Refurbishing the Image of Walt Disney? (Harlan Ellison and Mary Poppins).

“YOU’RE!!!” How could I be so stupid! Oh wait I’m not. Your just petty, or failing at trying to have a sense of humor, I can’t tell.

You took my statement out of context which totally skewed its meaning relative to my statements as a whole. How is that not semantics?
I guess I need to be more specific. “You’re” acting as if I made a serious claim towards Walt Disney in regards to his involvement with these innuendos. WTF?! I said it in passing and I made it clear that his involvement is irrelevant to my point.

And yes I do get to “boo hoo” about it lol. We wouldn’t even be having this conversation if you would have read my original post before opening your big mouth. “You’re” stealing credibility from my point, which as it turns out, is that regardless of whether or not Walt Disney was alive to put the innuendos in said movies, his name is still attached to it which in turn associates him with it. Guilty by association.

How could I presume to know whether or not Walt Disney the person was in anyway linked to the innuendo? I assumed he wasn’t but that doesn’t make it wrong to say he may have been.

Are you offended that I dare associate Walt Disney with something that happened in one of Walt Disney’s movies??? Lol

Who here hasn’t read the “Mary Poppins” books? I have, and I can see why she would disapprove of just about every aspect of the movie Disney made.

The thing is, though…the stories in the book were very episodic, and would never have made for a good, unified movie without some changes (like a continuing storyline to link them all together, which I think the movie did well).

Just as Carlo Lorenzini/Collodi’s Pinocchio (well-written, but very episodic, being serialized in a magazine, literally being made up as he went along and with a hero who’s way too unsympathetic for most of the book) would probably not have made a good movie without some changes (and you need look no further than the spectacular failure of the Roberto Benigni version for proof). What makes for a good read doesn’t always necessarily make for a good movie.

I enjoy the original Mary Poppins books for what they are, and I enjoy the Disney movie for what it is. Just as I enjoy the original fairy tales for what they are, and their Disney movie versions for what they are (good, well-animated movies in the movie musical tradition–and I’ve loved musicals since I could walk).

Actually (to go off on a bit of a tangent), this opens the way for me to ask something I’ve wondered for a long while.

Fairy tales and folk tales have changed and evolved since they were created, each different folktale type having hundreds if not thousands of variants. (Cinderella has over nine hundred alone.) Each different variation reflects the teller, the time period, and the audience of the era it was created in.

So why is it only wrong when Disney does it?

I haven’t seen the movie yet, nor have I read any of P.L. Travers’ books. As for Disney’s version of*** Mary Poppins***, well, I mostly enjoyed it, though much of it is corny and Dick Van Dyke was every bit as awful as you’ve heard.

But for now, I’ll stick to the general questions: When a book, story or play is adapted into a film, does the filmmaker have an obligation to be completely faithful to the author’s words, plot and vision? If the movie version is utterly different from what the author imagined, has the filmmake betrayed the author? SHOULD an author fight tooth and nail when the filmmaker’s vision differs from his/hers, or should an author just cash the check and butt out?

I can’t give any blanket answers to those questions. SOME authors have made public scenes about movie versions of their work (Tom Clancy and Anne Rice come to mind). Some are FURIOUS when filmmakers remove characters and whole storylines. Some fume at even minor changes, while others are very pleased with movies that take HUGE liberties with their work (James Ellroy LOVED the movie version of*** L.A. Confidential***, for instance). Others take the pragmatic view that, once they sell their work, it no longer belongs to them, and filmmakers are free to do as they wish (Pat Conroy has always said, “The director can turn the Great Santini into a Jewish, Eskimo lesbian for all I care”).

I gather that Disney’s ***Mary Poppins ***had very little to do with P.L. Travers’. That doesn’t necessarily make EITHER Disney or Travers a bad person. Travers may have had good reasons for dismay with the finished product, and Disney may have had good reasons for all his changes. In the end, Travers pocketed a decent check, and the movie boosted sales of her books. So, even if the movie was never likely to appeal to her, sellig out to Disney was a good move.

My guess is that people lament the fact that the Disney version becomes the “definitive” version of the tale, rather than one of many. And not all of Disney’s fairy tales are adapted from folklore; many had specific authors.

Or even after both were dead. Her will was very explicit in that the rights to her works were never to be sold to any American studio.

J.K. Rowling never went nearly as far as Travers, and was open to American Chris Columbus directing some of the Harry Potter films… but like Travers, she was adamant that the flavor and the casts of the movies stay entirely British. She quickly rejected Steven Spielberg’s overtures, since Haley Joel Osment as Harry didn’t work for her at ALL.

You seem to be suggesting that Walt Disney was responsible for creating a studio culture that encouraged hiding smutty secrets in Disney movies. And that that culture carried on after he died.

However, what you’re describing is at odds with the documentation. The Disney studio kept really good records of day-to-day operations. (There are complete transcriptions of every word spoken at every storyboard meeting for example.) All this stuff still exists in the Disney archives. Now, they won’t let the general public go rooting through their files, but they’re fairly open if you can prove you scholarly credentials. (My wife got access, for example. She’s a UCLA professor.)

As a result, we have a pretty good idea of how Disney ran things. And this picture is backed up by the things former Disney animators have said and written about the studio under Walt’s control.

He was a perfectionist and a micro-manager. He was very hands-on. Up until he started work on Disneyland he was deeply involved with all levels the production of the feature films: story, animation, music. He was also reactionary, paternalistic, and had a stick up his ass about the cultural changes of the 20th century. Almost everything he did revolved around the idea of recapturing an old-fashioned, more innocent time.

For example, the inspiration for Disneyland was that he wanted a place that parents could take their kids that was free of the seediness of the carnival. You just have to look at how the carnival is portrayed in Pinocchio to see what he thought of that sort of thing – it’s a dirty, debauched, corrupt place where innocence is taken advantage of.

So the idea that he was encouraging his artists to intentionally hide smutty bits in the feature films is laughable. It runs counter to everything we know about him.

(On the topic of labor relations: Disney had a hard time handling the idea that he was THE BOSS. When he started the studio it was very much like a modern high-tech start-up. There was a little team working long hours on a shoestring budget, and Walt was right down there in the trenches with everyone else. When the studio got big after Snow White, he still thought of himself as “one of the boys”, but the workers didn’t see it that way. And when they pushed for better wage/working conditions he felt personally hurt and betrayed. That colored his attitude toward labor for the rest of his life.)

Labrador Deceiver, YoungKusher – knock off the personal remarks about each other. If you want to disagree in this thread, do so politely. If you want to slag off on each other, take it to the Pit.

twickster, Cafe Society moderator

I have no idea what you’re talking about, as I made no such personal comments.

I’m seeing American Hustle tomorrow. Even without seeing it, I would recommend it x1000. I liked SMB ok, but I am quite positive that American Hustle will be one of the best films of the year, one of my favorite movies of the year and will quite possibly become an an American classic (whereas SMB will be forgotten in a few months but will be worth a look on Netflix).

Ooops, wrong thread.

Seconding Hamster King’s thesis. I worked with an old guy named Benny Hablow who’d been at Disney, and he confirmed the story of the animators showing Walt the porno Snow White; which he seemed to enjoy but then fired everyone in sight when the lights came back up.

Benny remembered Disney as a son of a bitch, but he also loved him because he’d pushed his people to achieve way beyond their expectations of themselves.

I’ve read Mary Poppins and yes, it could not have been made into a movie as it was written. In addition, according to the notes on the soundtrack album (which I got for Christmas in 1965), the film was planned to be a musical from the very beginning, even before Disney won the movie rights to the book(s). Whether this was good or bad kind of depends on how much you like musicals; I generally don’t, but Mary Poppins I loved when I was in fourth grade, and I still find it charming today (despite Dick van Dyke’s atrocious Cockney accent; I never realized how bad it was until I saw the movie as an adult).

Many, many movies have been made as “X’s _________________,” e.g. Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange. This does not make them inferior to the literary work; it just means that a particular director (or producer, or screenwriter) has interpreted the work. FWIW, Ian Fleming hated the first James Bond movie, Dr No (“Simply dreadful!” was his initial reaction) and (amazingly, IMHO) it even took him a while to warm to Sean Connery as Bond.

Another example to consider: 101 Dalmatians. Who among us who has seen the movie and read the book can honestly say that Disney didn’t do a better job of telling the story? I can’t!

Yes, I agree that that’s laughable given the knowledge I now have of Walt Disney, but in my original post it was irrelevant to my point whether or not he was involved. I only suggested such a ridiculous claim out of enthusiasm towards Labrador Deceiver’ statements, which again, really wasn’t supposed to be taken seriously. It was never my intention for the this to be a focus point in the discussion. In my original post, I was merely adding my opinion about Walt Disney, which originated from finding out about the innuendos at the age of 10. When I was 10 years old, I just assumed Walt Disney was alive and therefore gave him the burden of responsibility for these subliminal messages. This carried on until I found out Walt Disney died decades ago, but still, the damage was done.

I’ve read “Basil of Baker Street,” and have to say that “The Great Mouse Detective” is a better story. And Disney’s “The Little Mermaid” is a better-written story than Hans Christian Andersen’s. Andersen was a genius, but his story was poorly focused.

(Also, per the conventions of the period, it was very light on dialogue and heavy on narrative. Today’s standards are for stories to entail more dialogue. However, that’s an aesthetic issue for different times, and doesn’t detract from the story as it was written for readers of Andersen’s era.)

Watching Harlan Ellison’s review, I cannot help but suspect that he is haunted by the vision of a potential future movie, in which a chastened Harlan Ellison is portrayed learning a valuable lesson about cooperation, ruefully acknowledging how stubbornly foolish he was to waste his energy on creative control over his work, etc., etc.

Of all people, he needn’t worry about it. Nobody would believe it for a second.

His complaints about “City on the Edge of Forever” have always been completely unjustified, IMHO.

(a) His vision of Star Trek was far different from what had already been established in the course of the first season. It had to be rewritten for that reason alone.

(b) He apparently had no grasp of how budget limitations restrict storytelling in television.

(c) He was working in an industry where rewriting is a well-known norm.

(d) He was given pretty much unlimited leeway in developing his script. “City” was not only the most expensive episode of the regular series to produce, it was also the longest writer’s assignment in its history (January to May, IIRC).

I enjoy Ellison’s work (I particularly liked A Boy and His Dog), but his ego is of monumental proportions.

I don’t know of any biopics that haven’t taken extreme liberties with the actual history. I’m not sure if it’s possible to do in a movie.

But as I said, there should be at least a good faith attempt at being reasonably representative: if it was a relevant point in the life of Travers that she was dead set against the movie, and that fact is whitewashed… well, that’s like having Gandhi going Rambo on the brits.