We Should Live - Ben Bateman

My six-year-old son’s entertainment habits have turned back to Veggietales recently.  In case you don’t have young children, Veggietales are a series of computer-animated Christian-themed videos for children in which all the characters are fruits or vegetables.  Some of the stories are straight from the Bible, a few are original, and several are re-workings of famous movies, such as The Wizard of Oz, Lord of the Rings, and Indiana Jones.

The trouble is that my son hadn’t seen any of those movies, so much of the humor was lost on him.  I tried to explain to him that the original movie was very different from the Veggietales, but the general story and characters were the same.  And this left me short for vocabulary: Are they satires, parodies, or farces?  So I did some research.
A satire makes fun of people, either specific individuals or groups, by revealing their vices and follies.

A parody is makes fun of an author or literary work.  This best fits the Veggietales.

A farce is something silly.  The historical root is from Old French “to stuff”, and the first use of ‘farce’ was as an ad-libbed humor skit inserted into religious plays.  Modern usage emphasizes a light, silly show that relies on situational comedy.

There’s still a word that I can’t find: The Veggietales Bible stories keep the original stories and characters intact, because the goal is that the children learn the stories and their morals.  But modern children aren’t likely to understand Old-Testament politics and wars, so the Veggietales re-casts the stories in terms that modern children can understand: Goliath is a big pickle with boxing gloves, the defenders of Jericho dump slushies on their attackers, and Joseph’s troubles with his brothers take place in the American West.

Is there a word in English to describe this sort of modernized-but-faithful retelling of a story?