into edgy, angsty, punk shows. When Netflix decided to reboot and remake “Sabrina the Teenage Witch”, they went a completely different direction than the original show had. What was going through their heads when they took Sabrina and decided she would regularly take trips to hell? This is incredibly different from the blonde high school student who had secret powers and a lovable cat named Salem. I honestly think whoever decided we need every show to be a dark, gritty, drama and comedy series is illegal now. 

Sabrina however works better than the show reboot that was crowd booed by the entire internet, “Winx Club”.

In the old show, it was about a group of friends who were also secretly fairies who are in high school that save people. They wore very bright outfits and the colors being bubbly and sparkly was a marker for the show. The reboot decided that a show that had fans in 2012, is not going to be a dark, dreary teen drama with adult themes, which doesn’t make sense if the fans of said show aren’t adults yet.

If there’s one thing that really grinds my gears is when producers take a good show concept and change a bunch of things for no real good reason, did we not learn anything from the “Star Wars prequels? It is unnecessary and I would thank them to stop doing it.