Politically Correct Changes in Where’s Waldo Book The Fantastic Journey

I got a 2020 copy of the Where’s Waldo (Where's Wally in some countries) book The Fantastic Journey, formerly known as The Great Waldo Search. I know that Waldo books have seen editing in the past to censor some mild nudity, but I was surprised just how many political correctness changes have been made in just the last 5 years. I don’t have a 1st edition book, but I do have a book from 2015 that I’m comparing with. So there may have been even more changes before then. Without further ado, here are some of the PC changes I found.

In the original the vampire is using an actual bat as a baseball bat. It’s good fun. Now he’s using a baseball bat and it’s just very confusing as to why they’d be playing some kind of actual baseball game. And is anyone going to see this image and try to somehow make a bat into a bat?

In the original version, the witch chef was fat, and now she’s maybe slightly above normal. Is it offensive to show representations of fat people? Do they not exist? Well there are still fat executioner men running around. I guess we just can’t show fat women. Got it.

In the original, the green women are breaking rocks on the heads of the only 2 fat women. Now those women are no bigger than anyone else. No fat shaming here. Whew. This change doesn’t make much of a difference, so it’s fine if it makes people feel warm and fuzzy. But once again, we can’t have any fat women.

So the yellow men in the original are obviously Asian inspired caricatures, but in the new version, they made them into actual Asians. And they’re acting like buffoons, so I guess this is less offensive now? At least as a child I never took the red men and yellow men to be anything but fictional characters, so it’s just kind of jarring to see some realism brought to an obviously fictional scene. But sure, I can see why this was changed.

Carpet Flyers was one of the more iconic scenes in my options, but in the new edition it’s been replaced by a neutered remake The Dragon Flyers. The art style is in line with more modern Waldo books, so it sticks out like a sore thumb. I guess I don’t see why it’s so bad to have a Middle Eastern inspired scene when they have scenes set in Asia, Egypt, Europe, etc. I really don’t see it as making fun of people from the Middle East, especially not the people living there today who look nothing like this. This is similar to another change they made in a scene from The Waldo Fun Book, where they replaced all the ethnic characters with white ones. If white people can be shown doing stupid, silly stuff… isn’t showing people of color doing stupid, silly stuff “equality”?

Person of color out… white person in. Well done PC police!

I only assume these changes where made by the publisher and not Martin Handford, because Handford no longer owns the rights to old books. All in all, the changes don’t outright ruin anything, and if I wanted I could buy a 1st edition book. But I’m an adult and understand this is just the way things are these days. Oh well.