At first this was going to be a full-on BW Vs article, responding to a recent pair of blog posts by author Brian Neumeier over at his Kairos Publication‘s blog section. However, he showed the same video I’ll be showing below, and it’s a kinder version of what he wrote. I’ll still refer to those articles and to part two of the video, which is out and a part three is teased at the end, but you come here to read.
The video comes from YouTube channel Cartoon Aesthetics, a relatively new animation discussion channel with only a handful of videos in it’s one year of operation. This is the first of a series titled “How Disney Stole Your Childhood”. In the video, the host discusses how Walt Disney’s adaptations of public domain tales from the past had a negative impact on reading those stories by becoming the definitive version of those stories. Unlike Neumeier, the host of the videos doesn’t believe that this was intentional on Uncle Walt’s part, but something that happened over time and through later owners and CEOs of the company as they shifted more towards business than storytelling, or that was my impression of both. While I’ve gone over that Walt knew business to a degree he cared more about storytelling than the business, certainly more than current CEO Bob Iger, and wanted his stories to be as good as possible, knowing that would bring the business.
This actually started from a discussion on Disney’s role in cementing the idea that cartoons are just for kids, the first article I linked to specifically about that. I don’t agree with that assessment because making kids cartoons weren’t new. As even some commenters pointed out, other studios were making cartoons for kids but there were also cartoons for adults. Betty Boop was brought up and what the Hayes Code did to her, but let’s also remember that the Looney Tunes were not entirely for kids. Some of their humor was clearly made for adults. It’s just over time the Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies shorts (and I’m not even sure what the differences in titles were), ended up being thought of as kids fare, even airing on Saturday mornings not only on parent group-patrolled network CBS but in syndication and later on Nickelodeon. This really could be a discussion for a later time, and both the articles and the videos bring up Japanese “anime” (short for animation so stop correcting people) as examples of how this is a Western position. So the question is for this response commentary…did Disney convince kids to not read books based on their adaptations? And if so, do we now have a way to fix that?
Again, the host (I don’t have a name for him–welcome to the internet) is kinder than Neumeier is about how Disney adaptations supplanted the classics. What worries me, and it may not be intentional, is that some of Neumeier’s complaints gets a little close to Fredrick Wertham’s complaints in Seduction Of The Innocent, except that Neumeier isn’t a snobbish moron who doesn’t know any better due to ignorance of what he’s talking about. Points to Brian Neumeier. Wertham, who will haunt me forever after reading that firestarter (as in it should be used to get the fireplace going), was under the delusion that comics, including ones that adapted classics like Treasure Island, were bad for kids and would lead kids away from books. Neumeier isn’t that strict and I don’t get the impression he hates Disney then or now, but both he and the host have a good case in one area: there are kids who will avoid the book and just watch the movie. I would counter, however, with the same thing I’d counter with Wertham: odds are many of those kids weren’t going to read the book anyway.
I’m all for exposing kids to classic novels in their age group and some parents are a bit timid in what that means. There’s a comic that floats around Facebook where a woman complains to a young librarian about how the book he let the kid take out was above his reading level. I don’t remember the exact quote offhand, but the man’s response was that he didn’t think he should restrict what the kid reads. Content would be a factor, but it’s not that the child in the comic was given something violent or sexual in nature (like the romance novels I bet the lady reads), just that it used bigger words and was a thicker book than she would have given the kid. One of my first novels was the novelization of ET The Extra-Terrestrial, a very thick book along the lines of the Op-Center: Mirror Image novel I’m reviewing currently in my Chapter By Chapter series (but less dry) and the Narnia and Harry Potter books aren’t exactly pamphlets.
On the other hand the old expression “you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink” is also applicable here. You can hand a kid Treasure Island but unless it’s a schoolteacher who doesn’t know how to start a kid’s love of reading by forcing them to read books they may not be interested in (I had a high school English teacher like that), he’s only going to read it for an assignment. Sometimes this works. I didn’t expect to enjoy Treasure Island or To Kill A Mockingbird as much as I did, but on the other hand I still see The Old Man & The Sea as a boring book about a guy in the middle of the ocean thanks to a really strong fish who spends most of the story peeing over the side and trying to get food and less pee filled drinking water, and I was bored! One of my teachers tried to use the movies to instill interest in the books or compare the books to the movie to keep us interested. She was my favorite English teacher and this is why I hate how lousy I am remembering names I haven’t been exposed to in years.
Should Walt and later creators have played closer to the source material? Maybe. The host at least does give him the benefit of not intending a takeover. Blame Michael Eisner, who cared more about animation than Iger or Chapek with their modern Hollywood approved live-action adaptations as Hollywood continues to treat animation like crap. Eisner did give us mediocre direct to video sequels and try to be the face of the company, but we did get the Disney Renaissance and The Disney Afternoon. I do question the idea that today’s kids are getting the Disney version as the “definitive” take, with most of their animation library behind a paywall of some kind and television being slowly supplanted by streaming. Disney owned TV networks rarely show or push the animated works because they want you to gravitate to their “superior” live-action where the actors can show off they exist and make you see “them”. Home video sadly is dying, while Disney in particular seems to hate their past, using editing and trigger warnings to scare people off of their older and acquired works and burying films like Song Of The South in the vault. Robin Hood was never a definitive take anyway. Back in the day it was still Errol Flynn’s take everyone remembered and if anything replaced it the culprit was Kevin Costner. I couldn’t even tell you who Robin Hood is in the culture currently.
Now, however, there may be an opportunity to get people back to the classic version. Many of the works Disney adapted were already in public domain, but new ones like the original book versions of A.A. Milnes’ Hundred Acre Woods stories are entering every year. If the moviemakers weren’t trying to immediately pop out some slasher flick like Blood And Honey we could get a proper adaptation (I’m trying to remember who was making the animated version that looked like yarn animation) while Disney Junior gives us…
You somehow made a less faithful version than Pooh, Tigger, and some original little girl character with no connection to anything (she’s not even Christopher Robin’s daughter or something) solving “mysteries” around Pooh Corner. Nice going, Disney. I’d even defend Welcome To Pooh Corner and I’m out on this one.
There is our opening. Disney isn’t really getting their versions out to the general public anymore. Or if they do, you get drek like the new Peter Pan or girlboss Snow White more interested in fighting evil than making the world a more pleasant place and getting a happy ending with the prince of her dreams after going through so much torment and still winning people and animals over with kindness and a loving heart. Disney is tossing aside those definitive versions in favor of modern Hollywood versions, which includes getting rid of the “silly cartoons”. Now is the time to bring out Fox’s Peter Pan & The Pirates since today’s Disney is too afraid of the “redman stereotypes” to show their movie and nobody cared about the sequels or their live-action “sequel”. My Tarzan was the Filmation series, a closer version of the novels with only hints of the Johnny Weissmuller version in the iconic yell that’s in all Tarzans now. There are so many versions of Tarzan and Hercules that Disney couldn’t possibly have a definitive version, and now they don’t seem to care about them except as characters in the Kingdom Hearts video game franchise that is not even theirs. It’s owned by Square Enix, who just license the Disney versions and original characters.
They’re also moving away from adaptations. Frozen is nothing like The Snow Queen that Walt supposedly always wanted to adapt. There’s only one adaptation I even know of for that story. You could still make it and, if done right and good luck with that for modern Hollywood, you can have a girl hero who is trying to save her boyfriend because some old woman had a fit about being compared to the girl. Just don’t make her a girlboss but let her work in her own way to stop the villain and save her young love. With all of the classics now behind the Disney+ or other paid service barriers like Fandango or Hulu (the latter also owned by Disney and who know how long former-Vudu will have the license) if not shoved into the vault for being “inappropriate” for “modern audiences”, it shouldn’t just be the low budget, direct to video waste of video disks getting these adaptations out there. Obviously I don’t expect Neumeier the author or the video essay guy to do that, but someone out there could make a version that points kids to the book. Walt used the traditional “let’s start with an opening book” later parodied by the Shrek franchise, but you could have a parent reading to a child or the child starting to read the book in a way that maybe the kid watching, if he or she was ever going to become a reader, encouraged to do so. Set the framing device in a library reading session with the kids discussing it.
It’s also up to the parents to actually parent and try to instill a love of reading. One article I linked to even suggested reading to your baby to start them off. Disney…well, until the current regime Disney wasn’t the enemy. I grew up with Reading Rainbow, The ABC Weekend Special, before the network was owned by Disney, and as I hit my teens we had CBS Storybreak, though after their adaptation of one of my favorite Weekly Reader Book Club supplied books, C.L.U.T.Z., that last one might not be as great an option. They did encourage reading, the first one by actually reading a book and the other two by encouraging kids to get the actual book. ABC Weekend Special even grabbed ABC’s PSA character Captain O.G. Readmore near the end of the series to push kids into trying books. We need more of that stuff.
This isn’t the time to give up. We have a huge opening thanks to Iger’s mistakes. Let’s push for that and make reading fun, and continue to push for better book adaptations like we keep doing comic and video game adaptations. And don’t complain about the kid-friendly characters “ruining” the darker moments. If anything they made it easier to digest the darker parts for kids who might not be ready for it. Walt was trying to give kids and their parents a good time, leaving the theater in a better mood than they went in. Okay, Mary Poppins went too far and I haven’t had the chance to read the old Witch Mountain books, but nothing is stopping a well-made and better adaptation, remembering what Walt did right and what he didn’t…and what everyone after him did right to a diminishing degree and wrong to an increasing one. Then we the public have to get it to our kids, and make the books they might like available.
It’s not all Disney’s fault. He didn’t do anything different and he wasn’t trying to replace the old stuff. He was using the old stuff to make his own version. The old stuff was right there and it still is. We just have to be as good a seller as Disney.
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BW Media Spotlight 
At first this was going to be a full-on BW Vs article, responding to a recent pair of blog posts by author Brian Neumeier over at his Kairos Publication‘s blog section. However, he showed the same video I’ll be showing below, and it’s a kinder version of what he wrote. I’ll still refer to those articles and to part two of the video, which is out and a part three is teased at the end, but you come here to read.
The video comes from YouTube channel Cartoon Aesthetics, a relatively new animation discussion channel with only a handful of videos in it’s one year of operation. This is the first of a series titled “How Disney Stole Your Childhood”. In the video, the host discusses how Walt Disney’s adaptations of public domain tales from the past had a negative impact on reading those stories by becoming the definitive version of those stories. Unlike Neumeier, the host of the videos doesn’t believe that this was intentional on Uncle Walt’s part, but something that happened over time and through later owners and CEOs of the company as they shifted more towards business than storytelling, or that was my impression of both. While I’ve gone over that Walt knew business to a degree he cared more about storytelling than the business, certainly more than current CEO Bob Iger, and wanted his stories to be as good as possible, knowing that would bring the business.
This actually started from a discussion on Disney’s role in cementing the idea that cartoons are just for kids, the first article I linked to specifically about that. I don’t agree with that assessment because making kids cartoons weren’t new. As even some commenters pointed out, other studios were making cartoons for kids but there were also cartoons for adults. Betty Boop was brought up and what the Hayes Code did to her, but let’s also remember that the Looney Tunes were not entirely for kids. Some of their humor was clearly made for adults. It’s just over time the Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies shorts (and I’m not even sure what the differences in titles were), ended up being thought of as kids fare, even airing on Saturday mornings not only on parent group-patrolled network CBS but in syndication and later on Nickelodeon. This really could be a discussion for a later time, and both the articles and the videos bring up Japanese “anime” (short for animation so stop correcting people) as examples of how this is a Western position. So the question is for this response commentary…did Disney convince kids to not read books based on their adaptations? And if so, do we now have a way to fix that?
First, let’s watch the video being responded to.
Part two is also available as of this writing if you’re curious.
Again, the host (I don’t have a name for him–welcome to the internet) is kinder than Neumeier is about how Disney adaptations supplanted the classics. What worries me, and it may not be intentional, is that some of Neumeier’s complaints gets a little close to Fredrick Wertham’s complaints in Seduction Of The Innocent, except that Neumeier isn’t a snobbish moron who doesn’t know any better due to ignorance of what he’s talking about. Points to Brian Neumeier. Wertham, who will haunt me forever after reading that firestarter (as in it should be used to get the fireplace going), was under the delusion that comics, including ones that adapted classics like Treasure Island, were bad for kids and would lead kids away from books. Neumeier isn’t that strict and I don’t get the impression he hates Disney then or now, but both he and the host have a good case in one area: there are kids who will avoid the book and just watch the movie. I would counter, however, with the same thing I’d counter with Wertham: odds are many of those kids weren’t going to read the book anyway.
I’m all for exposing kids to classic novels in their age group and some parents are a bit timid in what that means. There’s a comic that floats around Facebook where a woman complains to a young librarian about how the book he let the kid take out was above his reading level. I don’t remember the exact quote offhand, but the man’s response was that he didn’t think he should restrict what the kid reads. Content would be a factor, but it’s not that the child in the comic was given something violent or sexual in nature (like the romance novels I bet the lady reads), just that it used bigger words and was a thicker book than she would have given the kid. One of my first novels was the novelization of ET The Extra-Terrestrial, a very thick book along the lines of the Op-Center: Mirror Image novel I’m reviewing currently in my Chapter By Chapter series (but less dry) and the Narnia and Harry Potter books aren’t exactly pamphlets.
On the other hand the old expression “you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink” is also applicable here. You can hand a kid Treasure Island but unless it’s a schoolteacher who doesn’t know how to start a kid’s love of reading by forcing them to read books they may not be interested in (I had a high school English teacher like that), he’s only going to read it for an assignment. Sometimes this works. I didn’t expect to enjoy Treasure Island or To Kill A Mockingbird as much as I did, but on the other hand I still see The Old Man & The Sea as a boring book about a guy in the middle of the ocean thanks to a really strong fish who spends most of the story peeing over the side and trying to get food and less pee filled drinking water, and I was bored! One of my teachers tried to use the movies to instill interest in the books or compare the books to the movie to keep us interested. She was my favorite English teacher and this is why I hate how lousy I am remembering names I haven’t been exposed to in years.
Should Walt and later creators have played closer to the source material? Maybe. The host at least does give him the benefit of not intending a takeover. Blame Michael Eisner, who cared more about animation than Iger or Chapek with their modern Hollywood approved live-action adaptations as Hollywood continues to treat animation like crap. Eisner did give us mediocre direct to video sequels and try to be the face of the company, but we did get the Disney Renaissance and The Disney Afternoon. I do question the idea that today’s kids are getting the Disney version as the “definitive” take, with most of their animation library behind a paywall of some kind and television being slowly supplanted by streaming. Disney owned TV networks rarely show or push the animated works because they want you to gravitate to their “superior” live-action where the actors can show off they exist and make you see “them”. Home video sadly is dying, while Disney in particular seems to hate their past, using editing and trigger warnings to scare people off of their older and acquired works and burying films like Song Of The South in the vault. Robin Hood was never a definitive take anyway. Back in the day it was still Errol Flynn’s take everyone remembered and if anything replaced it the culprit was Kevin Costner. I couldn’t even tell you who Robin Hood is in the culture currently.
Now, however, there may be an opportunity to get people back to the classic version. Many of the works Disney adapted were already in public domain, but new ones like the original book versions of A.A. Milnes’ Hundred Acre Woods stories are entering every year. If the moviemakers weren’t trying to immediately pop out some slasher flick like Blood And Honey we could get a proper adaptation (I’m trying to remember who was making the animated version that looked like yarn animation) while Disney Junior gives us…
You somehow made a less faithful version than Pooh, Tigger, and some original little girl character with no connection to anything (she’s not even Christopher Robin’s daughter or something) solving “mysteries” around Pooh Corner. Nice going, Disney. I’d even defend Welcome To Pooh Corner and I’m out on this one.
There is our opening. Disney isn’t really getting their versions out to the general public anymore. Or if they do, you get drek like the new Peter Pan or girlboss Snow White more interested in fighting evil than making the world a more pleasant place and getting a happy ending with the prince of her dreams after going through so much torment and still winning people and animals over with kindness and a loving heart. Disney is tossing aside those definitive versions in favor of modern Hollywood versions, which includes getting rid of the “silly cartoons”. Now is the time to bring out Fox’s Peter Pan & The Pirates since today’s Disney is too afraid of the “redman stereotypes” to show their movie and nobody cared about the sequels or their live-action “sequel”. My Tarzan was the Filmation series, a closer version of the novels with only hints of the Johnny Weissmuller version in the iconic yell that’s in all Tarzans now. There are so many versions of Tarzan and Hercules that Disney couldn’t possibly have a definitive version, and now they don’t seem to care about them except as characters in the Kingdom Hearts video game franchise that is not even theirs. It’s owned by Square Enix, who just license the Disney versions and original characters.
They’re also moving away from adaptations. Frozen is nothing like The Snow Queen that Walt supposedly always wanted to adapt. There’s only one adaptation I even know of for that story. You could still make it and, if done right and good luck with that for modern Hollywood, you can have a girl hero who is trying to save her boyfriend because some old woman had a fit about being compared to the girl. Just don’t make her a girlboss but let her work in her own way to stop the villain and save her young love. With all of the classics now behind the Disney+ or other paid service barriers like Fandango or Hulu (the latter also owned by Disney and who know how long former-Vudu will have the license) if not shoved into the vault for being “inappropriate” for “modern audiences”, it shouldn’t just be the low budget, direct to video waste of video disks getting these adaptations out there. Obviously I don’t expect Neumeier the author or the video essay guy to do that, but someone out there could make a version that points kids to the book. Walt used the traditional “let’s start with an opening book” later parodied by the Shrek franchise, but you could have a parent reading to a child or the child starting to read the book in a way that maybe the kid watching, if he or she was ever going to become a reader, encouraged to do so. Set the framing device in a library reading session with the kids discussing it.
It’s also up to the parents to actually parent and try to instill a love of reading. One article I linked to even suggested reading to your baby to start them off. Disney…well, until the current regime Disney wasn’t the enemy. I grew up with Reading Rainbow, The ABC Weekend Special, before the network was owned by Disney, and as I hit my teens we had CBS Storybreak, though after their adaptation of one of my favorite Weekly Reader Book Club supplied books, C.L.U.T.Z., that last one might not be as great an option. They did encourage reading, the first one by actually reading a book and the other two by encouraging kids to get the actual book. ABC Weekend Special even grabbed ABC’s PSA character Captain O.G. Readmore near the end of the series to push kids into trying books. We need more of that stuff.
This isn’t the time to give up. We have a huge opening thanks to Iger’s mistakes. Let’s push for that and make reading fun, and continue to push for better book adaptations like we keep doing comic and video game adaptations. And don’t complain about the kid-friendly characters “ruining” the darker moments. If anything they made it easier to digest the darker parts for kids who might not be ready for it. Walt was trying to give kids and their parents a good time, leaving the theater in a better mood than they went in. Okay, Mary Poppins went too far and I haven’t had the chance to read the old Witch Mountain books, but nothing is stopping a well-made and better adaptation, remembering what Walt did right and what he didn’t…and what everyone after him did right to a diminishing degree and wrong to an increasing one. Then we the public have to get it to our kids, and make the books they might like available.
It’s not all Disney’s fault. He didn’t do anything different and he wasn’t trying to replace the old stuff. He was using the old stuff to make his own version. The old stuff was right there and it still is. We just have to be as good a seller as Disney.
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Posted by ShadowWing Tronix on May 22, 2025 in Animation Spotlight, Movie Spotlight and tagged commentary, Literature, Walt Disney, Walt Disney Pictures.
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About ShadowWing Tronix
A would be comic writer looking to organize his living space as well as his thoughts. So I have a blog for each goal. :)