Bedknobs and Broomsticks/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Adaptation Displacement: Very few people nowadays know there was a book.
  • Crowning Music of Awesome: Portobello Road for most people, but "Substitutiary Locomotion" and "The Beautiful Briny Sea" have their share of fans.
  • Disneyfication/In Name Only: Disney's so-called adaptation of the original Mary Norton book dropped the original book's entire plot, and instead created a new one from whole cloth. Along the way, a medieval sorcerer became a modern con-man, an island of Talking Animals was added apparently just to give Disney's animation division something to do that year, and a climactic battle scene of magically powered suits of plate armor versus a Nazi invasion force replaced the book's much more low-key conclusion. A major plot element complete with its own musical number, critical to the climax of the film, was conjured up out of a random two-word phrase ("substitutiary locomotion") that appears only once in a minor conversation on which the children eavesdrop in the book. And on top of all that, they pluralized both nouns in the title for no obvious reason.
  • Non Sequitur Scene: The Royal Cup Match on Naboombu. Seemed to only exist to give the animation department something to do and make Emelius Brown a Butt Monkey.
    • The Portobello road sequence drags on quite a while and seems to have no greater link to the story than to display different cultures dancing. By the end of it, you might have forgotten why the heroes even stopped in.