Characters from the Disney TV series featuring Enid Blyton’s Famous Five

London, March 20: Enid Blyton’s Famous Five tales for children, which she began in 1942 with Five on a Treasure Island, recounting the adventures of Julian, Dick and Anne with their cousin George and her dog, Timmy, have been modernised by Disney television for the 21st century.

As generations of children know, George, a bit of a tomboy and said to have been modelled on Blyton herself, hated being called by her real name, Georgina.

In the new version, George’s daughter, described as an “Anglo-Indian”, is Jo, the team leader who lives in the countryside. But Jo is short for Jyoti, “a Hindi word meaning light”.

Disney’s attempt to recreate the characters for the modern age apparently received the blessings of Blyton’s eldest daughter, Gillian Baverstock, who died aged 76 last year.

Blyton wrote for another time and age when England used to win Test matches, people were polite and children did not wander around at night carrying knives. In recent years, her books have been banned from some libraries by right-on councils, who have accused her of being racist.

In the new series, which will be launched on the Disney Channel on May 5, the children of the original Famous Five are brought together at their aunt George’s house on the English coast.

Allie, a 12-year-old Californian shopaholic who enjoys going out and getting “glammed up”, is packed off to the British countryside to her cousins. Her mother was Anne in the Famous Five, but she has now become a successful art dealer.

The other characters are adventure junkie Max, who is Julian’s 13-year-old son, Dylan, the 11-year-old son of Dick, and dog Timmy (not the original one, of course).

Producers say the characters embark on a series of adventures similar to those experienced by their parents and that the series is faithful to the original Famous Five books but with “a contemporary twist”.

But while Blyton’s original sleuths targeted kidnappers and smugglers, the enemies of Disney’s Famous Five include Kyle, a DVD bootlegger on Shelter Island who is masquerading as an environmentalist. The children, who wear iPods and use mobile phones and laptops, also discover subliminal messages in DVDs to brainwash children into buying Fudgie Fries sweets.

Steve Aranguren, Disney Channel’s vice-president of global original programming, said: “We wanted to bring the sense of adventure in the original books to a new generation of Famous Five fans. However, we needed to give the characters a contemporary voice.”

But who could George have married? “Anglo-Indian” does not mean the same thing as it does in Calcutta. In Britain, such a child would be called British Asian or British Indian.

Jeff Norton, brand development director at Chorion, which owns the rights to Blyton’s books, said of making the Famous Five multicultural: “We tried to imagine where the original Famous Five would go in their lives. Because George was such an intrepid explorer in the original novels, we thought it would be only natural that she travelled to India, to the Himalayas, where she fell in love with Ravi. That’s the back story (to Jo). We spoke to Enid Blyton’s daughter and she thought her mother would love what we have done.”