Disneyfication: Difference between revisions

* Disney's so-called adaptation of Mary Norton's ''[[Bedknob and Broomstick]]'' dropped the original book's ''entire plot'', and instead created a new one from whole cloth involving Eglantine Price's attempt to learn magic solely in order to help the British effort in [[World War Two]]. Along the way, a medieval sorcerer became a modern con-man, an island of [[Talking Animal]]s 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. Oh, and they made it a musical. 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.

* Likewise, ''[[Mary Poppins]]'' began as a series of seven books about a quite snarky and unpleasant magical nanny. Particularly towards the final books, the series become increasingly bizarre and increasingly interested in mythology, mysticism and herbalism (as was [[Author Appeal|its author, P.L. Travers]], a devotee of Theosophy). It's all a far cry from the Disney film version, which Travers loathed.

* ''[[Pocahontas]]'' pretty much shredded everything we know about the historical woman. For one thing she was between 10 and 12 years old when she first met John Smith, making a romantic relationship unlikely at best. Her father had fifty wives and many children. She was taken to Jamestown as a hostage and married before her trip to London, and no Armada was threatening to annihilate her people. John Smith was not a Prince Charming type, but in fact an unattractive, short man with a giant woolly beard. Just about the only bit they got right was her saving Smith from execution, and even ''that'' is considered by some historians to have been the enactment of a ritual (and thus Smith wasn't in any real danger). [[Unreliable Narrator|Still other historians suspect Smith of making up the entire story, since it doesn't appear until he wrote his memoirs, four years after her ''death'']].

** And she didn't actually marry John Smith. She married John ''Rolfe''. The sequel addresses this, albeit in an inaccurate way, playing with drama between the two Johns. History reports that when she met John Smith in London, she slapped his face.

** Of course, one must point out that the newspapers ''never actually lowered their prices'' in the end; they came to an agreement with the newsies where they agreed to buy back their unsold papers. While this agreement was pretty mutually beneficial, clearly the idea of the rag-tag kids' union getting everything they wanted in the end was too good for Disney to pass up.

* ''[[The Fox and the Hound (film)|The Fox and The Hound]]''. In the [[The Fox and The Hound (novel)|original book]], {{spoiler|Tod and Copper were never friends to begin with, Tod loses his mate to a trap, Chief doesn't survive his encounter with that train, and at the end Tod dies of exhaustion while being relentlessly chased by Copper and Slade. And then Copper is [[Shoot the Dog|literally shot in the head]] by his owner to avoid having to abandon him.}}

* The story of [[Robin Hood]] had been thoroughly bowdlerised before Walt Disney was born, and [[Robin Hood (Disney film)|their take on it]] is actually far from the worst abuse of the mythos.

** To be fair, the narrator outright admits that everybody has their own version of the story (true enough) and that this was just "the version that the animals tell".