Home » Entertainment » Efteling responds to petition to remove ‘Monsieur Cannibale’: ‘No adjustment yet’

Efteling responds to petition to remove ‘Monsieur Cannibale’: ‘No adjustment yet’

More than fifteen hundred people have signed a petition that has been drawn up to remove ‘Monsieur Cannibale’ from De Efteling. The initiator, Sammy Straub, speaks of a “problematic racist caricature of an attraction.”

The management of the fairytale park denies this in an email to the author. She does, however, check ‘when the time has come whether the attraction still fits in with the current zeitgeist and with us as Efteling in terms of aesthetics’, a spokeswoman told Omroep Brabant. The attraction would be modified during a (major) maintenance. How and when this happens is not known.

‘Don’t visit’
Straub thought the petition immediately after the commotion caused by statements by football analyst Johan Derksen in the TV program Veronica Inside. Straub not only wants his proposal to be signed: he asks everyone “especially not to visit this so-called amusement park.” Ten years ago his father would have asked De Efteling to ban ‘Monsieur Cannibale’.

De Efteling writes to Staub that ‘in our park we make enlargements of characters from stories, myths and legends. (…) it is absolutely not the case that we want to generalize. Efteling also doesn’t think that all stepmothers are bad people, all girls with red clothes have no sense of direction or all obese people eat a lot of paper. ‘

The author of the petition calls the response “extremely ignorant (stupid) and disrespectful.” According to Straub, the park rejects the “painful reality knowingly”. It is not known until when his petition can be signed.

‘Our attention’
A spokeswoman against Omroep Brabant emphasizes that the subject ‘obviously has our attention’. “That is not to say that we will adjust things immediately. But we do think about how we can move with the times. We would like that. ”

Last year, during a major renovation, controversial dolls in the ‘Carnival Festival’ attraction were adapted. At that time the park management was already considering implementing changes at ‘Monsieur Cannibale’.

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