Buy Peter Pan Now!

I had been warned about this annoying revisionism earlier, and now it has come to pass. Note the grating use of the term “franchise” to refer to the Pooh series. It all makes a strong case that Disney should be nationalized and all its characters freed from their prisons, into the public domain.

Speaking of Disney, a Peter Pan marketing effort – which seems to be to pushing the movie of the same name on DVD – reached into my life earlier this week. I hadn’t seen any commercials for this latest Pan franchise product, but I did spot the DVD itself at Costco. Ann happened to be with me at that moment, and she decided in an instant that she wanted it. No, no, no overpriced DVDs today featuring characters long ago shanghaied by Disney, kid. Considerable wailing and gnashing of milk teeth followed, but she settled down upon the receipt of pizza at the store snack bar.

By odd coincidence, or maybe even synchronicity, before I knew that an effort was afoot to persuade me to own the Disney version of Peter Pan, I was at the Schaumburg Township Library last week with Lilly, who was looking for Clarice Bean books. I helped her find some, and along the way noticed the book version of Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie, which I understand was a followup in 1911 to the initial stage version of 1904 – you know, he was expanding his franchise. It occurred to me that I didn’t know the Barrie Peter Pan. So I checked it out for myself.

“Mrs. Darling first heard of Peter when she was tidying up her children’s minds,” Barrie writes early in the tale. “It is the nightly custom of every good mother after her children are asleep to rummage in their minds and put things straight for the next morning, repackaging into their proper places the many articles that have wandered during the day… It is quite like tidying up drawers… When you wake in the morning, the naughtiness and evil passions with which you went to bed have been folded up small and placed at the bottom of your mind; and at the top, beautifully aired, are spread out your prettier thoughts, ready for you to put on.”

A damned peculiar idea, tidying up the mind, amusingly curious and vaguely disquieting at the same time. As if Barry were describing the process of Disneyfication, but when Disney was only a lad. It isn’t something that Disney would ever illustrate in his version of the movie, though.