THE MOUSE IS IN THE HOUSE: DISNEYIFICATION, DILUTION, AND DILETTANTISM

Let’s get this straight:
I absolutely loathe Disney.

What’s up my nose, you ask?
This started back in my long ago days in high school. Yes, that long ago. Three decades, no less. I had, in the lost days of my youth, read The Jungle Book. Wonderful read. Absolutely excellent. Kipling was a genius.

It’s a profoundly dark novel. Filled to the brim with tooth and claw and survival of the fittest.

I saw not long after that, a preview for the Disney version. I was aghast. Dancing monkeys? A dancing bear? Even Shere Khan does a musical number?

I’m leveling a charge here: you guess the word for it.

Don’t read me wrong here – I’m all for a re-telling of a classic (hell, I wrote one myself, not long ago), if done within boundaries. But honestly, people don’t bust out in song like some Broadway musical (unless you’re a drunk at a karaoke bar).

I inveigh here against the dilution, the utter ravage of a great story badly retold and retrofitted to pander to the lowest common denominator.

Mind you, I’ve never seen this wretched feature. I refuse to watch any of the following travesties:

Pocahontas (she was FOURTEEN, fer cryin’ out loud, when she saved Wolfe), Hercules (GAH! Theseus rode Pegasus; Herk didn’t have a sidekick, a flying horse being jealous of his GF, Hades spouting off street-smart smack? C’mon!), Beauty and the Beast, Mulan, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Aladdin, oh hell, any revamped concept specially tailored to the madness of the masses.

And the absolutely worst portion of all this, is that it’s all so formulaic. There’s always a sidekick (sometimes plural, a certain percentile of which can be inanimate objects), the bad guy is always this two-dimensional cardboard cutout figure straight from the days of vaudeville, dripping evil and menace, no redeeming features whatsoever.

And yes, I know this is for the sake of the kids. A little fantasy never hurt anyone. But this delusory methodology is keeping people from reading a book. Using their imaginations.

And what is this with not being able to leave well enough alone? If a story works, if it’s a classic, why bother messing with it? Little touches, that’s fine. Modernizing it? Weeellll…as long as its not slapped on a chopping block and hacked to pieces beyond recognition, I can go along with that. Hell, I rewrote Peter Pan with Pan as the villain. Saberhagen did his own version on the Dracula and Frankenstein classics that were a little bit of all right. But taking The Arabian Nights and re-casting it in the image of the Honeymooners?

And, for the record, the reason people believe lemmings are suicidal, is that in an early feature, the film crew on a documentary (Disney, yeah, you guessed it) herded the poor things off a cliff to provide some ‘drama’. Charming.

There are limits.