Disney Lies: Rewriting P. L. Travers

Marineland should learn from Disney and make a movie about a killer whale who longs to come live at Marineland.  It’s his dream.  At first, he objects to being trapped in small antiseptic pool, but he comes to realize that it is a magnificent tiny little pool and is grateful to Marineland for feeding him.

P. L. Travers absolutely hated what Disney did to her book (Mary Poppins). You have to be pretty shameless to make a movie about her in which you simply rewrite history and reverse her attitude.  She’s grateful for the fish.

It is even more shameless to claim, in interviews, you didn’t do it.

So we have “Saving Mr. Banks” in which we are told that P. L. Travers (the “P” stands for “Pamela”) had reservations about the Disney version of “Mary Poppins” until she sees the results and begins to understand how honorable and wonderful and edifying it is to believe that most people really can’t bear reality and so must be drugged into infantile fantasies or bribed with sugar and so finally understood and approved of Walt’s vision of a sweet, white, oblivious America.

She did not!

She didn’t like what they did to her book at all and tried to withdraw consent for the movie. She did not like the animation injected into the story. She didn’t like the sticky sentimentality, or the fact that they white-washed the Mary Poppins character to move into that “lovable” mischievous rogue category so well-inhabited by the American popular landscape with all it’s Lucys and Gilligans and Jethros and Mr. Haneys and Fonzies and– oh, my god, it’s absolutely sickening just how dominated our culture is with treacle and feyness and posturing.

Is there nobody to sue Disney for this massive public lie?  I suspect that the only people left with standing to do so have been bought and paid for.  That’s how Disney works.  It’s the Animal Farm of entertainment conglomerates.  And it has learned to walk on its’ hind legs.

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