This article was the first time I’ve read of Spielberg owning up to the mistake that was editing out the guns in ET, and it felt.. cathartic. <deep breath> Like forgiving a father who never returned after going out for a pack of smokes after he reconnects thirty years later for a heartfelt apology. Yep, you jacked up one of the most significant films of my childhood for no good reason, thanks for owning up to the stupidity that we all saw it was back then. All better now.
In truth, you’d never know if you didn’t know. It was more the act, the misguided motivation, and the impossibility of ignoring it having been privy to the original during formative years.
Will changing Agatha Christie’s novels be terribly impactful or noticeable to the plot if you were unfamiliar with the original? Probably not. It inarguably subtracts from the works, however. The bigger idea is that we lose something of the original creation and it’s voice from the period; that if such edits are not clearly identified and worse - if original works are simply censored from the casual marketplace - it’s a loss bigger than the sum of the incidental changes.
I think Spielberg’s statement on this does it better justice than I can, but there’s value in keeping original works available and not just in the cobwebbed and esoteric corners of libraries or the Internet but in GA. This is our heritage, for better AND worse.
