Ellison has long been known to be a fighter for the rights of writers, and I don’t think he gives a shit whether it makes him look bad. If you want to know how far producers will go to screw over a writer try to find a copy of his essay, “Somehow, I Don’t Thing We’re In Kansas, Toto”, in which he tells of his misadventures with the television show, “The Starlost”. His original idea won a Screen Writers Guild Of America award-what the rat bastards turned it into made “Space: 1999” look like a thesis by Stephen Hawking.
I saw the same thing on a Boskone panel, where Barry B. Longyear was talking about Enemy Mine and Gary K. Wolfe talked about Who Framed/Censored Roger Rabbit?. Longyear – to say the least – hated what they did to his story, while Wolfe loved it, and even wrote a sequel (Roger was killed off in the book).
I’ve heard a lot of stories about Ellison, and seen him in action – both the good and the bad. Ellison insists on full creative control – rather quixotic for someone working in TV – and he’s not the only one complaining about the Walt Disney hagiography in Saving Mr. Banks.
And he has long been known to have a ridiculous view of what a writers “rights” are.
In my days as an elementary school teacher, I read quite a few chapter books aloud to my classes. Mary Poppins was one of the less successful of them. Some of the kids were familiar with the movie, others were not. Either way, they found MP herself to be without warmth (one boy kept saying, rather helplessly, “But she’s so mean!”), didn’t relate especially well to the early twentieth-c Britishness of the characters and the settings, and generally were unimpressed by the magic, which even in those pre-Harry Potter days seemed to strike them as tame.
This is very much in contrast to several other children’s classics from the same time period or earlier, such as Winnie the Pooh and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which were pretty universally loved by the kids I read them to.
It makes me wonder how well Mary Poppins (the book and the character) would be remembered these days if not for the movie. I don’t want to judge solely based on the experiences of one classroom of children, but it clearly didn’t float these guys’ boats much at all. Certainly no one was much interested in me continuing on with any of the sequels, or with checking them out of the library (another contrast with Oz, say). It’s easy for me to imagine the book and the characters largely forgotten today, at least in the US, without the Disney adaptation. What Travers would have thought about that is an interesting question, I think.
(To be fair: It didn’t help that this was the one time in my career that I failed to read the entire book to myself just before reading it aloud. The copy I had included the original “Bad Tuesday” chapter, which, if you have not read it, includes some appallingly racist imagery which I was not about to read to the kids–I skipped it, but the events of the chapter are referred to later on, which made for some on-the-fly editing that confused the kids who were paying close attention. I later discovered that Travers had unwillingly rewritten the chapter, despite her certitude that it was NOT offensive and her belief that children, especially little black children, were not at ALL offended by the chapter; her publisher basically told her, rewrite it or we’ll pull it from print. With one eye on posterity and the other on the bottom line, she decided to rewrite it.)
I doubt the books would be remembered at all if not for the movie. As you noted, they are too intimately bound to a particular time and place to possess the universality needed to become a true classic. Without the Disney adaptation, they’d be sitting on a shelf next to The Bobbsey Twins and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.
Disney ruined Winnie the Pooh. I loved the books when I was a kid.
I read the Winnie the Pooh books, but never saw the Disney films.
I feel so clean!
How “ruined?” You don’t like the treatment? Well, okay: how does that “ruin” anything? You still have your own personal interpretation, and nothing can take that from you.
Disney’s treatment of “Alice in Wonderland” differs from my personal interpretation. Well, that’s easy to fix. I ignore it. There’s no “ruin” involved. It is beyond the power of the Disney Corporation to do such a thing.
What it can ruin is the sharing of books with someone else who has been exposed to the Disney versions first.
I saw an Alice on C Band satellite that was a young actress, cardboard and clay animation. It was very much as I would imagine a drug trip to be.
I can see how it could be challenging, but how would it be “ruined?” Even very young children can understand the notion of different story-tellers telling the same story…differently.
There are always a few kids, many of them on the Aspergers-autism spectrum, who get very confused (and very unhappy) when you try to introduce an “alternate” version of some creative work to them. I have dealt with several over the years. That’s definitely challenging.
In general, though, Trinopus, you’re exactly right. I taught full-time as a classroom teacher for over 20 years; that’s a lot of kids and a lot of books. I mentioned Winnie-the-Pooh above; plenty of kids were familiar with the characters and situations from the Disney shorts, but that did not interfere with their enjoyment of the stories at all.
Wizard of Oz is another example (yes, I know it’s not Disney); though I suspect nearly all the kids had seen the movie, and though the movie is VERY different from the book, the children enjoyed the book very much.
Mary Poppins, likewise, sank or swam (mostly sank) on its own merits.
When I read fairy tales such as “Cinderella” aloud (to the youngest kids I taught) no one objected…in fact, there are dozens of picture book versions of stories like that, and they sell well, Disney or no Disney.
And in fact when I think about Disneyfied books I really don’t see it:
–I would not read Peter Pan aloud to kids; I like it personally, but it’s too strange, too much description, too much theorizing. I don’t know too many kids who I think would truly enjoy it. Some, but not a lot.
–I doubt very much that the average American kid had ANY knowledge of Hunchback of Notre Dame before Disney issued that one. Same, though maybe less so, with Little Mermaid.
–Pinocchio and Bambi would be forgotten now if not for the adaptations. Maybe it’s just the translations, but the books are pretty much unreadable.
–Alice in Wonderland – I’d say most kids aren’t real familiar with either book or movie, but I can’t think of any child who knew both the movie and the book and preferred the movie, let alone dismissed the book as a pale imitation.
YMMV, of course, but my teaching experience does not support the idea that the Disney films–or any other adaptations–“ruin” the originals for kids, except a small group who have bigger issues to deal with.
True, it would be like making a movie about Ghandi and having him serve as a soldier in multiple wars in British colonial armies suppressing black natives, and opposing discrimination on Indian South Africans while having no problem with far worse discrimination against Black South Africans.
Can anyone imagine a movie making up such monsterous lies about Ghandi!?
I remember reviewers actually criticizing Richard Attenbrough for not including scenes of this as well as of Ghandi causing his wife to die by refusing to let doctors treat her!
I’m sure you agree it was disgusting that racist idiots like that dared to slur such a great man!
My earliest memory of Walt Disney was the kindly old man that briefly introduced the tv show each week. Even then his public image was carefully crafted. I doubt the current generation had any knowledge of Walt the real person. He was just a name to them that had something to do with movies they saw or the theme parks.
Ellison makes a good point that The Disney Studio is resurrecting a new Walt Disney and introducing him to people under the age of 40. I can understand Ellison’s dismay. He’s had a chip on his shoulder about Disney most of his life.
I believe the appropriate way to phrase this is “Walt Disney is in suspended animation.”
Hugo’s obviously was not a child’s tale in the first place so it is to be expected (and even the Disney version has some dark passages). And the average modern American parent probably would have avoided exposing the kids to many of the unadulterated Andersen/Grimm tales with all the pain and blood and death, Disney or no Disney (and those done in Walt’s lifetime had some scary scenes, come to think of it).
Too much creatures of their time and place.
It’s been a long time since I was a kid but I still remember my mother struggling to read Winnie the Pooh to me. Finally giving up in frustration. “That whole page was one run on sentence. Let’s try a different book.”
Even in the Charles Laughton film, everyone lived happily ever after, as I recall.
nm.
Well, “everybody dies miserably” IS a tough sales pitch.
Hugo *himself *rewrote a happy (ok, happier) ending for the opera version, which is kind of unexpected given that opera tends to end up with dead people all over the stage. Wonder what Ellison would have said about that.