BROOM This was three different short features that had been packed into one movie, and I think the quality of those three shorts varied. They weren’t all at the same level, and I think the idea of packing them together was detrimental to all of them.

BETH Which was the worst one?

BROOM The middle one.

ADAM All of them. I thought that was almost unwatchable. I was so upset.

BETH I didn’t think it was unwatchable. I thought it was dull, but it was interesting to me that both Pooh and Tigger seemed like very self-involved characters. That felt new. It seemed new to be so self-referential in general.

BROOM How do you mean?

BETH Like, “I’m rumbly in my tumbly…” Basically they were saying “I’m so cute, aren’t I?”

ADAM They were assholes.

BETH And Tigger and his song about how he’s the only one. “The best thing about me is that I’m the only one!”

ADAM It’s true. I hadn’t thought about it in those terms, but that does feel very, like, Tiny Toons…

BETH The seventies were the “me” decade.

BROOM But both of those things come from the book, which is from 1925 or something.

BETH Really?

BROOM Have you never read the book?

BETH I haven’t.

ADAM Have you ever read the book?

BROOM Yes I have.

ADAM I adore the books and that’s part of why I’m so angry about this.

BROOM Really? Because at the end, when Christopher Robin was going away to school, you said “this doesn’t happen in the book,” and when he was saying sentimental stuff like “will you always remember me,” you said, “oh, man…” But it does happen in the book. I remember the end of the book making me tear up because it was so manipulatively poignant, exactly like that.

ADAM Which book? “Now We Are Six”?

BROOM Whichever one is the last one. Whichever is the one where Christopher Robin has a little talk with Pooh about where he’s going, and Pooh doesn’t understand, and Christopher Robin is sad that he can’t really explain to him why he has to leave the Hundred Acre Wood.

ADAM I don’t remember that scene.

BROOM Well, it was just painful. I don’t think I’d ever seen this feature-length version with that ending. The first short I had seen many times; we must have had that in some accessible place on tape. To me, the only truy awful thing in here was the redo of “Pink Elephants.” What did they think they were getting away with? “Shameless” doesn’t begin to cover it.

ADAM I’m sure that they convinced themselves that it was homage.

BETH They just ripped it off.

BROOM Or did they think that kids wouldn’t have seen Dumbo? Was there a point at which the Disney properties were not a constant in the public consciousness?

BETH Prior to home video, were Disney movies really always available?

BROOM Not always available, but they were released cyclically.

ADAM Recall when we were children that they came out every seven years in theaters.

BETH So if you were five, you might have missed Dumbo. And the sequence worked in the context of the era.

ADAM It’s interesting that this tried so slavishly to make the point that it was following the books, because it failed so utterly to capture their spirit.

BROOM That’s the issue I was focused on, when we started watching, and I thought that at least in the first segment, they had in some ways gotten the spirit of it across. The conceit that they’re stuffed animals and these stories are sort of Christopher Robin’s playing with them, but they’re also sort of their own beings in their own world… I thought that was handled carefully. I liked that he would drag Winnie-the-Pooh along like a kid dragging a stuffed animal, but at the same time Winnie-the-Pooh would sort of be alive. I thought they had struck a nice balance. And then in the latter segments it drifted and started to feel more like an episode of “Gummi Bears” by the end.

ADAM But what saves Pooh from being an asshole in the books, from being this self-absorbed sort of Hunny Monster, is that he’s so dumb. The real Pooh has an intense seriousness about everything he says, which makes it all humorous.

BROOM When he invents a little hum, he’s very truly proud.

ADAM He’s very serious all the time. When he says, “I think the bees are getting suspicious,” that’s funny because he’s dead serious.

BROOM Because he’s announcing his new thought.

BETH It’s not ironic at all.

BROOM There’s no sense of winking.

ADAM And he’s not cute!

BROOM But the author is constantly winking at the reader.

ADAM Right, but Pooh is not.

BETH He’s not aware of how cute he is.

ADAM Which is how little kids are cute, too, because they’re very serious. Picture a little kid with a furrowed brow and a pouting face, which is adorable. This was just treacly.

BROOM He wasn’t really winking here, either. But he did remind me of Homer Simpson in the scene where he was falling asleep and talking about how he couldn’t hear because there was fluff in his ear.

BETH Yeah. Stuff like “go back to the part when the fluff got in my ear” made me not like him. Because he has no awareness of how others might be experiencing the world.

ADAM And I used to think that Sterling Holloway was a great choice for the voice…

BETH I never liked it!

ADAM … but it’s just so treacly and bumptious! I said “treacly” twice, but I mean it.

BROOM You’ll get them both. Who should the voice have been? Should they have done it like the Peanuts cartoons with an actual six-year-old reading the lines as best he could?

BETH I think that might have helped. Sterling Holloway seemed too old, like an old man being Pooh.

ADAM This was so depressing because it was like the difference between drawing and tracing. It was actually quite faithful, literally, to the book, but it just felt…

BROOM It felt traced. I hear that. Those illustrations in the book — especially the watercolored ones — are really lovely, and these backgrounds looked just like the Shepard illustrations.

BETH I really liked the look of this.

ADAM Well, except that those illustrations have a slightly watery, hand-drawn quality, whereas these lines were too thick and the colors were too opaque.

BROOM Yes, the original illustrations are much nicer, and one of my clearest memories of reading my mother’s copy of “The World of Pooh,” the compendium edition, is that particular quality of color, that muted watercolory look. But this was definitely a rendition of it, and I give them points for doing that instead of, for example, what they did in the Winnie-the-Pooh Saturday morning cartoon that they made in the 90s, or whenever that was. Maybe there was a little hint of that look, but mostly it was just standard cartoon backgrounds.

ADAM Right, well, this wasn’t “Pooh Tales” (woo-ooo!), but… it was so depressing. Those books have a slight otherworldliness — like a Beatrix Potter fable-iness. This was just too literal.

BROOM I don’t disagree that this had problems and didn’t nail it, but still, somehow the weather of it, the way the trees looked, gave me a sense of this place as a clearly imagined place for a child. It looked like Hampstead Heath out there — I’m sure that’s what all the British countryside looks like — and like looking at a landscape painting, you have a certain fantasy of that world is, and I felt like it had the childlike quality that it was supposed to have.

ADAM But none of that is their doing.

BROOM It’s their doing to allow that to come across visually. In one of the many scenes in one of their little houses, when the characters were having a pointless conversation about nothing, which is what most of the action here is, and I thought about how as a child, you just watch that for what it is: then Tigger says this, then Pooh says that, then Tigger says this… I felt very comfortable watching things like that, where there’s no plot pushing it forward, there’s just a sequence of mundane events, of comfortable situations. That felt essentially childlike.

ADAM I want to come back to what I was saying earlier about Pooh being serious. As a child, part of what’s entertaining about it is that the characters are so obtuse that you can understand their motivations even when they can’t, and that’s part of what makes you feel like a grown-up. Even you, the child, can see that Rabbit is selfish, and Piglet is timid, and Owl is a pedant — but they can’t see that. And so you feel like Christopher Robin, which is to say affectionate and knowing toward these childish creatures, and that makes you feel good about yourself. But here…

BROOM I think it was like that here. Christopher Robin was the authority figure in these woods.

ADAM Well, yeah, everything here was literally the same as in the books, but they had trouble communicating the actual gravity with which these characters act. When Rabbit is in his hole and he’s got that cartoony cliché “exhausted” face, where his eyes are bloodshot and his teeth are chattering with exhaustion… it’s so like a Looney Tune, and it takes it out of the realm of grown-up seriousness and into the realm of cartoony, and the whole effect is ruined.

BROOM Fair enough. That reminds me that I was in a bookstore and picked up a book by Gilbert Seldes, the guy who wrote “The Seven Lively Arts,” but this was a book from later, and it had a section on Disney in it. And it was all about how his first few movies are great, but that Alice in Wonderland was a complete abomination, that Disney’s whole career had been building up to tackling that material, and by throwing out everything wonderful about the book in favor of American cartoony crap, he showed his true colors. And you’re saying something similar here. But I felt about this the way I felt about Alice in Wonderland, which is that of course it’s nothing like reading a book — it has none of the fineness of a book — but…

ADAM But the whole concept of this was “we are reading a book! We are looking at the original typesetting!” It’s openly playing on your nostalgia for the text in a way that Alice in Wonderland is not, so it has more of an obligation to be faithful. It just seemed caught between this desire to be a big blowsy Disney cartoon and the desire to play to the affection of those who liked the original, and it felt like a half-measure in a way that made me really upset. As soon as I saw that Pooh was that gruesome orange, I was like, “I can’t watch this.” And I was right!

BROOM So you truly had never seen any of this before?

ADAM I had seen it before. I just didn’t have very much taste as a child.

BROOM Everything you’re saying seems right to me, and so I think, “well, but I’m lowering my standards as we go, as befits the material!” My gut reaction to what you’re saying is, “why would I raise my standards that high?” But I guess Snow White, way back at the beginning of this, was a much more honorable rendition into film of the impression you get from a lovely book of fairy tales. And this definitely doesn’t feel like a book in that sense, but that’s a sense in which I don’t expect them to “get” a book at all. I just don’t expect that.

BETH Not knowing the books, I was mostly struck by how unlikable almost all the characters were.

BROOM Piglet?

BETH I liked Piglet fine…

ADAM No, Piglet’s a milquetoast.

BETH As a kid, I didn’t like Piglet because he seemed so wimpy. Eeyore I was always a fan of, although his voice in my head was different — so I guess I must have read the books a little bit.

ADAM Yeah, his voice was too way-out-there here.

BROOM I guess I spent more time with the book than I realize, because a lot of my favorite incidents, which I assumed I was going to see here, were not included. When Eeyore has his birthday that nobody remembers, and they give him a deflated balloon and he’s thrilled by it.

ADAM Winnie-the-Pooh is going to give him a honey pot, but he gets too greedy and eats all of it so he gives him an empty one, and then Eeyore puts the balloon into the pot and takes it out again, and then in, and then out…

BROOM And I remember than whenever I saw this as a child, the fact that you see heffalumps and woozles, even for a second, even in a dream, felt completely wrong. They shouldn’t have appearances, and if they do, they definitely shouldn’t just look like elephants and weasels. And he certainly shouldn’t say, “You mean elephants and weasels?” That seemed on the nose in a way that nobody needed.

ADAM And again, the point is that children aren’t as good at drawing inferences as grown-ups are, so when a child manages to draw an inference, it’s especially pleasurable. Which is why it has to be played so straight.

BROOM I don’t even want to think about what goes on in something like Pooh’s Heffalump Movie. The fact that Pooh has become one of their characters and one of their franchises is sad to me, in a way that this movie itself was not sad to me.

ADAM What if their next movie were “Peter Rabbit”? You know?

BROOM I would just accept it! The force of Disney I just accept, and the fact that they made their own thing, which is of course coarser and broader and vaudevillian where the original is touching, I accept. Yes, there’s a Disney version of it. I don’t even have emotions about that. I guess I should be questioning that, but it all becomes depressing once you question it.

BETH Well, you seem pretty predisposed to liking everything they do. I don’t know why. You are less judgmental about Disney movies than you are naturally. You come in with a less judgmental attitude than I think Adam or I do. You tend to be more delighted. I think it has to do with your childhood somehow.

BROOM Well, it probably does, but I also feel sympathetic to them because they exist. If there weren’t this, there would be no animated film of Winnie-the-Pooh. And that seems like a great idea, to make an animated film of it. Did they do it in a commercialized way? Yes, they did. But yeah, I love animated movies. It doesn’t get done very much, and it especially doesn’t get done with care and attention very much.

ADAM Yeah, this is better than “The Jetsons.”

BROOM That’s right. There just aren’t very many such things. I know it’s taking us forever to get through them so it seems like a ton of material, but there really are only these Disney movies and then those Don Bluth ones that are a step below even this…

BETH Two steps below.

ADAM What about, like, Tex Avery and Chuck Jones?

BROOM I mean features. I mean, yes, there are cartoons — there’s tons and tons of animation out there… And of course there’s all the art animation, which I generally think is superior to this.

ADAM Well, wait until we get to Howl’s Moving Castle.

BROOM We’re not going to.

ADAM I know. But it gets better when we get to Beauty and the Beast, too.

BROOM But it’s never going to get fundamentally better. It’s always going to be middlebrow; it’s never going to get to the point where anything about it is really fine again.

ADAM There’s no Seven Samurai.

BROOM That’s a weird example, because when I finally saw that, I thought, “That was Seven Samurai?” But yeah, there’s not going to be a Citizen Kane.

ADAM Well, Steven Spielberg called “One Froggy Evening” “the Citizen Kane of animated shorts.”

BETH It really is great!

ADAM Is this the end of Sterling Holloway?

BROOM Yes.

ADAM His quavery reign is over!

BETH The songs in this felt really old-fashioned, if you were paying attention. Like, forties-style songs.

BROOM I thought that was to make them seem simplistic and childlike. And given that, since they’re doing the Disney version, they’re of course going to have to set all those goofy little poems, I thought they weren’t so bad.

BETH No, I liked them!

ADAM I guess I must have seen this several times, because I remember singing to myself “Winnie-the-Pooh, Winnie-the-Pooh…”

BROOM Oh, I sing it all the time even now.

BETH There were just some songs in the middle that weren’t very catchy but had such an authentic forties sound. If people were doing a forties sound now, you’d think, “oh, that was trashy.” I don’t think they would do it as authentically.

BROOM I don’t know what you mean by “forties.” They all just seemed childlike to me. Which one?

BETH I don’t remember, but it had a chorus…

BROOM Oh, “Down in the Hundred Acre Wood, where Christopher Robin plays…” ?

BETH Yeah.

BROOM That’s the verse of “Winnie-the-Pooh.”

BETH It was impressive to me that that was done in the mid-seventies.

BROOM Well, that one was done in the sixties.

ADAM Yes, we can be grateful that Pooh does not ride in a rocketship, that Pooh does not join a Beatles-like band of vultures….

BETH That he doesn’t show up in a Hawaiian shirt.

BROOM Yeah! Think about all the restraint it took to make it like this!

[We spend 10 minutes attempting to find the original New York Times review as usual, but it seems there was none!]

ADAM That was like all the delights of childhood in a single package. I remembered everything about it.

BETH I had never seen it before, so it wasn’t nostalgic for me.

ADAM Then maybe you should tell us what it was like to you as a grown-up, before we wallow.

BROOM Let me say first that of all of the movies so far, I felt I had the least perspective on this one. Several times during the movie, I thought to myself, “You really ought to come up with a new, adult perspective on this,” but that would have taken effort that I just didn’t feel like exerting. I had immediate access to the way I felt about every moment when I was eight, but I’m still not sure what this movie is like from an adult’s perspective.

BETH What was it like from your childhood perspective?

BROOM We should hear from you first.

BETH It was a little bit dull and it felt cheap, but it was fine. I almost fell asleep. But it was fine.

BROOM Elaborate.

BETH The music felt like Love Story to me, like a live-action romance movie.

ADAM The music was very distracting.

BETH That’s the one thing that stood out to me. The rest felt like a very long Saturday morning cartoon. A cartoon that I would have watched on TV as a child. It was nothing: it was not exciting, it was not suspenseful, it was not terrible. It was solid.

ADAM Not even during the jailbreak?

BETH The jailbreak was pretty good.

BROOM I said the other day that it was going to have the best “taking something from a sleeping person” scene in the Disney canon. And I think that’s right. That scene has gotta be the apotheosis of the “taking something from a sleeping person” scene.

BETH Yes, it was good. The disguises were used well. I liked all the disguises throughout the movie.

ADAM I agree. They always looked like what they were supposed to be, but you could also tell what they were made of.

BROOM Really? What was the beak of the stork made of?

ADAM That was the weakest element.

BROOM I think it may have been made of a real stork’s beak.

BETH It could have been made of really good construction paper.

ADAM I was thinking of the sock that formed the vulture’s beak.

BROOM How did you feel about the script?

BETH I just feel like everything about the movie was fine. Nothing was bad, and nothing was great. The script was fine. Many of the voices were familiar from The Jungle Book, and that was actually a little distracting to me.

BROOM Besides Baloo, who else?

ADAM Wasn’t Sir Hiss in The Jungle Book?

BROOM No; this was Terry-Thomas; Kaa was Sterling Holloway.

BETH And the evil guy…?

BROOM Shere Khan has the same sort of lion mouth as Prince John, but he didn’t have the same voice. Shere Khan, remember, was like James Mason; he was very smooth and commanding.

ADAM It definitely had a Hanna-Barbera look to it. The very thick black lines around the characters and the backgrounds that stay perfectly still while people run through them are deeply familiar to me from The Smurfs. In The Smurfs, they would run through the same four background panels over and over again.

BROOM I remember being aware of a lot of repeated or reused animation in this one when I was a kid, but it didn’t bother me now as much as it did then, oddly enough. I thought they had disguised it pretty well, as opposed to in Sword in the Stone where it seemed very exposed.

BETH I think that’s just you. There were a lot of obvious repeated moments.

BROOM I noticed that every time the Sheriff of Nottingham walks in, he’s swinging his arms exactly the same way.

BETH They reused the shot of the little girl bunny laughing and falling against a tree.

BROOM Did they? When was the second time they used it?

ADAM It was when Maid Marian kissed the little boy, and, uh…

BETH It must have been during the party, because I remember that it seemed like nighttime the second time we saw it, and daytime the first time; something about it was different.

ADAM You can see why Robin Hood is a sex object to me. He has those big huggable eyes, like a Japanese anime hero.

BROOM Like I said the other day, this movie must be the founding document for Furries.

BETH Maid Marian is appealing.

ADAM She’s pretty sexy. She makes that wimple look genuinely feminine — and kind of slutty, frankly.

BROOM I think that’s going a bit far.

BETH I think she’s very pure.

BROOM In the scene where we’re introduced to her, she does come off as knowing, at least in relation to seven-year-olds. She’s very much a grown-up. That was an interesting dynamic to see, that she and Lady Cluck are playing around explicitly for the children’s benefit. Yes, Marian and Robin Hood are both appealing, and they have exactly the same face, down to every feature. I think they even have the same eyelashes and the same hair, which is usually how you can tell women from men. [Ed: the eyelashes are in fact different.]

ADAM Maybe that’s why I found them such an appealingly matched couple.

BETH I liked the Lady Cluck character, and I liked her costume.

ADAM All the supporting characters were very strong. I mean, they were pretty obvious — to have your pathetic townspeople be a cripple, an elderly owl couple, a mother with sixteen children, and a little minister mouse and his wife —

BROOM Church mouse.

ADAM — that’s pretty blatant. But they were all compellingly pathetic.

BROOM There were a lot more supporting characters than that. There were all sorts of bad guys: there was the Sheriff, and Nutsy and Trigger, and the elephant guards, and the rhino guards, and the weasel-ish guards, and the alligator from Fantasia making his triumphant return appearance, where we finally got to hear his voice.

ADAM Speaking of repeated voices, I think the sheriff’s voice is the same as the hound from The Aristocats.

BROOM Pat Buttram.

ADAM It was distracting that some of the characters had British accents and others did not. It reminded me of Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, in which Kevin Costner does not have a British accent and everyone else does.

BROOM Robin Hood’s voice was just right. He was easier to like than the actual Errol Flynn ever was. I guess Phil Harris as Baloo is a little more memorable than Phil Harris as Little John, but it still works pretty well here. Though I don’t know why we have to spend so much of the movie looking at him in that “crazy duke” outfit.

ADAM That was part of the 70s jauntiness of it, which I found touching. The music had a very easy-listening quality. But also folky.

BROOM I think “folky” was a better way to handle the 70s than to try to keep up with other popular music.

ADAM Right. I was glad there was no rock band.

BROOM Well, the chase scene did have a little bit of “wooka-chocka-wooka-chocka” guitar. And there was that “sneaking around” music.

ADAM The sneaking around music was really good. It was more than just [imitates cymbal shuffle].

BROOM Well, it was a variant of that.

BETH It was funny. It was kind of all over the place.

ADAM I liked it. It sounded like what sneaking around in the dark sounds like.

BROOM That was one of those moments where I felt that I couldn’t get any perspective on it, because it was almost exactly the same style that I complained about in The Aristocats, and yet here it somehow seemed right. We know that they’re being really quiet, so the music is really loud — to show us how intense their effort to be quiet is.

ADAM It’s like their hearts thumping. It’s quiet and then you get erratic beats, like… … … BUMP BOMP.

BROOM The trombones play a short little noirish figure, and then you get some kind of k-k-klonk in the percussion.

ADAM Yes, because all sounds seem magnified when you’re creeping around.

BROOM I think the script is more grown-up in its construction than many of the movies we’ve seen, and certainly more than any of the Hanna-Barbera-type cartoons that you’re comparing it too. It really has a challenging structure, to a child. It starts out with the rooster telling you that he’s going to tell you the story… but he doesn’t. He sings a little song that introduces you to the scenario, and because of what’s being sung, you don’t really know whether what you’re seeing them doing is generic or specific storytelling.

ADAM “Robin Hood and Little John, walking through the forest…”

BETH I thought that was a clever song. I really enjoyed it. I liked how the lyrics of the second verse sounded like the words of the first verse but were different.

ADAM I liked that it contained the word “other’ne.”

BROOM During that sequence, you don’t know whether you’re seeing “a day in the life of Robin Hood,” or a particular day that starts the plot. Then it jumps to the Prince, and we have a little scene with him alone before they meet him, and then after that it jumps to the people of Nottingham and the sheriff. Then Robin Hood comes in and gives the kid the arrow, and then the kid — and we don’t know whether the kid is going to play a role at this point — goes and meets Maid Marian, and then we end up with her, and her thought of Robin Hood finally takes us back to him. We’ve met all these different people in their various relationships without being sure whether the plot has started or not, or what it is. I also remember from when I was a kid that it was particularly complicated that so much of the premise has to do with things that happened before the movie started. Maid Marian and Robin Hood had a love affair before, and King Richard left the country before.

ADAM Which is not totally spelled out for a kid.

BROOM Right. It felt complex.

BETH So what is the deal with King Richard? He left and came back? He took a vacation?

BROOM He went on a crusade, as they said.

BETH I totally missed that.

BROOM Possibly because he was hypnotized by a snake. But history doesn’t record that.

ADAM He went on a crusade and was gone for like twenty years, and John, who I think was just the regent, usurped in his absence.

BETH Is that the Robin Hood story that everyone knows? I don’t know the Robin Hood story.

ADAM All I know about the Robin Hood story comes from this movie and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, and they both have the same story.

BROOM Is it also the same story in The Adventures of Robin Hood? We watched part of that at Beth’s parents’ house but I don’t remember it. There are also books about Robin Hood, of course.

ADAM Yes, I’m sure there’s other source material.

BROOM Probably some of it predates the 30s movie, eh?

ADAM Do you think this movie had a Reagan-era quality?

BROOM Nixon era.

ADAM I understand that… but I mean like a “morning in America” silent majority heroic opposition to taxes. A hearty male opposing an effeminate, weak ruler. No?

BROOM I felt like all the elements of it had been taken from all kinds of kids’ culture, and did not add up to any preconceived political worldview. I thought that the wimpy bad guy was just one of several possible kinds of bad guys, one that would keep the movie feeling light.

ADAM It’s true that he wasn’t expressly effeminate in the way that, say, Scar will be expressly effeminate. He was just childish.

BROOM He was just a baby-man. But he was probably gay too, right?

BETH I think he was nothing.

BROOM Yeah, he was just cranky. As the kid said: “I don’t like him; he’s cranky.” And the grim brown town that at the end is all the colors of the rainbow because life has been restored to it — that’s just a standard device.

ADAM It’s very The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe.

BROOM Isn’t it in everything? Isn’t that what happens to Shire? No, I guess that’s the opposite. But, I mean, the Care Bears do it all the time. The water flows at the end. Is this the first Disney movie we’ve seen where the benighted countryside comes back to life? No, it happens at the end of Sleeping Beauty too.

ADAM The thorns go away.

BROOM The frozen kingdom reawakens.

ADAM Specific things that I remember from my childhood: the scene where they know he’s alive because they see the straw in the river is burned in my memory. At the time, that seemed like an unbearably long interval before he reappeared. Even though I knew what would happen because I’d seen it before, it was always upsetting. And then always a burst of joy when he would return. I loved him. I loved the character. I believed in him and I trusted him. It was so thrilling. I just loved it, as a kid, and those good feelings are sort of slopping over my recollections now. The way he tricks them in that stork costume! And he’s so good at archery!

BROOM It’s pretty impressive that he’s tricked into shooting an arrow in the wrong direction, and he shoots another arrow and makes it go the right direction! And it goes so in the right direction that it blows open the Sheriff of Nottingham’s arrow. It goes right through it!

BETH I guess if I had seen this as a kid I would have liked it.

ADAM We are telling you: you would have.

BETH I didn’t dislike it. I just thought, “okay, fine, I’m watching a kids’ movie.”

BROOM I can see that it has a lot of standard fare common to other kids’ stuff. But I think from a technical standpoint, the character animation is very good.

ADAM It’s very expressive.

BROOM There’s a lot of kinds of acting and expression in it that they haven’t tried before. Sarcasm and joking around. Well, I guess we noted that in 101 Dalmatians the couple had their own sense of humor within the movie.

ADAM Like when Cruella leaves and they make fun of her.

BROOM Right. The characters joke around here; again, that scene with Lady Cluck and Maid Marian, but also Robin and Little John.

ADAM There’s that scene with the puppet play, where it’s clear who the characters are supposed to be… and it’s so winning when Robin Hood pops his head up! I think I just fell for his big eyes when I was a kid.

BROOM About how winning that moment is… Anything that happens in a cartoon has to be elaborately pre-planned; nothing just happens. I appreciate that they decided and calculated that the appeal of certain scenes should be “they’re all joshing around, and you’re with them when they’re having a good time.” I respect that, and I think they got it pretty well. It certainly communicates that feeling when you’re a kid. And it’s the same kind of appeal at the end when they’re going off, and the camera warmly pans past all the characters that you’ve gotten to meet. Whereas in The Aristocats they did that and it felt unearned. But maybe if I’d known The Aristocats as a kid, I would have happily thought, “look, it’s my friends cat X and cat Y!”

BETH I think you would have. I think if I had seen this even once before, I would have had a different opinion of it.

ADAM Well, it helped to have seen it eight times.

BROOM That “Whistle Stop” tune is awfully catchy.

ADAM Which one is that?

BROOM [whistles]. You know it from The Hamster Dance.

BETH What’s that?

BROOM “What is The Hamster Dance?”?!? You don’t know??

ADAM An early internet meme.

BROOM The first contentless, pointless huge internet phenomenon. We’ll look at it in a second.

BETH No, I’ve seen it.

BROOM Any last thoughts about Robin the Hood?

ADAM I feel totally satisfied.

BROOM I really enjoyed it. I’m sorry that it doesn’t mean the same thing to you when you’re a grown-up.

ADAM But I will say that it has a sort of “François le champi” pleasure to it, which I don’t think it would have a second time. In Proust, it’s this thing that he reencounters, but it’s only significant because of the long period that has elapsed, and he knows that the second time that he reencounters it, it won’t have that same magic, because adulthood will write over the track of childhood, and it’s only the shock of the encounter with the old that is stirring.

BROOM Well, I’ve been thinking about this recently, and I think that the fear of that happening is overstated. In the moment that you experience something for the first time, you’re overwhelmed by actually remembering it from your youth, and yes, if you do it again the next week, you mostly just remember yourself remembering. But! If you do it again ten years later, that moment of remembering is just light scratches over the deep groove of the original memory. I’ve already “used up” my nostalgia moment on certain things — senior year in college, in particular, I went back and re-experienced stuff. But then I went back and re-experienced some of the same things again recently, and it was all almost entirely as potent. Because who cares about “the day I remembered something in college”? That itself isn’t a memory that leaves a heavy track behind it.

ADAM Fair enough.

BROOM So you might enjoy this again in a few years.

ADAM But not next week.

BETH I want to say that I would not have any problems showing this to my children.

ADAM Oh yeah, I endorse all the values here. And then some.

BROOM Me too. I was thinking, in fact, about the one scene where some subtext was lost on me the first time around, where Maid Marian and the little boy rabbit go into the woods because he’s playing Robin Hood and has “won” her, and he says “now what?” and she says “usually they kiss.” The point is “oh, the innocence,” and that was lost on me, of course. And then she kisses him and the little girl rabbit says “they’re kissing!” and laughs and laughs, and it fades out on that. I was struck by the implication that it’s a little bit titillating to the girl, who’s a little bit older — she’s a little embarrassed and she’s also a little delighted by it, because she has more of a romantic sense of what that scene stands in for. I thought that psychology was there and was sweet. Where there could have been something leering or weird, there was something touching.

ADAM And no fart jokes. I don’t think we’ll see a fart joke in a Disney movie for many years.

BROOM No. In fact, I was struck by the moment where Sir Hiss peers into the costume and sees that the stork is actually Robin Hood; he’s looking right up his butt, but that is just where he happens to be looking, and there’s no butt-related humor or embarrassment about it.

BETH That’s a good point.

BROOM It was also funny that he put his head in a balloon and propellered himself around.

BETH Actually, that was my favorite part of the whole movie. The sound that he made just sounded like a guy making that sound.

ADAM What is the first use of the visual cliche of people being pursued off the screen one way and then being pursued off screen the other way?

BROOM I think that’s from Tex Avery, from those Red Hot Riding Hood cartoons, where they go in one door and out another. That’s always a pleasure to see. It’s an old favorite.

[we proceed to read the New York Times review, which prompts no further comments]

ADAM [deadpan] I have so many thoughts it’s hard to know where to begin. It was weird to see C-3PO cast as a villain.

BROOM His villainy was as minimal as possible.

BETH He was just an annoyance.

BROOM In this replay of the plot of 101 Dalmatians, they had, clearly, intentionally dialed down the threat level. There was essentially no threat here.

BETH Well, death by oven.

BROOM No. He was just holding them in there until he could send them to Timbuktu. That was the greatest threat that was ever held over them.

ADAM It was sort of like 101 Dalmatians and Lady and the Tramp, turned down to five.

BROOM Turned way down. So: based on having seen stills of this movie — or maybe even a few seconds of animation — I expected that what would be depressing about it would be the appearance of it, that it would look ugly and hairy and be shoddy. And that turned out not to be a problem at all. I thought the animation was actually all it had going for it. It felt like this non-starter project had been handed over to the art department and they had done a fine, serviceable job of it. What it was lacking was any reason to be, any story interest. I also thought the musical score really dragged it down constantly. It was the laziest kind of imitation of Henry Mancini, which was the least considered, most reflexive thing to do in 1970. It never played the drama of what was actually happening. Any scene with the geese just had that imitation-Mancini “goose walk music!” The same music: when they were in the water, when they were on the shore, when they were in the city street at night with the drunk goose — in all of those situations, the same thing: [hums dinky goose music]. The whole movie suffered from the same flaw: total insensitivity to whatever little story there was.

BETH Plus — and I don’t remember if this was true of Lady and the Tramptoo — the music didn’t seem to have anything to do with the period. Maybe in Lady and the Tramp the music just worked better because it wasn’t in a style that was as obviously popular to us as this was. I don’t remember the music from Lady and the Tramp so well; just the Italian song.

ADAM Peg had a song. “He’s a Tramp.”

BROOM Yeah, that was actually pretty similar in spirit to the songs from Aristocats.

BETH Right. That wasn’t very 1910 either.

BROOM When you guys started joking about how this wasn’t very 1910-ish, I didn’t even realize that it was supposed to be 1910; I missed that at the beginning. There was nothing 1910 about it in any way. The fact that she had a butler was about it. If they had said that this was 1970 and this just happened to be a fantastically upper-crust lady that would have been just as acceptable.

ADAM It was a little like “Johnnie Fedora and Alice Bluebonnet” in the look.

BROOM I thought it was just an all-purpose cartoon look. And it was full of so many blatant anachronisms, especially in who those alley cats were. A bead-wearing hippie?

ADAM Which was more embarrassing: the alley cats here, or the vulture-Beatles in The Jungle Book?

BROOM I thought this was far more embarrassing. I think the Siamese cat in this movie was the most embarrassing thing yet. “Shanghai Hong Kong egg foo yung?” We thought the Siamese cats in Lady and the Tramp were shameful — they were models of restraint compared to this guy.

ADAM I mean, which was more embarrassingly trying to be “with it,” like someone’s dad talking about punk rock.

BETH Those vultures were pretty embarrassing. This was embarrassing too. They’re both embarrassing. Equally.

BROOM The sneaking-around Henry Mancini music for the butler was deeply embarrassing for me. Every time this stuffy old butler showed up, in come the jazz bass and the trombones, which were just completely wrong. They had everything to do with being up to date, and nothing to do with the movie.

ADAM The movie was just so boring!

BETH It was very boring. Especially if you’re tired, it’s really unwatchable.

ADAM A third of this movie was like, “François! Juliette! Take your musique lesson!”

BROOM Their names were Berlioz and Toulouse!

ADAM I know.

BETH And Marie.

BROOM Who do you think Marie was? Marie Curie?

ADAM It was just painfully dull. “What are all the things we can think of about upper-crust French people? Doing boring shit?” I’m surprised they didn’t have a whole scene that was a porcelain-painting lesson.

BROOM That the second song was basically just “Play your scales! Play your scales!” just typified the whole movie. And that scene: I understand that the animator probably went to the music director and said “We just can’t afford to worry about him playing the right notes on the piano, so live with it,” but it was really distractingly absurd, what he was doing.

ADAM It was weird to picture Eva Gabor making love to Baloo.

BROOM The love in this movie was too sexual. She was too trampy.

ADAM Yeah. O’Malley cat comes up to her and she immediately starts licking herself. In front of her children!

BROOM The implication was that they were eagerly thinking, “I hope that alley cat does Mom.” They never established the idea that this family unit is lacking a father. I mean, it is, obviously, by the arithmetic of it, but there was no emotional sense of any need. So when they’re peeking out at mom vamping for this sleazeball, all you can imagine is that he’s going to have his way with her, which is clearly all he wants. He never cared about them. “Hey, babe!” But the main problem with it was, as I said, that it was just an animated movie about cats for the sake of there being an animated movie about cats.

BETH It had a Scooby-Doo quality to it. Something about the animation reminded me of Scooby-Doo.

ADAM It was classier than that. But it seemed like it was really labored. When they did Madame’s face, it was the most elaborate thing in the movie, but it was so cross-hatched with effort. Like they’d forgotten how to do faces. Or how to erase pencil marks. It just felt constipated with effort.

BROOM I felt like I was watching the animators’ workshop working without direction. The director had checked out, or management was somehow confused, and so they were all going to work and doing their animator-y things. Like the first ten minutes, which pointlessly consisted of watching the doddering lawyer go up the stairs: his choreography was very elaborate, and you got to see him do all kinds of stuff. It looked like exactly the technical stuff that occupies animators. Like: there’s going to be spring-back in his body, and then his foot will counter-balance by going back, and then he’s going to bend and stretch him this way, and then there will be two kinds of motion at once… it looks like every animator was doing his pet project or exercise, because there was no coordination to make those moments meaningful as anything other than animated business. And I think that what reminds you of Scooby-Doo is the fact that all the post-production was so slapdash and insensitive.

BETH It’s the sound effects. It’s that late-60s sound-effect thing.

BROOM Not trying to create any particular dramatic arc or impression; just getting stuff out of a bucket and dropping the stuff on the movie until it’s done.

ADAM Did we just hear this tune: [hums “Baby Elephant Walk”]?

BROOM No! That’s real Henry Mancini, that’s “Baby Elephant Walk.” When I hummed before, that’s what started you thinking of it, but I was just doing my impression of the goose music from this movie.

ADAM What was your favorite moment in the movie? Because I had one favorite moment.

BROOM My favorite moment was when the horse came into the house to sing at the end.

ADAM My favorite moment was when Madame wakes up in the middle of the night and she has long hair. It reminded me of “A Rose for Emily.” Do you know that story?

BROOM Is that the Faulkner story where the old lady sleeps in the same bed with her dead husband?

ADAM Yes.

BROOM What was your least favorite moment?

ADAM The other parts! It was really boring. The drama of O’Malley almost drowning in the river? Not dramatic! Not interesting! And the train? There were all these things that felt like, “[exhausted groan], so what other obstacles can we throw at them?”

BETH Exactly. When Marie fell off into the water, that just felt like crappy scriptwriting.

ADAM None of it hung together at all.

BROOM Yeah, you never believed in any of those moments.

ADAM “We need to fit ten obstacles between the porcelain painting scenes. Okay, dogs. Okay, I guess dogs are southern. Okay, and there will be a madcap scene with a sidecar. And a windmill. All right, fine. Uh… okay, um…. train trestles…”

BROOM “I know, a retrieving-something-from-a-sleeper’s-grip scene. Okay, good. Do you want to do feather-tickle or fishing rod? Let’s do fishing rod. Well, let’s get a tickle in there too. Okay.” Ugh, and the action music for the windmill chase scene was so awful. They had worked out all these intricate gags, and the music was just like the same blaring brass hits, repeated over and over to cover the whole sequence. Beth, what do you think you would think of this movie as a six-year-old.

BETH Bored. Very bored. But I would like the part at the end when the lights are flashing and everything was changing into different colors.

ADAM I would have been entranced by the fact that it was set in Paris. I would have found that so romantic.

BETH I would have liked that too. And I did like the backgrounds. The elaborate furniture and that sort of stuff, I thought, was nicely done. It had a mood.

BROOM I think I would have found it congenial and pleasant to look at. It would have been boring, of course, because it is boring, it just doesn’t grip you. But I thought that in terms of being spaces to imagine yourself in, it would have served. It was a series of inoffensively pleasant places, like your family took you out to a restaurant that was perfectly fine.

BETH It had some nice space. Like when they visit the alley cats, that house is a cool space.

BROOM I thought that the backgrounds were actually better than the Jungle Book backgrounds, the previous movie’s. But they didn’t hold a candle to 101 Dalmatians.

ADAM Okay: this was essentially the same movie as 101 Dalmatians, so why was this so much worse? Was it because the characters weren’t properly developed? There was a slackness to this that there wasn’t in 101 Dalmatians.

BROOM Yes. I think there was a witlessness to both the scripting and the directing. And, as I’ve said, post-production elements like the sound effects and music.

BETH I think it was mostly the script. I think the lack of threat was a problem. There wasn’t enough conflict driving the action, throughout. Once they were just trying to make their way home, that’s all that was happening.

BROOM This was not a sharp enough movie to afford the inclusion of geese with “bad senses of humor.” The idea that they were making lame jokes — we weren’t flying nearly high enough for them to pull that off. Is that a British stereotype? That they have wretched senses of humor?

BETH Yes, I think the idea that the British like “silly jokes” is a stereotype.

ADAM Why did they take the time to go see the alley cats when they could have just gone home?

BETH They were entranced. The kids were tired and she was in love.

ADAM They obviously didn’t miss Madame that much.

BROOM They were waiting to show up in the daytime.

BETH Okay, let’s read the New York Times review.

[BROOM begins looking it up]

BROOM Oops, I spelled “Aristocrats” correctly by mistake. Which reminds me, I wanted to make a joke, like, about the part of the movie where…

ADAM Where they were, like, all fucking each other?

BROOM Yeah. Where the mom makes a hairball right into the daughter’s mouth.

[we read the review]

BROOM That review just makes you realize that 1970 must have been a terrible time.

ADAM It’s true. All the great institutions had lost all confidence in themselves, The New York Times no less than Walt Disney Studios.

BROOM It had its commas in the wrong places, and it was all about “Know what I’m saying, my swinging readers?” That was my most embarrassing moment: the review. Too bad there wasn’t a byline; if that had been baby Janet Maslin or something, that would have been sobering to us. But it was probably someone who didn’t last. Probably got high a little too often. Plus they got this movie so wrong.

ADAM It must have been such a culturally dislocated time.

BROOM Somewhere in between The Jungle Book, which just had that tentative Beatles thing, and now, you can sense that there was just an anti-cultural explosion. And it’s not even like Disney was trying to embrace that, here.

BETH No. They were just doing something mainstream.

BROOM Which had gotten so dumbed down. If had been Marshall McLuhan writing about culture then, of course I would have said that everything had gotten dumber. It’s gotten so much dumber over the course of these movies, right?

BETH Well, yeah.

BROOM Since when? Has it been downhill since World War II?

BETH No. Alice in Wonderland isn’t dumb.

ADAM As these things go. And neither is Dalmatians.

BROOM But Cinderella was dumb, and that was the start of the post-war period. Dalmatians wasn’t dumb, I suppose, but it definitely had its sights lower.

ADAM I suppose that’s right. We just liked it because there were the funny bachelor parts at the beginning, but the actual puppies part was pretty rote.

BROOM And surely that’s why it was popular. Kids wanted to watch puppies.

ADAM Right, not the swinging bachelor dog.

BROOM So, not to give away the story, but looking forward we’re going to have about twenty years of riding the rapids of dumbed-down mainstream stuff, and then there’s finally going to be the revolution, the renaissance, but it’s going to be this liberal-agenda Pocahontas shit, and it’s sort of sad to think that that was the middlebrow’s best hope for renewal. Is that really what the storyline is?

ADAM The best hope for renewal is Rapunzel. I have a lot riding on Rapunzel.

BROOM That’s two from now, right? The Princess and the Frog comes first?

ADAM Yeah.

BROOM I don’t know what you can have riding on that. You know, Ross Douthat, before his New York Times appearances —

ADAM His disappointing New York Times appearances.

BROOM — wrote something on The Atlantic’s site about how he misses middlebrow movies — how it used to be the glory of Hollywood that it made something genuinely, wholesomely middlebrow. And I feel like that’s what we’ve been watching, here. Snow White was just an experiment, they didn’t know what it was, but then after the war, they found what it was: it was middlebrow, it was something for everyone to come and see. And now we’re just watching its standards slide. And that’s sad. And it is because of those damn hippies; that’s how that review made me feel.

ADAM It’s like the French revolution: it’s not the revolutionaries’ fault that everything went to pot, even though everything did. I mean, the things that happened in the 60s and 70s were by and large good for everyone, but they were wrenching.

BROOM I’m not proposing that those things shouldn’t have happened, or that it would be better if they hadn’t. But there’s a cause and effect relationship.

ADAM Well, this isn’t the place for macro-cultural criticism.

ADAM That was the most charming case against miscegenation I’ve ever seen. “Would you want your daughter to marry a panther?” That was creepily of its time.

BROOM I don’t think that’s what that meant.

ADAM That’s what it meant in every other context when people said things like that. I’m not saying that’s what it meant here. I just thought it was funny.

BROOM Several times I thought about how it’s easy for us to see things that are “inappropriate.” Like that they shouldn’t be rubbing their balls on things. But I must have watched this movie many times as a kid — so much of it was familiar this time — and I never thought “look, he’s rubbing his balls!” Or that it was too weirdly intimate for Mowgli to be lying on Baloo’s belly.

BETH That didn’t really seem inappropriate.

BROOM Well, we were snickering at it, but there’s really nothing there.

BETH You don’t think the animators thought about it?

BROOM No. I just don’t think it was there at all. And I definitely don’t think that they thought of it in racial terms. I don’t think that the jungle was “the wrong kind of people” and the human village was “the right kind of people.” I don’t think there was any sort of “typing” going on.

BETH It did seem less racial than, say, Dumbo did.

BROOM I think the avoidance of any characters who were even remotely black meant that they had, by this point, learned their lesson.

ADAM Um, except the orangutans!

BROOM They weren’t black! As you said, they were like the guys who sing “Gee, Officer Krupke.” Very pointedly so, instead of being black like they would have been in any other Disney movie.

ADAM I thought that the orangutan king was, like….

BROOM He was Louis Prima! He’s Italian.

ADAM I don’t know.

BETH He seemed to be black.

BROOM Yes. He’s Cousin Louis because the voice is actually Louis Prima.

ADAM Okay. I thought it was funny that Disney’s response to the 60s — that finally kicked in in 1967 — was…

BETH Ringo?

ADAM It was like Dobie Gillis. They tried to do the Beatles, but their Beatles were singing barbershop. They obviously said, “let’s get some of this crazy 60s stuff in,” but they had no idea. Their understanding of what 60s culture meant was, like, beatniks.

BETH I don’t know. To do what they did, I think they couldn’t have been clueless.

ADAM It was like, “hey, these people are on Ed Sullivan, and they have mop-like hair and British accents!” and that was about all they got.

BETH The barbershop singing was weird.

BROOM I was wondering what kind of song they were going to sing, because if they sang a Beatles-style song, it seemed like that would be taking it too far. And when they started singing the barbershop, I thought, “this is a good move.” The quartet turns into something else so that we don’t have to be distracted thinking about the Beatles the whole time. I thought that the electric bass in the underscore while they were talking was already heavy-handed enough. Did Bagheera remind anyone else of Captain Picard?

BETH Yes! I was going to say that! He looks like him and talks like him.

ADAM I liked the shaggy style of the drawing here, with stray lines. It looked like an animated sketchpad.

BROOM That’s because they used xerography or something to transfer the drawings directly to the cells. But you liked it?

BETH I like that too. You don’t?

BROOM It’s a sign of them cutting costs. But when I was a kid, it was just “a look,” and I guess I did like it. I certainly liked this movie a lot when I was a kid. I think it has two of the catchiest songs in the Disney canon in it.

ADAM What’s the other one?

BROOM “I Wanna Be Like You” and “Bear Necessities.”

BETH When the snake’s eyes get crazy…

BROOM “Trust In Me?”

BETH … no, I’m just asking about the scene — that didn’t scare you? I feel like that totally would have scared me.

BROOM Really?

ADAM It would have scared me more if Bagheera hadn’t been as exasperated by it.

BROOM I don’t remember the first time I saw it, but I remember watching it and knowing it already, and I knew that Kaa was ineffectual. Even though he gets right to the place where he could eat Mowgli, both Shere Khan and Bagheera are more powerful than he is.

ADAM Why does Shere Khan let him go if he knows that he has Mowgli?

BROOM I think that when he lowers his middle down, the trick actually works. Shere Khan is actually surprised that he’s able to do that.

BETH I thought Shere Khan was a great villain character.

BROOM He’s excellent. It’s a shame that he’s only in about five minutes of the movie.

ADAM Yeah. He’s so authoritative.

BETH He’s just like James Mason in North by Northwest, I thought. “Your next role will be playing dead; you’ll be quite convincing.”

BROOM That’s right. I like that his power comes in being so calm the whole time. I like when he puts out his claw and quietly squeezes Kaa’s neck. That’s a good bad-guy show of force. But I think the movie — even more than Sword in the Stone — is just episodic, just a series of encounters with characters, some of whom have songs. Well, I guess they all have songs, but some of the songs suck.

ADAM The orangutans to me were pretty charismatic, and Baloo is pretty entertaining — he’s the first stoner in a Disney movie.

BROOM He’s not a stoner, he’s just a vagabond. I remember really liking Baloo in the same way I liked the scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz — as “the guy who likes you! He’s so nice to you!” It’s a very warm feeling, and Phil Harris’s voice is very inviting to a kid — though now I hear a little more sleaze in it than I would have heard then.

ADAM He has a Yogi Bear quality.

BROOM Yeah, but more warm, more avuncular.

ADAM You can see in him the Hanna-Barbera-ization proceeding apace.

BROOM What does that mean to you? Just a cheapening, all-around, or something else?

ADAM Sort of a jauntier, cheaper animation style, and a jauntier cast of characters; less moralizing and more slapstick.

BROOM Some of the slapstick was pretty shoddy.

ADAM When the temple collapses, it’s like the temple collapsing in a Scooby-Doo cartoon.

BROOM That’s true.

ADAM [imitates Hanna-Barbera “scrambling feet” sound effect]

BROOM Right. The slapstick was generally well-animated, but a lot of it was pretty lazy stuff. Like someone being snapped backward and slamming into something. And the timing was very much for kids. I guess Sword in the Stone was like that too. I feel like The Jungle Book has a little more human warmth than The Sword in the Stone, which is probably why I liked it better. Bagheera and Baloo felt like nice guys.

ADAM Although it’s a shame that when he leaves his wolf family, it’s like, “oh well.”

BROOM It’s true. His parents don’t mean anything to him.

ADAM And then when he leaves Baloo and Bagheera, it’s like, “so much for that!” He leaves them for that little minx.

BROOM Yeah, the really sexy ten-year-old.

ADAM That’s the clip that I’d seen in a Disney Valentine’s Day special, which is really creepy.

BETH It is.

BROOM She’s explicitly seducing him, even though they’re just ten-year-old kids. And her really big eyes that she bats at him. She looks like that creepy shot in Lion King where the girl lion looks up at him and it’s a little too sexual. I thought that Mowgli looked like Bobby Hill. He had a very simplified flat face.

BETH I liked his face. I thought he was cute and easy to watch. A lot of times I think kids’ faces look obnoxious.

ADAM I appreciated that we didn’t have to endure the backstory of how he got into the jungle.

BROOM Right. It doesn’t matter. “He got abandoned by his parents. There are no emotions in it; go with that.” There are almost no emotions in the whole movie.

BETH Well, fear.

BROOM Just momentary fear, maybe. But even the final, serious, scary-landscape, actual-threat-of-death fight scene is still just about being bonked on the head.

BETH Yeah.

ADAM “Easygoing” is what I would call this movie.

BROOM I remember it being very appealing when I was a kid. Yes, it’s very superficial.

BETH Even if Baloo isn’t a stoner, it feels like it was made by people who had done a lot of pot.

BROOM Oh, I don’t think so. I think it was all the same old men who had done the other movies.

BETH Really? Even the music? A lot about it seemed so 60s-y.

BROOM I think the association of that aesthetic with drugs and hippies is just retrospective. I think a lot of people in the 60s were just having the same lives they had in the 50s, with a different soundtrack.

ADAM I think the orangutans were clearly pot-smokers. And I think Baloo was clearly a pot-smoker.

BROOM I don’t think pot was a factor here at all. Baloo was just a moocher, a well-meaning good-for-nothin’.

BETH But he might have tried drugs at some point.

BROOM His defining characteristic was his advice to Mowgli: “Don’t go out there looking for things that you don’t have; just give up and settle for the bare necessities.” I don’t think he was saying “space out.” He was just saying “don’t expect anything.”

ADAM Hakuna matata.

BROOM “Hakuna Matata” is exactly the same scene; it’s obviously an attempt to do this song again. “Bear Necessities” really is a standout song for me. It’s really very catchy. The patter about the prickly pawpaw — “put the paw and the claw with the pawpaw” or whatever — when I was a kid, I thought it was just the fun of saying crazy words in rhythm. This time I heard that he was actually saying things that made sense, and the idea of doing a tongue-twister break seemed almost embarrassingly corny to me now. Anything else to say about the big picture here?

BETH About the ideology?

BROOM I don’t know. Sure, if you’ve got something.

ADAM The ideology is like, “cool it.”

BETH “Go with the flow.”

ADAM “Breeze it, buzz it, easy does it: keep cooly-cool, boy!”

BROOM That’s about keeping cool and not losing your cool; but nobody here was going to lose their cool. Even Bagheera, the serious one, the prude, isn’t really a prude. At the end you think he’s going to be flustered and say “I can’t sing this song!” but instead he immediately joins in.

ADAM It’s like nobody meant any of it, for the whole movie. And that’s sort of comforting.

BROOM Which is what all Disney movies were like at that point. All those Herbie movies… there’s no threat of anything.

BETH You were just saying this. That you like encountering old live-action Disney movies on TV because there’s no threat of having to deal with anything.

BROOM I don’t remember saying that.

BETH At the beach.

ADAM Can we read the review? I have to go. Sorry, Emma.

BROOM No, she’s happy about that. I was going to say at the beginning of this conversation that this viewing was a little more distracted, because Beth was falling asleep and Adam had work emails coming into him as we watched, but that it turned out the movie could handle it. The movie didn’t demand anything of us. There’s no investment to be made in it; it’s just a series of diversions.

[we read the original Times review but have nothing to add]

ADAM Beth, I think you should go first.

BETH Because I said I used to like it?

ADAM Yeah.

BETH I was thinking about why I liked it so much when I was 13 or 14, and I think it’s because it feels modern, in a way that everything prior to it did not. And I think that’s because the characters are more modern. Merlin, in particular, seems easier to relate to than any prior Disney character, for me.

BROOM Including Pongo and Perdita?

BETH Yes, obviously that’s similarly modern.

ADAM More than the negro crows?

BETH Yes.

ADAM Well I been done seen ’bout everything.

BETH Also, it’s always active. Even though essentially the same thing happens three times; the same story gets played out when he’s a fish, a bird, and a squirrel. Well, I guess the squirrel one was a little different.

BROOM How do you mean that you can relate to Merlin because he’s “modern”? He just seemed to me like an archetype of the addled, absent-minded professor character.

BETH I think it was something about the dialogue.

ADAM It’s self-referential, in a way that the others aren’t.

BETH Yes — it’s more knowing, and felt more influenced by Warner Brothers. Not that there’s always a lot of dialogue in Warner Brothers cartoons — but the scenarios. The squirrel scenario seemed like a Warner Brothers setup.

ADAM It seemed like a Pepé Le Pew scenario.

BETH And there were two Wile E. Coyote scenarios. The whole thing just felt a little saucier than other Disney movies.

BROOM And how do you feel about that now? When you were 13, your values were: the sassier and the more… what’s a word for what Warner Brothers cartoons are as opposed to Disney?

ADAM Wiseacre.

BROOM … the more wiseacre the better. But how do you feel about that now? The same way?

BETH No. I don’t think that this was a great work, but it was entertaining to me in the same way. I understood why I was entertained by it. It never lapses, I felt.

ADAM It’s striking to me that this is the first explicitly moralistic one. Disney movies today are all about “here’s a theme, and we’re going to hammer on it.” Like Lilo and Stitch, you may recall, is like: “Mahalo means family, and family means no one gets left behind!” Do you remember that?

BROOM I’m impressed! [Ed. “Ohana” means family; “Mahalo” means thank you]

ADAM And this also had a clearly defined moral that carried through from the beginning to the end, and all the episodes were about illustration rather than narration, in a certain way.

BROOM “Develop your intellect and you will go places.”

ADAM Right, which is an odd message for this movie, since he actually becomes king through divine quirk. He displays no kingly qualities whatsoever.

BROOM Did you ever read The Once and Future King, upon which this is based?

ADAM No.

BROOM I don’t think I finished it, because it was too long and boring for me as a kid, but because it was the source for this movie I did read a bunch of it.

ADAM Are there squirrels and everything?

BROOM Yeah, he turns into a bunch of things, but it’s not comic like this. He spends a long time as a hawk. His education is an education in the natural ways of the world; he becomes one with everything. It’s this sort of hippie-spiritual idea, that Merlin introduces him to the rhythms of the earthworm and the eagle…

ADAM “The Circle of Life!…”

BROOM Yes, that’s exactly it. [Ed. Actually more like “The Colors of the Wind”] That’s the education he needs to be a true leader of men, to have been to the heights and the depths of everything. Whereas here they just took it as the framework for slapstick.

ADAM The movie claims that book-learning is important, but they don’t actually want to trouble us with more than one sentence of book-learning.

BROOM Well, oddly, Merlin disdains actual book-learning, when Archimedes tells Wart to read a huge pile of books. That’s not the kind of education this movie is espousing.

ADAM But Merlin does put the books in his bag first, and clearly believes in them. He says “You need to learn English! and History! and Geometry!”

BROOM Merlin represents that philosophy, in opposition to the medieval brutes — Sir Kay and his father — but then Archimedes is beyond that, he’s too formal and pedantic. Putting the curlicues on your capital C isn’t the point of education.

ADAM The movie struck me as sort of slipshod, coming to it now.

BROOM That’s how I felt too, but I didn’t want to jump on it right at the top of the conversation.

ADAM For a lot of these others, I have some received childhood imagery that bolsters my impressions, or provides them with some sort of scaffolding, but here I was without that.

BROOM You had really never seen this before.

ADAM I had only seen the last bit, from when Hobbes comes down with mumps through to the end. I think I’d seen Merlin coming down in Bermuda shorts.

BROOM Hard to shake that image.

BETH It reminds me of Back to the Future.

BROOM You’re right, it is like Back to the Future. So much so that it’s almost like the end of Back to the Future is a reference to this. And Doc Brown basically is the Merlin from this movie.

BETH Yeah. Which maybe is part of why I liked it. Because it reminded me of Back to the Future.

BROOM In terms of things that show up elsewhere: the “oh no here comes a pike to eat us!” scene happens exactly like this, underwater with fish, in Little Mermaid and Finding Nemo, and possibly in other movies. I guess it sort of happened in Pinocchio already, but it wasn’t quite the same. There was something specifically familiar about the particular way this scene played out. “Here comes the bad guy animal from this region of the world! Get it stuck trying to go through a small hole! Now put a spike between its jaws!” Is this the first place where that sequence of stuff happened? I guess Popeye must have been doing stuff like that back to the 30s.

BETH Yeah, it must be in other cartoons.

ADAM There are only so many ways to disable a predator animal that aren’t gruesome. I mean, he could have put the arrow in its eye! That’s what I was hoping he would do.

BROOM Luke Skywalker puts a spike between the jaws of the Rancor in Return of the Jedi.

ADAM That wouldn’t actually work in real life, would it?

BROOM You think it could flick it away with its tongue? I don’t know.

BETH I think it would work.

ADAM If the spike were actually lodged in the roof of its mouth, that would be different.

BROOM I think if a fish with long jaws had something wedged in there vertically, it would probably have some trouble with that.

ADAM I had a children’s book in which Madam Mim featured. But it had nothing to do with the story of Arthur, as far as I could discern. She was just a stand-alone character. I forget how they defeat her in the end, in the children’s book. Truly, that was not something I had thought about in years and years until that image came on screen.

BETH I found the wizard’s duel sequence really funny.

BROOM As a child and now?

BETH Yes.

ADAM Why didn’t Merlin just go straight for the germ thing? That’s obviously a dominant strategy.

BETH I think it hadn’t occurred to him.

BROOM I think he had ideals about playing fair and was trying to do it the way it was meant to be done.

BETH He was also a little slow to come up with ideas.

ADAM He should have become a fatal virus.

BROOM I knew, when he was a crab and snapping at her snake popping out of the hole, that eventually something else was going to come out of the hole, but I couldn’t remember what, and that sense of foreboding was exciting. Even as a kid, after you see the head keep popping out, you know that they’re going to change it up on you.

ADAM Sir Kay is pretty brutish in a way that is not appealing.

BROOM I’m glad that you feel that way. I really am.

ADAM That I’m not attracted to him?

BROOM Yeah. You’re pretty much always attracted to the Gaston character.

ADAM Even for me, Kay is a little too loutish.

BETH I thought they did a nice job maintaining the characters when they changed into different creatures. All the Mim creatures looked like her.

BROOM That was well done in that it wasn’t overdone. The fish didn’t look like Wart’s face on a fish.

BETH No, but it had his personality.

BROOM He basically looked just like Nemo.

ADAM The idea that they would resolve the kingship with a tournament — or that it would have lain open for so many years that they could have forgotten about the sword — although obviously they didn’t forget about it…

BETH The stone was pretty cleaned up, when he got there, from how it looked at the beginning.

BROOM Yeah, Adam pointed out that the vines had been taken away.

ADAM … that all seems historically implausible to me. It’s more likely that a brutal civil war would have come about.

BROOM In Robin Hood — at least in the Disney Robin Hood, coming up shortly — a tournament like that is held for the hand of the king’s daughter, right? Is that less historically absurd?

ADAM I don’t know.

BROOM Oh, but it’s a trick, isn’t it? It’s a way of luring Robin Hood.

ADAM I can’t wait for that!

BROOM It’s two or three from now.

ADAM What’s next, Jungle Book?

BROOM Yes. The Jungle Book is the last one during Walt Disney’s lifetime. Though, honestly, the rhythms and feeling of this one…

ADAM It’s as if he’s already dead.

BROOM It really is.

BETH It is. It’s the new style of animation — of children’s entertainment in general.

BROOM 101 Dalmatians felt like, “wow, look what we came up with! It’s great! The movie doesn’t totally hang together — but look at this new look and style and attitude we came up with!” And here it immediately already felt like, “the formula is in place, let’s turn out another one.”

ADAM It felt like budget cuts. It was so drab.

BROOM And so many repeated bits of animation. Even as a kid, it’s a drag to see him drop the plates twice in exactly the same way. Or when he’s goggle-eyed at Merlin at the beginning: the first time, it’s funny, but then a minute later when they use it again to fill time, it’s depressing. The whole movie gave me the impression that there was no big picture for any of the artists anymore. I thought the directing was weak, and there were a lot of places where scenes fell flat, or dragged, moments that weren’t worth anything to anyone.

BETH There was a lot of drag.

BROOM Real care seemed to have been put into it only on the scale where a single person was working on his own — like in the backgrounds. Each background, created by an individual artist, was interesting. Or the animation evaluated on a really small scale; like, when he scratches his head or something, the quality of the animation of an individual action was always good, but it didn’t necessarily play into any larger value, any pacing that would make it worth anything to the audience.

ADAM Yeah.

BROOM I was reminded of something that I think I showed you, Beth — I saw an interview with John Williams recently, when I was looking through his movie score stuff online, and someone asked him how he thought his style had changed over the forty years of his career, or whatever it’s been, and he said, “I think that now I know more, but it’s less durable.” And I felt like that’s what we were seeing here. All kinds of technical things had been learned; they had polished and worked all kinds of stuff that would have been sloppier back in the Pinocchio days — I criticized how Geppetto looked, and I stand by that — here the people didn’t have any of those problems; they were really solid; they rotate through space and always look perfect. But…

ADAM To what end?

BROOM They know more… and it’s less durable.

ADAM Is this squirrel scene the first time we’ve seen the “amorous fat lady” as a joke?

BROOM No, of course not. In Sleepy Hollow there was the amorous fat lady who wanted to dance with Ichabod Crane, who was exactly like that.

ADAM I forgot all about that. The character of course is in “Pirates of the Caribbean,” the ride. So I was curious.

BROOM It seemed a little unnecessarily rough that they gave her black whiskers and a gap between her front teeth.

ADAM The matronly squirrel?

BROOM She looked like a man.

BETH Yeah, she was ugly.

BROOM She didn’t need to be that ugly for it to be funny.

ADAM What are we to make of the lesson that love consists of, you know, misdirected obsession? That’s only a little piece of love!

BROOM I remembered feeling very bad for the squirrels when I was a kid… and now I see that they totally want you to. The end of the scene is all sad violins and the weeping squirrel. And I don’t know why! It’s a very weird emotion they’re nursing there. I don’t know what they were going for.

BETH What is anyone learning from that?

BROOM Adam, you were cowering behind the pillow through the whole sequence; do you want to say something about it?

ADAM It was really uncomfortable!

BETH And extended. They just keep going and going with it.

ADAM He’s kind of a jerk to her, and she still saves him from the wolf. And it’s just creepy! Maybe I see it as a metaphor for being in the closet.

BROOM Howso? Oh, that she can’t understand why she means nothing to him, and he’s saying “you don’t understand what I really am”…?

ADAM Yeah. I’m joking. Not totally. I’m mostly joking. But it’s just the creepy mismatch of it that makes it uncomfortable.

BROOM I wasn’t thinking of it as a metaphor for being in the closet, but…

ADAM I wasn’t either, to be honest.

BROOM … but just as male-female relations. I mean, obviously it wasn’t about human-squirrel relations; it was about male-female relations, and the females were the ones who had no idea what the men really were. And then when the men pop out of the bushes in their true forms, the women scream in uncomprehending terror. And the men say, “Now do you understand?” What does that translate to? It doesn’t mean anything, hopefully! Other than that if you turn into a squirrel, squirrels will be upset.

ADAM I call attention to the fact that the only women in this movie are those squirrels and Madam Mim and the dishwasher woman. But of course there are no sympathetic males either. Everyone’s unpleasant, really.

BETH Well, Arthur.

ADAM Except for Merlin and Arthur.

BROOM And you’re supposed to be okay with Archimedes and his curmudgeonly ways.

BETH I am.

BROOM And of course the deep-voiced man at the tournament!

ADAM “Give the boy a chance!”

BROOM I wanted to talk a little more about Madam Mim. I said “this is like Psycho” because they’re in the middle of a chase and you’re invested in whether he’ll get away, and then suddenly he falls into this evil woman’s lair. It’s also like in Pulp Fiction when they end up in the torture room in the middle of a different story.

ADAM Right.

BROOM But anyway — is she a type? Is she like people in any way? Or is she just a crazy thing? Her delight in being a hag is just absurd, right? There’s no way for me to align that with any other character in anything.

ADAM She’s a little bit like Hagatha on The Smurfs. Do you remember her? [Ed: internet says “Hogatha“]

BROOM I guess I remember there being a character who was like that.

ADAM Well, she’s actually not like that, because Hagatha — if you don’t remember — wanted to use the Smurfs to make face cream. Because she thinks it will make her beautiful, which is sort of a miserable delusion, and they defeat her by giving her this mud bath that they tell her is going to fix her skin, but the mud hardens on her face and they push her down a hill. Which also has its own gender issues.

BROOM When Madam Mim briefly turned into “beautiful lady,” I was struck by how 60s she looked. She looked like a Jules Feiffer drawing.

BETH She did. Her nose was upturned.

BROOM And she had pointy boobs.

BETH Yeah, exaggerated curves.

BROOM She looked like a Jules Feiffer semi-parody of what a beautiful lady is supposed to look like.

BETH But Arthur seemed a little bit titillated.

BROOM It wasn’t clear to me why he was staring.

ADAM He liked it!

BETH I think he did.

BROOM Maybe, but the animator seemed to be making fun of the whole notion of this “beauty.” But I guess that was so that she would still seem like Madam Mim.

ADAM Did Bill Peet do “The Reluctant Dragon”?

BROOM “The Reluctant Dragon” — you mean the cartoon from the 40s that you didn’t watch? What do you mean?

ADAM Oh. No. Did he?

BROOM I don’t know. He was a story man for a long time.

ADAM I wish I could remember what the Bill Peet book was that I’m trying to think of.

BROOM The Caboose that Got Loose was the one that I had. But there were others. There was one about a moose, maybe?

ADAM Yeah, I don’t know. [Ed.: Droofus the Dragon?] I don’t have much else to say about this movie. It was ramshackle.

BROOM Yeah. It felt like a chintzier product.

BETH It didn’t have as much class as I thought it had.

ADAM Sorry to rub your nose in it as an adult.

BETH So what, though? As kids entertainment it was fine.

BROOM It was definitely kids-ier. In the first section, when it was all about how he meets Merlin and how Merlin comes to his house, I was pretty sad about how lame it was, and how low their standards for storytelling had gotten. But then when it turned into a lot of gimmicks in a row, I thought, “all right, fine” You get to watch him fall, you get to watch someone get clonked on the head. Fine.

ADAM At least it’s not Bongo.

BROOM Right. They’ve done worse.

BETH Oh, it wasn’t that bad, guys.

BROOM It wasn’t.

ADAM It was fine.

BROOM It was just very superficial. And it was the first one where the moral felt, as Adam said, like an ingredient in a formula rather than like part of the conception of the movie.

[we read the original New York Times review]

BETH He really liked it.

BROOM Yeah, he was totally into it.

ADAM Unaccountable.

BROOM An unequivocally positive review. And why not, I guess. But just as we’re saying that the era has turned these films into more of a kids’ thing, the review treats it as more of a kids’ thing. In the 40s, the reviews were all about “what is Disney and his team of artists up to?” That’s stopped.

ADAM It didn’t even get a stand-alone review; it was in a package right under “The Best of Cinerama.”

BROOM I feel like the story of how that happened to Disney and animation, how it got trivialized, is not being told by this survey of just the feature films. We’re watching the features and saying “this one is dumber, how did that happen?” It happened in between. Something about kids’ entertainment, and culture in general.

BETH Well, the Mickey Mouse Club started up in the 50s.

BROOM Yeah, television changed the flavor of these things.

BETH The brand of Disney changed, and the focus changed.

ADAM Now it’s all about, like, Annette Funicello’s boobs.

BROOM The final joke in this movie was almost an acknowledgement that the movies are just secondary to television, now.

BETH It definitely was. Which maybe was a complaint?

BROOM I don’t know. It just seemed to be shrugging and saying, “So whaddaya gonna do? Movies are dumb now. The end!”

ADAM Visually, that was my favorite one.

BETH I agree.

ADAM The story was a little flat, but visually it was top-notch.

BROOM Yes. The designs of the still imagery, and also the lively way that they animated it, starting with the opening credit sequence, were all gratifying.

BETH And they way they used color was very sophisticated, I thought.

ADAM They decided to be cartoony again. For real. It was like the Sleeping Beauty cartooniness taken to a jauntier and more confident level. And it was a more cheerful subject, so it was more befitting.

BROOM There’s no reason for this to necessarily be a more cheerful subject than Sleeping Beauty; it was just directed more cheerfully.

ADAM It was about dogs! Everyone loves puppies.

BROOM I felt like this movie made Lady and the Tramp feel like a warm-up. It sort of ate up Lady and the Tramp. What does Lady and the Tramp have going for it over this? This had more dogs and more events.

BETH It was surprising to me that they chose to do another dog movie so soon after Lady and the Tramp.

ADAM Lady and the Tramp must have been a hit.

BETH I guess so.

BROOM I liked seeing all the Lady and the Tramp characters in their brief cameos, but it also made the point to me that we don’t really want to see them more than that. What do they have to offer us?

ADAM I liked Peg!

BROOM Well, you’ll be happy to know she made it out of the pound and is now in a store window.

ADAM In England.

BETH Fifty years later.

ADAM I thought that the puppies were not all that well characterized. It got irritating when Rolly kept saying that he was hungry.

BETH Yes.

BROOM “One of them will be fat!”

ADAM My bias in coming to this is that I don’t remember having seen the movie as a kid more than once, if that, but I read the book about a dozen times. I loved the book.

BROOM I’ve never read it. What is it like? Is the plot like this?

ADAM The plot is the same but there’s more incident in the book. I seem to remember an incident where they stop and are fed by a kindly old man who feeds them buttered toast… but maybe that’s in “Lassie Come-Home.” I don’t know.

BROOM It seems like the idea here, at least in the movie, is that animals take care of animals.

ADAM Right. Well, that’s why I’m not sure. I have to check. Anyway, a couple more of the puppies have personalities. The puppy that gets nursed back to life is like albino, and it’s sort of weaker than the others, and I think it’s called either “Cad” or “Pig.” [ed. – Cadpig].

BROOM They didn’t follow through with that character in the movie. Just the event of its being nursed back to life after being pseudo-stillborn was strange.

ADAM It just sort of was there and they didn’t do anything with it.

BROOM Not even that it didn’t connect to the plot, but just the life-and-death stakes of it, when he’s rubbing it to see if it will live or not. There’s a lot on the line there, while the rest of the movie was very frothy.

ADAM Well, I mean, the puppies are about to be brutally murdered! They’re within seconds of being brutally murdered. It doesn’t feel quite as frightening as that, though. Also in the book, Cruella has a husband, and they get arrested at the end. Here there’s no reason to think that Cruella’s not going to come back and continue to menace them. In fact, she must hate them now that she’s the target of this popular ballad. And they buy Hell Hall at the end of the book, and paint it white, and it becomes their country home.

BETH That’s cool. I wish that had been in the movie.

BROOM You did like that book by Dodie Smith.

ADAM There’s another book by Dodie Smith?

BETH It’s called “I Capture the Castle,” and it’s just delightful. It’s about a poor family who happens to live in a rotting castle.

ADAM There’s another part at the end, where all the puppies come in, and they call up all of the hotels in London – the Savoy and the Ritz and everyone – and have them send over steaks. Much of my idea of what England was like came from this and Paddington Bear. Not very accurate. But this did have a lot more real London-iness than Peter Pan.

BETH Yes.

BROOM Absolutely. They mentioned all the locales and actually made it look like those places.

BETH They did. It looked like Regent’s Park.

BROOM Hampstead Heath you couldn’t really see. But Primrose Hill I recognized. I was struck by how television was a recurring theme here. It was sort of showing how Disney had embraced television.

BETH But it was also criticizing it.

BROOM I don’t know if it was. It had a relationship with television that was complicated. There was a whole scene of the family sitting around watching TV…

ADAM Which was pretty wholesome.

BROOM Yes, like that’s where the family comes together, that’s their hearth, and it was sincere about that.

ADAM But then Lucky almost loses his life to television addiction.

BROOM Well, television is what saves them too, because dopes watch television, and that’s how they have time to escape. Also, surely whatever show “Thunderbolt” was supposed to be, it was clearly a Disney-produced show. Essentially they were watching “Davy Crockett.” And I’ll repeat what I said, for two years from now, or whenever it is that we get to Bolt: Was that Bolt?? I mean, it was a TV show with a superhero dog called Thunderbolt. We’ll find out!

ADAM Do you think that the Colonel and the Sergeant were a gentle satire of British military pig-headedness in the First World War?

BROOM I don’t know if it was a satire; I think they were just pulling stock characters. The addled British officer…

ADAM And the clever staff sergeant? We’ll see that again in Dr. Strangelove.

BROOM Yes, exactly. That was the Peter Sellers character, right?

ADAM I’ve never seen it.

BROOM You’ve never seen Dr. Strangelove?

ADAM No.

BROOM Well, yes, it was like that guy.

ADAM Beth, what was your favorite of the many lovely visuals?

BETH I’m not sure. What was yours? Let me think about it.

ADAM I think the way that they portrayed the city with line and patches of character that spilled over line was really lovely.

BETH I loved all of that. I guess my favorite was the city when they had the neon signs flashing. I kind of wish the “Kanine Krunchies” sign wasn’t in that.

BROOM It was part of the joke. I liked the “Kanine Krunchies” TV ad.

ADAM The dogs themselves, while perfectly adequately animated and pretty acute, were nothing magical. It was the backgrounds that I thought were really amazing. And Cruella herself.

BROOM I have to say that I thought that faces of the dogs and Roger and Anita – well, Anita wasn’t always dead-on, but Roger and Pongo and Perdita had expressive but convincing heads. The three dimensions of their heads were perfectly handled; you felt there was a solidity to them. Whereas Cruella de Vil, actually, I thought looked good as a still, but they didn’t really know how to manage her head in three dimensions quite as well. Her mouth would get a little crazy; she looked a little erratic, I thought.

ADAM But you kept getting distracted by the swishings of her coat.

BROOM Yes. Most of the animation on her was in her coat because her face wasn’t so expressive, I thought.

BETH When we first saw Anita, I thought, “they’ve done the perfect female face.” I thought she looked pretty, and smart, and looked like a real person. That was in that first scene. But then later, I thought, “Wait! She got less pretty somehow!”

ADAM The scene where he’s watching the animals and their matching humans go by was my favorite scene.

BETH Yeah, that’s great.

BROOM I thought the first half of the movie was a lot better than the second half.

BETH Once the people disappear…

ADAM It took a lot of effort to get them out and into Hell Hall. The chase really had no incident other than just stock chase stuff. Basically, when the other eighty-four dogs come on the scene, the animators seemed to get exhausted by that, and not a lot happened.

BROOM Yeah, I agree with that.

ADAM There wasn’t a lot of clever animation with the puppies. Either they all went in single file or they were all massed in clumps, but there wasn’t anything really clever with them.

BROOM Back to the design: I think this was a really impressive job of reinventing the Disney movie, the Disney animated look, for a new time.

ADAM Right. There’s no sense in which this is a gold-leafed book being opened.

BROOM They sort of took some steps in this direction with Sleeping Beauty, but it didn’t really mesh so well with the material.

BETH Here everything fit together.

BROOM They really hadn’t had a sense of matching their era since 1940, basically. Dumbo felt natural. The 50s had an in-between quality to them. Not that I didn’t really enjoy Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan. But it felt now like obviously they had to reinvent their product, and they did, cleverly. And I think this is going to get them through…

ADAM What’s next?

BROOM The Sword in the Stone…

BETH Which I love.

BROOM The Jungle Book, and then The Aristocats…

ADAM I’ve never seen any of these.

BROOM … and then Robin Hood. And those are all in a pretty consistent style with each other.

ADAM The jaunty era.

BROOM Right! And I think Robin Hood is the last one that people really like in that style – well, I guess the Winnie the Pooh movie, too. And then you get into The Fox and the Hound and The Black Cauldron, and those movies are sort of the descendants of the style that we saw inaugurated here, but it doesn’t feel right anymore. It’s the late 70s and the early 80s and somehow that’s not quite right. And they didn’t find a new feel that suited its time until Little Mermaid. I think finding the tone and style for One Hundred and One Dalmatians took real inspiration, and I’ll bet when audiences went to see it they immediately identified it as right. I bet if Don Draper took his kids to see this, he would have thought it was great.

BETH You said that they needed to reinvent this style, but don’t you think that they were being influenced by other animation that wasn’t Disney animation?

BROOM Like UPA? Mr. Magoo and all that? Well, I’m sure they were. All the things here that we identified as very 60s, it’s not like they all originated in One Hundred and One Dalmatians. But I’m saying that “the Disney animated feature” was a branded product…

BETH You’re saying it took balls to go in that direction?

BROOM Not just balls – it’s not obvious how to apply these things. You can know what the elements are and still not know how to make them work for your product. Like now, I would argue.

ADAM I think Disney’s lost its way in the face of Pixar. They don’t have the confidence of just doing two-dimensional animation any more.

BETH They never seem confident. That’s true.

BROOM I think there’s a challenge in simply matching the times. There’s all this stuff out there; you could do any number of things that looked “2000s-y” and everyone would know that it was from the 2000s, but whether it felt like it made sense and worked and was satisfying, and at the same time was “a Disney animated feature” – that takes inspiration.

ADAM Right. You could go, like, Emperor’s New Groove “young adult sarcastic,” or you could go “futuristic technology / CGI,” or…

BROOM I gotta say, I thought The Emperor’s New Groove was pretty successful as what it was.

ADAM And Hercules was pretty much the same thing.

BETH I haven’t seen them.

ADAM I think you’ll like them a lot.

BROOM I don’t know. Hercules I think might in retrospect might seem a little shrill in a 1997 way.

ADAM So 1990s Disney movies all seem sort of shrilly moralizing, to me.

BROOM Whereas this had no moral content whatsoever.

ADAM Other than just, like, “don’t murder puppies to turn them into coats,” which is pretty straightforward. It was pro-puppies and pro-family.

BROOM It was pro-domestic cuteness. A particular kind of being cute with each other at home.

ADAM And it was anti- a sort of exaggerated, like… you sort of imagine that they went to Vassar together, in America.

BROOM Yeah, exactly. We’re always talking about “what does this movie say about how to be” – when Roger is singing the Cruella de Vil song to tease Anita about Cruella coming over, and then when she’s there he’s upstairs playing the trumpet at her – that was a kind of teasing based on a particular sense of the family unit. “There’s just us at home, and when that lady comes over that I hate, I’m going to tell you in code that I wish it was just us and our little unit.” It definitely had a different sense of interpersonal relations, based on the insular world of their home. When they had to go out into the world, it’s inherently an adventure. Though there are people who are nice to them.

ADAM Cruella is like a crazy rich women’s-libber woman gone mad.

BROOM I don’t think women’s lib has anything to do with it.

ADAM She’s not political, but…

BROOM I think she’s like Grey Gardens. I think she’s like a socialite who lost it and has no idea what to do with herself other than get crazier.

ADAM She’s a woman addled by too much money and too little anchoring responsibility, and, indeed, lack of children, and that allows her to become untethered from moral notions, which… is gendered, to some extent.

BROOM Oh, it’s gendered, but I don’t think it has to do with feminism at all.

ADAM Well, I don’t know. She’s like a 20s-style feminist; she smokes and she is sexually confident, you know.

BROOM Yeah, but I don’t think “feminist” is the right word for that.

BETH And she’s the boss of two men.

ADAM Right: two stupid men. And in the book she has a weak husband. Roger later explains that Cruella was strong and evil, and her husband was weak and evil. This is his explanation of why it’s just that they should both go to prison.

BROOM You see her bed and it’s clear that she’s one of these people who wants to think of herself as leading a luxurious, glamorous life.

BETH She looks like Barbara Stanwyck in Sorry, Wrong Number.

ADAM Yeah, with the pink curlers and her wonderful phone.

BETH That phone is great.

BROOM I don’t think it has to do with her being an empowered person at all.

ADAM But there’s certainly an obsession in these last few Disney movies with “unbridled womanness.” That’s what Maleficent is, and that’s what Cruella is too.

BROOM I think she’s very similar to Maleficent.

ADAM Right; it’s when women go wild, you know. It’s not about politics.

BROOM I don’t think it’s about domestication versus wildness; I think these women are people who became delusional when they lost the milieu to which they want to belong. She wants to be at some party where everyone is swooning “Oh, Cruella!” – she wants to be among sassy sophisticates, but for some reason she has absolutely no community and is just clutching at things like furs that represent that world to her.

ADAM But the movie made fun of all kinds of women untethered from domestic life. Basically that whole parade of women at the beginning with their dogs. I understand why they all have to be women, because they have to be potential mates…

BROOM That’s also why they’re all single.

ADAM They’re all single and they’re all pathetic in their own way!

BROOM The painter lady was a caricature, but I don’t think she was supposed to be pathetic.

BETH I think she was.

ADAM She’s painting a landscape in a park! That’s ridiculous!

BROOM What’s ridiculous about that?

ADAM There’s this concept of Sunday painter ladies, which dates back to, like, the 1910s, as being a ridiculous image.

BETH And they made her very unattractive.

BROOM Well, that’s why he didn’t want to go with her! She was the wrong breed of dog.

ADAM Admittedly, he’s ridiculous too, but in a much more sympathetic way.

BROOM His wife is more sympathetic than he is.

ADAM That’s because she’s so submissive. She’s not submissive, but…

BETH She’s agreeable.

ADAM The scene of them bantering, where Cruella’s coming over and he’s teasing her – I thought that was a really nice image of what it’s like to be part of a couple. Moreso than most Disney movies, where the parents are just non-entities.

BROOM But that’s exactly what I was saying; it’s something modern. I don’t think the idea of being annoyed at your bantering couplehood being interrupted by company is one that had been celebrated this way for too long – but maybe I’m wrong; maybe it’s in Trollope or something and I just haven’t read it. It seemed like a very contemporary ideal of what you get out of a relationship. Also, there’s just the blatant and obvious point being made by the movie, where it asks “what kind of person, i.e. what kind of dog, do we want to be?” You don’t want to be a little Scottie, and you don’t want to be big sheepdog, and you don’t want to be a poodle! Instead of saying that you want to be, say, Thunderbolt, this movie was endorsing a different attitude – not exactly “hipster,” but…

ADAM Definitely not hipster.

BROOM No, but it’s an idea that still appeals to people now, that you are going to be sleek and intelligent and attractive but you’re going to have spots, and that’s the ideal. I feel like the movie was saying, “let’s not want to be Golden Retriever people.” It was saying, “don’t we all really want to be Dalmatians?” An obscure, yet attractive breed. Let’s be interesting. You hear Pongo’s voice right at the top, urbanely saying, you know, “I used to live in this flat in London,” or when he says that thing about “we lived in a little place that was small but just right for couples starting out.” It felt like a cosmopolitan sort of fantasy – something close to what I think is still alive in Brooklyn as an ideal for how to live. And I don’t think that would have been saleable in a cartoon movie prior to 1961.

ADAM But in the end we will give that up, and move to East Hampton with our ninety-nine children.

BROOM I know, but it was a kind of comfortable pseudo-Bohemianism.

BETH It was. Because he was an artist trying to be commercial.

ADAM It’s like the happy version of Revolutionary Road.

BROOM But he was an artist only in his actual business; he was Bohemian in a way where you could still have all of the comforts of a really nice flat, and look good and not be weird in any way. He was an artist, a composer who nonetheless smoked a pipe and looked basically like a 50s dad.

ADAM Interestingly, in the book he’s not a songwriter; he did some kind of service for the government during the war and is living on a permanent pension, and they give him this flat as a reward for his wartime service.

BROOM That is interesting. When was the book written?

ADAM Don’t know.

BROOM The fact that the social stuff I’m talking about was added in the Disney rewrite just bears me out, because I’m saying it couldn’t have dated from much earlier.

BETH It also gives a reason for the Cruella de Vil song to exist. Which is very catchy.

BROOM I’m not sure it’s really a good enough reason, or a necessary one; they could just start singing it for no reason if they wanted. But it does add a lot of charm to the way the song fits into the movie.

BETH It makes it diegetic.

ADAM Good word.

BETH I wanted to say – maybe I’m harping on this too much, but going back to what I said about Anita looking so much different when we first were introduced to her. She’s wearing this – while not fancy like the poodle lady – very fancy, expensive outfit, and seems to have a career and a life. And then she just became the domesticated, kind of frumpy version of herself.

BROOM I don’t think she was frumpy.

BETH Not frumpy, but she suddenly wore an apron all the time.

BROOM Housewife-y.

BETH Yeah.

BROOM I thought she still looked good. But she looked more glamorous in the park, certainly.

ADAM [reading from Wikipedia]: “Mr. Dearly is a financial wizard who has been granted exemption from income tax for life, and has been granted a house in the outer circle of Regent’s Park as a favor for wiping out the government’s national debt.” Sorry, I got that wrong. The book is 1956.

BROOM Of no interest to American audiences at the time. Oh, so it was quite a recent book.

ADAM Also, I had forgotten about this, but Pongo’s wife is named Missis, and Perdita is another lost dalmatian whom they recruit as a wet-nurse for the puppies.

BROOM Yeah. It makes no sense for her to be called Perdita here. I remember thinking that “Perdita” must just be a regular name, and not until I read “The Winter’s Tale” did I put it together that it means “lost” and nobody would want that name.

ADAM [reads more from the book’s Wikipedia article…] So that would explain why “one hundred and one” is more than just a jaunty number. They’re a flat one hundred, and then there’s a surprise Dalmatian at the end.

BROOM It is a jaunty number, though. So how about those opening credits, showing all the different departments with a related visual. Is that a first? That’s something that happens all the time nowadays. I guess we’re just watching Disney cartoons, and all this stuff is also going on in every other movie, but at least in our little survey, it felt like a delightful first.

BETH Yeah, it was satisfying.

ADAM I liked her “C. D.” hubcaps.

BETH That car was pretty funny.

BROOM That reminds me; there were some unusual special effects. When the car ran into the snow, it was pretty clearly drawn over film of real snow, but so was the car itself, I think. The way it was manipulated in three dimensions, I think they must have had a model car that they filmed.

BETH Maybe.

BROOM There were several three-dimensional things that they moved so perfectly, and that’s the kind of thing that in the past has always been clunky. It’s very hard to do. I think they filmed more things, and a couple times with the people, Roger especially, it seemed very clearly to be based on film footage.

[At this point the program recording us froze, unbeknownst to us, and we didn’t realize it until after reading the New York Times review and returning. But I think we were pretty much done at this point. If the participants have anything they’d like to add or reconstruct, please do so in the comments. Thank you.]

BETH The colors! It’s like they discovered fuchsia for the first time. I found it delightful, and I thought they were being very daring.

BROOM Did this movie invent that green and purple were the colors of evil? Was this the first place those colors were used for that purpose? Because that really stuck around. It’s so effective.

ADAM This movie was almost exclusively attractive visually.

BROOM That’s right. And it’s almost enough.

BETH Almost.

ADAM They totally abandoned lushness and went for “zap! pow!” flatness and quasi-abstraction. And it was great, visually.

BETH Even though she was kind of ugly.

ADAM And it was like they abandoned their commitment to doing real people. All the people were sort of like Hanna-Barbera. He had a sort of Prince Valiant look to him.

BROOM Well, I think this came before the Hanna-Barbera cartoons that you’re thinking of. And the designs of the people were certainly flat, but the animation of them was pretty strong throughout. It felt like attention had been given.

ADAM Have we seen swashbuckling like that before? Well, I guess in Peter Pan.

BROOM That was sort of comical swashbuckling, not sincere swashbuckling like this at the end, which was a little confused. So what is the problem with this movie? What’s lacking?

BETH The problem is that you can’t relate to anything for a really long time.

ADAM And nobody’s motivations make any sense.

BROOM Yeah. The script just doesn’t work. They obviously have a problem, because the story is just “A curse was placed on her, and on her sixteenth birthday, despite their efforts, the curse came to pass, but then the prince came and saved her.” They decided to put the longest delay in between the morning of her sixteenth birthday and the evening, and they made it be about the dress, and the cake… just artificial delays, because the story doesn’t have anything to offer.

BETH And it’s artificial suspense anyway because we don’t know her or care about her.

BROOM She is not the protagonist of the movie. It’s really all about Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather.

ADAM Yeah. I expect the princess to be a cipher, but here, even the prince was a cipher.

BROOM You mean the other way around?

ADAM No. I don’t mean personality-wise; I mean that I expect at least the prince to have some… “will to being” – some… what’s the word I’m looking for? it’s a word that starts with “A.” Not “action,” but…

BROOM I don’t know. It was striking, especially after you pointed it out, that all his heroism at the end basically consists of looking on while the little fairies do fairy stuff around him.

ADAM I pointed out during the screening that he’s thoroughly emasculated, because they turn the arrows into flowers, and guard him with a rainbow.

BROOM Even the climactic moment when he stabs the dragon, even that is done for him by the fairy. I know, she doesn’t exactly throw it.

BETH She blesses the sword.

BROOM Yeah, the second before he throws it.

ADAM Maleficent is sort of the hero of this movie. She’s the only person with any force of personality.

BROOM She’s the only character that you look forward to her being onscreen again. Everyone else just comes and goes, but you wait for the scenes with her, because you know they’re going to be fun. That’s a brilliant costume she’s got. Is there any historical precedent for wearing horns like that? Weren’t there those medieval headdresses that had round turret things? I know that’s not really what she was wearing, but maybe it’s a jumping-off point.

ADAM She is truly frightening. She’s much more frightening than anything we’ve seen. Except maybe the hag, way back in Snow White.

BETH She also says outright that she is evil.

BROOM She calls on “the forces of hell.” Strong stuff! Her little posse of demons was straight out of “Night on Bald Mountain” from Fantasia. I felt like her type and level of scariness was comparable to that. That, I think, is still scarier overall. But the nightmare scene when Maleficent manages to get Sleeping Beauty to a spinning wheel is still awfully strong.

ADAM It’s awful. When her face falls blank. I don’t think that’s what happens in the Charles Perrault story. I think she somehow convinces her to try her hand at spinning. That’s not as effective as the zombie bride approach.

BROOM Which emphasizes the arbitrariness of the curse being based around a spinning wheel. This movie has no spinning; it has nothing to do with spinning wheels. She’s just walking through these abandoned hallways in this abandoned tower, looking for the room that is the absolute center of evil, where she’s going to touch this totally arbitrary talisman. That’s a scary setup. And the music in that sequence, which I guess is from Tchaikovsky, is really effective.

ADAM It’s notably not over-the-top, “eeeevil!” music, because it’s by Tchaikovsky.

BROOM There’s something classical about the way that it’s scary, which I found very gratifying there. Whereas I didn’t think that the Tchaikovsky worked in a lot of the other places, especially comic scenes. A lighthearted passage by Tchaikovsky doesn’t really match up properly with ineptly baking a cake. The level of stupidity just isn’t low enough.

ADAM I think this is the most arbitrarily fairy-tale-like of all the movies. It’s the one where people’s motivations matter the least and the abstract arc of the fairy tale is the most important, and I think that makes sense to pair with Tchaikovsky, a sort of abstract, classical soundtrack that comes from above.

BROOM It all came from above. The design came from above, too. It’s all stylized. Every layer of the movie is artificial. But I think that works just fine for kids. I don’t think a kid would have a problem with this movie the way we did. Except for maybe the “Skumps” scene.

BETH Then why did we both dislike it as kids?

BROOM I didn’t say I disliked it.

ADAM Well, why did you dislike it?

BETH I think it was because I didn’t know who anyone was, except for the evil person, and I wasn’t into evil as a kid. Right before we started, you did say that you didn’t like it.

BROOM Maybe I didn’t. I do remember that when I was a kid, I felt like it was my personal observation that this one looked flat and not as lush as the other movies. And that wasn’t as satisfying. I don’t think the idea of a facade of stylized lacquered figures was of any interest to me as a kid.

ADAM When the thorns come up, and they’re like “THORNS!” “THORNS!” – it’s awesome.

BROOM Almost every background is beautiful and striking.

BETH I thought maybe they were utilizing color so boldly because they knew that kids wouldn’t be into the story, and they were trying to get them involved aesthetically.

BROOM My understanding was that they threw everything they had at this and wanted it to be their biggest, boldest, greatest…

ADAM …extravaganziest…

BROOM …Cinemascope spectacular. [ed.: not Cinemascope, “Technirama”]

BETH Which it certainly was. It was just amazing, visually.

BROOM It was just the story, the timing. A real misjudgment to make the “Skumps” scene be all about how they’re getting drunk, and that the jester, or the troubadour or whatever, gets drunk. That’s not good comedy for kids!

ADAM I don’t think the queen says a single word in the entire movie.

BETH At the end I think she says something.

BROOM Like, “oh, darling.” Did Philip’s mother die between the opening scene and the present day? At the beginning, his father and mother walk him up to the cradle, and then later his mother’s not around.

ADAM Interesting.

BROOM And is Philip going to look like his dad when he grows up?

ADAM Aurora had a sort of hard-bitten look, I thought, when she was a lass, that was not pretty. She could not have melted butter with that face.

BETH No. The gift of beauty did not take.

BROOM Well, obviously, she was beautiful by a different standard. She was a different type of beauty from what we’ve seen before, for a different era, intentionally.

ADAM She was a quivering blonde the way Renee Zellweger is.

BETH It wasn’t even 50s-ish.

BROOM You didn’t think she looked exactly like the cartoon woman in an advertisement, saying, “Look at my new stove”?

BETH No. I thought she had more of an 80s teenager in a Ferrari kind of look.

BROOM She had kind of a wry, spoiled look.

BETH Yeah.

BROOM But that was the whole attitude of the movie. It was like, “if you’ve got a kidney-shaped table in your house, this is the fairy tale for you.”

BETH I guess.

ADAM It was hard for me to concentrate every time the three fairies said, “Rose,” because it sounded just like Blanche, Dorothy, and Sophia calling for Rose.

BROOM It seemed cheap that all three of the fairies were just variations on the fairy godmother from Cinderella, with the same features. All three of them were basically the same as each other.

ADAM Maybe they felt badly for only giving the fairy godmother two minutes of screen time in Cinderella.

BETH I felt like Aurora’s costume was like a rip-off of Cinderella’s peasant costume.

ADAM She was the worst, most featureless princess.

BROOM I’m surprised at you guys. If I had to live with one of the princesses, I wouldn’t necessarily pick her, but I can recognize that she had beauty of a sort.

ADAM I didn’t say she was the ugliest of the princesses; she’s just the most generic, there’s nothing about her that is memorable.

BETH I could draw her, right now, but only because we just watched it. No-one ever wants to be her.

ADAM She’s like the David Souter of Disney princesses.

BETH She did look pretty when she was asleep.

BROOM In the fake drawing? I thought she looked way better in real life. I was surprised when she woke up and you said, “now she’s not pretty anymore.”

BETH She looked like Gwen Stefani. She’s so angular.

BROOM A lot of people seem to think Gwen Stefani is hot. I personally think Sleeping Beauty looked better than Gwen Stefani.

BETH Okay!

BROOM I’m just saying, she was a certain type that some people are into. I thought it was interesting that she didn’t have any real character, yet they imbued her face with an implied attitude.

BETH It was just, like, “sporty girl.”

BROOM Yes, that’s right. She was sort of Sporty Spice.

ADAM Yeah: “the Spice you don’t care about.”

BROOM There’s one that we care about? Which one? “Baby Spice?”

ADAM Which is the black Spice?

BETH Scary Spice.

BROOM A bit of racism embedded there. Just this side of “Jungle Spice.” But anyway, Sleeping Beauty didn’t have any actual attitude, it was just a look. Which ties into what I’ve wanted to say, to go a little deeper here, I felt like the surfaces and the background and the color scheme – everything that made this movie stylized – were all somehow philosophically of a piece with her superficial veneer of having an attitude, even though there was nothing there. The style suggested worldliness. There was nothing worldly about her or anyone else in the movie, and yet she had it in her eyes. It seemed like the movie was made for a public that wanted to be…

BETH Sophisticated?

BROOM Yes, exactly.

BETH I see what you’re saying, and I agree with you. If she had looked like Snow White, it wouldn’t have meshed with the rest of the visuals. She would have been out of place. Even Cinderella would have; anything prior.

ADAM Was Cinderella a redhead? I have so much trouble remembering.

BETH She was like a strawberry blonde.

ADAM Sleeping Beauty is ironically the most generic-looking of the princesses, but nobody cares about her. Did you even know her name? “Aurora?”

BETH I tried to memorize it but I still keep forgetting it.

BROOM Nobody would have thought to name a princess “Aurora” prior to 1959. That was probably a very stylish name for them to give her.

ADAM “Princess Jennifer.”

BROOM You know the character in Shrek is “Princess Fiona,” and that seems like either a joke or a reflection of 2001, when Shrek came out. And I don’t think it was a joke, I think they just thought it would be a nice name for a princess. At no time earlier would they have named the princess “Aurora.”

BETH and ADAM: Right. [ed. We sure are wrong about this! It comes straight from Tchaikovsky, who derived it from Perrault]

ADAM It sounds like the name of a modern vacuum cleaner. It’s of a piece, era-wise.

BROOM So that’s the larger thing I wanted to find a way of saying. Even if her face hadn’t looked the way it did, something about the design in general… Even the little bad guys, the little trolls, had a certain…

ADAM Dean Martin at the Copacabana?

BROOM No – they were designed as disposable beings for us to laugh at. Their pig-noses and overbites were less fond; they were animated with less sympathy. There’s something warmly human in the earlier movies, in Snow White, where every flower deserves to be given a blush of beauty, where here the attitude was different: “if we’re going to a place of evil, let’s just make it as vile and nasty as possible.” There was a sleazy material quality to it. I can’t think of better adjectives. But everything in the movie had a harder spirit.

ADAM I did want to say that I thought the evil queen’s plot was brilliant. She’s going to keep the prince in prison until he’s an old man, and then let him rescue her when he’s gray-bearded and weak. It’s fabulous.

BROOM Is she still going to be sixteen when he rescues her, or is she going to be one hundred in her bed, too?

ADAM I think she’ll be sixteen.

BROOM Either way, it’s pathetic.

ADAM He truly is emasculated. She’s going to wait until he’s impotent and cannot consummate true love’s first kiss.

BROOM And then she says something sarcastic like “True love conquers all! Ha ha ha ha…” and the unspoken correction is “Really, it’s death that conquers all. You will age and die.”

ADAM Sucks. Enchanted is actually most directly based on Sleeping Beauty, if you’re curious. Down to the chitter-chattering with the animals. I know that Cinderella does that too, but she doesn’t talk with cardinals, say.

BROOM This was the most mockery-worthy animal friendship scene thus far.

ADAM I think you guys would enjoy Enchanted, having now seen all these. Or maybe wait until the end of this run. You’ll like it. I mean, it’s stupid. It’s Amy Adams playing Sleeping Beauty and Susan Sarandon playing Maleficent. Who, incidentally, I only recognized from Annie Hall, not from having seen this movie as a kid.

BROOM Where he says that he had a crush on her instead of on the princess.

ADAM Right.

BROOM So let me just restate: they kind of look the same. She has a big chin to show that she’s evil – and horns, and makeup – but, otherwise they have very similar features.

ADAM She’s not unsexy.

BETH No, she’d be a sexy, hot, evil woman.

ADAM You don’t see many Maleficent costumes, but she has a sort of dominatrix quality.

BROOM I think part of the reason people wouldn’t go to a party as Maleficent with cleavage showing is because…

BETH No-one would know it was Maleficent?

BROOM I think if you have the horns, you’re set. No, because of what I was saying before, because her castle isn’t somehow a kinky fantasy. There’s nothing appealing about it.

ADAM That’s true, she lives among, like, rotting bones.

BETH Yeah, it really is like hell.

BROOM I like that you see her sitting on her throne, and all that’s going on is the demons dancing an endless devil dance around a fire, constantly.

ADAM The witch’s sabbath dance. It’s got to be lonely to be Maleficent, because your only companions are a crow and those moronic demons.

BROOM It’s funny when Fauna – or whoever – says, “I don’t think she’s very happy.” Funny because the movie doesn’t let itself go that deep with anything else. Are those the first truly moronic henchmen we’ve seen? Because that’s going to be another trope for the ages.

ADAM Actually, you know where I learned the word “henchmen” was in playing the computer game version of The Black Cauldron, so I assume there are more henchmen coming. What’s the next one?

BROOM 101 Dalmatians.

ADAM Okay. That’s sort of an “after the sack of Rome but before the Dark Ages” kind of movie.

BROOM This was the sack of Rome.

ADAM This was the day before the sack of Rome.

BROOM This was their biggest-budget movie, and I think it did not do as well as they’d wanted. And they couldn’t budget as much as they did for this ever again. In the next one I believe they start using a process where they somehow print the pencil drawings directly onto the cel, which is much less labor-intensive and cheaper, and you can see all the pencil-y lines. This is the last one done the old way.

ADAM And when did Mary Blair die?

BROOM I don’t think she died until much later, but she left Disney and had a sad life, according to that book I have. But these designs were all by Eyvind Earle.

ADAM It didn’t look exactly like Mary Blair, but sort of like a fantasia on Mary Blair. Small F.

BROOM Well, speaking of the big-F Fantasia, I was glad to see that when they pulled out all the stops, even in 1959, that still meant certain kinds of abstraction that I really didn’t think were ever going to come back. When they give her the gifts, for example, it spins up into an effect, up in dreamland.

ADAM You liked that the last shot is them dancing on a cloud?

BROOM I mean, god knows what Bosley’s going to think of the sentimental stuff, but I have a nostalgic attachment to those remnants of what they’d been doing 30 years earlier.

ADAM When is the last bejeweled storybook?

BROOM I don’t know. We hadn’t seen a live-action book in a long time. I think that may have been it.

ADAM Mulan opens with a fortune cookie.

BROOM That may be true, unfortunately.

[We read the New York Times review]

ADAM That’s basically right.

BROOM Well, it wasn’t right when he said she looked like Snow White.

BETH I think he meant her costume. Her costume does look like Snow White’s.

BROOM It looks like Cinderella’s.

ADAM Does Snow White wear the thing with the arm puffs when she’s a peasant, or when she’s a princess?

BROOM Uh… all the time.

BETH I think when she’s a peasant.

ADAM Snow White looks to me like Betty Boop. Not like Lana Turner.

BROOM Snow White seems like she’s somewhere between the ages of 13 and 25. And Sleeping Beauty seemed like she was somewhere between the ages of 20 and 40.

BETH No, no, no. I would say 18 and 28.

ADAM Who would play the live-action Sleeping Beauty? Amy Adams was their answer, but who would be like the original?

BROOM Amy Adams is actually sweeter than Sleeping Beauty.

ADAM Speaking of Lana Turner, I would have her be played by…

BROOM … Lauren Bacall?

ADAM No. Who was the woman in L.A. Confidential?

BETH Kim Basinger?

ADAM Yeah.

BROOM That doesn’t make any sense.

BETH Keira Knightley has an angular face, but she’s not right. She could play the witch, maybe.

BROOM They’d be played by the same person. That’d be the Freudian version. Prince Philip’s mother disappears and then reappears in the form of these two women, the good and evil in womankind.

ADAM I meant to say earlier that Prince Philip even to me is not attractive. He’s just a Ken doll. Not even. He’s utterly a cipher. I’ll have to wait for the fox Robin Hood comes along.

BROOM So back to the issue of these movies teaching kids how to be people: would you show this movie to kids today? Do you think it teaches anything about how to be people? Do we endorse what it teaches?

ADAM There’s no one in this movie whom I would want my child to emulate in any sense.

BROOM But I don’t think it invites that. Who would anyone want to be like?

ADAM Do you want your kids to hear that the three gifts bestowed upon a princess are beauty, song, and resistance to death?

BETH Sleep, essentially.

BROOM In terms of the storytelling and texture – you said at the end, “this is like a video game.” It had a more materialistic attitude toward even the elements of fairy tale stories. That’s what I’ve been saying here.

ADAM Their love is manifest in a cake and a dress, and the main drama is the color of the dress?

BROOM More than that, that there are no emotions in this movie.

ADAM Even her parents have essentially no feelings whatever about Aurora.

BROOM The fetishization – the surface refinement – of these symbols like “the evil castle” or “the beautiful forest” has been brought to this even wilder extreme of comic book intensity. You know, when you watch He-Man and every single shot is ridiculous…

ADAM “By the power of Greyskull!…”

BROOM Exactly. Is the problem with invoking “the power of Greyskull” that it’s not a compelling concept, or that it’s so over-the-top – that the gap between my real life and that operatic level of craziness is so great? I felt like this movie went straight for something more inflated and dubious than before. Like at the end, when the evil queen shouts “you’ll have to deal with me and all the powers of hell!” and then transforms into a mile-high dragon…

ADAM Doesn’t that happen in something else?

BROOM A lot of things. It happens at the end of The Little Mermaid, which seems sort of like a reference to this. The sea-witch turns into a giant version of herself.

ADAM No, that’s not it. Haven’t we seen this already, where the villain turns into something and then is slain in that form?

BROOM I think of that as essentially “the Sleeping Beauty thing.” And that she’s this woman who thinks she’s hot stuff but is completely isolated, this lonely vamp, and then the true form of this character is revealed as a fire-breathing dragon – that seemed a little misogynistic to me. It’s one thing for the villain to be a woman, and it’s another thing for her to say “let me show you what I really am: HHHHHH!!” [breathing fire]

BETH That’s surprising. I really wasn’t feeling it that way.

ADAM Actually, she could be played by Sigourney Weaver.

BETH Perfect!

BROOM Because she’s tall?

BETH Because Sigourney Weaver does evil very well!

ADAM She’s commanding.

BROOM Don’t you think Sigourney Weaver should be playing Michelle Obama?

BETH No. She’s way too old.

BROOM Every time I see Michelle Obama, that’s what I think.

BETH That’s weird.

BROOM You don’t think she looks like Sigourney Weaver?

BETH No!

BROOM Well, she does. They both have underbites and are really tall.

BETH No, they have very different vibes. They emanate different sensibilities.

BROOM You think Sigourney Weaver is like a dragon and Michelle Obama is not.

BETH Yeah, a little.

BROOM Well, I don’t think of any woman as being like a green, fire-breathing dragon.

BETH No one’s like a dragon! But Sigourney Weaver is more like a dragon.

ADAM Maybe the princess should be played by Reese Witherspoon.

BETH Yes! I like this casting.

BROOM I don’t know. There was, as Beth said, something 80s-y about her. I’m trying to think who the person would be.

BETH The girl who was in Sixteen Candles…

ADAM Molly Ringwald?

BETH No, no, the blonde one.

BROOM You know who could play her? Daphne from Scooby-Doo.

ADAM Yeah, actually. I had a big crush on Daphne on Scooby-Doo.

BETH Who doesn’t?

BROOM You sure it wasn’t a sublimated crush on Fred?

ADAM No, I didn’t have a crush on Fred.

BROOM He could have played Philip. Who played Daphne in the movie?

ADAM Sarah Michelle Gellar.

BROOM Oh, well, that doesn’t work at all.

ADAM Fred was played by Freddie Prinze, Jr.

BROOM Right. I don’t remember who played Velma.

BETH Not America Ferrera.

BROOM Velma should have her own show now. A live-action show all about Velma grown up.

BETH Called “Velma”?

BROOM Yeah. She’d live in an apartment. It’d be about her crazy neighbor.

ADAM Is it animated?

BROOM It could go either way.

ADAM Is she a lesbian?

BROOM No, she’s not. I don’t think she was. She’s just sad. She doesn’t have a boyfriend.

BETH I really think she was a lesbian.

ADAM When you transcribe this, you can probably leave off this whole thing about Scooby-Doo casting.

BROOM I don’t know; it’s sort of entertaining. My sister might like it, if she gets this far.

ADAM I didn’t realize that dogs were so ethnic. I think in the fifties, white people’s ethnicity must have been one of the paramount facts about them to other white people, and it’s weird that that was such a staple source of humor.

BROOM You mean the different breeds of dogs? Or the fact that on Monday Tramp goes to the German house, on Tuesday to the Irish house, on Wednesday he goes to the Italian restaurant…

ADAM All of it. Basically all of the characters other than Lady and her owners are characterized exclusively by their ethnicity.

BROOM No. I disagree with that.

ADAM Not everyone, but virtually everyone.

BROOM I disagree with the “exclusively.” The characterizations in the pound were not just ethnic types, They were characterized within ethnic types.

ADAM But they’re stereotypes based on ethnic types. The Russian guy is a crazy philosopher…

BROOM Yes, he’s one of several Russian stereotypes. He’s a particular Russian stereotype. He’s not just “Russian.”

ADAM The Scottie is sort of proud and miserly.

BROOM He didn’t actually have miserly characteristics, did he?

ADAM The first thing you see is him hoarding bones.

BROOM Oh yeah. And singing “Loch Lomond” with lyrics about bones. But Old Trusty wasn’t just an ethnic type.

ADAM Well, “southern” is sort of a stand-in ethnicity.

BROOM Yes, those were elements in their characterizations. But the characterizations were thoroughly worked out for each of these characters. There was the floozy…

ADAM The “lovable slattern.” I liked her. She was one of my favorite characters. She was the floozy with a heart of gold.

BROOM She was Goldie Hawn, as Beth said.

ADAM She was probably the nicest dog, and I thought her face had the most personality.

BROOM You didn’t like the Russian?

ADAM The Russian was a little crazy.

BROOM The bulldog wasn’t an ethnicity, he was just a tough guy.

ADAM He was British!

BETH Yeah, or Australian.

BROOM He might have said “bloke,” but he didn’t have an accent.

ADAM Yes he did! He totally had a British accent.

BROOM I thought he just had mannerisms.

ADAM Really, the only un-ethnic dogs were Lady and Tramp.

BETH Well, the floozy wasn’t.

ADAM You’re right, she didn’t either. She was a recognizable American type.

BROOM But also: what are you saying? I would argue against the claim that that’s all there was to them, but even if it was a big element of the characters – which it obviously was – what’s wrong with that?

ADAM I’m not saying that it’s necessarily a bad thing. And I appreciate that all the dogs had forceful personalities. But it’s just interesting to me that in the fifties it was such a standard go-to move, to base a character on the stereotype of their ethnicity.

BROOM I guess it was a shortcut, if you compare it to Dickens, who can toss off all these characterizations without resorting to ethnic stereotypes, very often. Though he occasionally does.

ADAM He does, a little bit. Smallweed.

BROOM Which one is Smallweed?

ADAM The Jew.

BROOM Right, that’s who I was thinking of. There were no Jews in this. Jews hate dogs.

ADAM This was no Dickens. There were also no blacks. I was thinking we would see a negro dog – like the crows – but no.

BROOM I don’t think there’s any particular reason why not. I think they still would have.

ADAM There’s no “black” dog breed.

BETH I think that’s why. They would have if they had had an African breed of dog.

BROOM Do Scottish Terriers really come from Scotland?

BETH Yeah.

ADAM I mean, initially.

BROOM Do Siamese cats really come from Siam?

BETH Probably no. [Ed: yes]

BROOM I didn’t mind any of that.

ADAM I’m just remarking that you couldn’t do it anymore. That it wouldn’t occur to anyone to do it anymore.

BROOM I think it would occur to Disney to do it, but that’s the one forbidden aspect of what they’re still doing now: “We’re going to have a seagull, what’ll he be like?” “He’ll be a loudmouth and he’ll love nautical stuff!” And if they could, I’m sure they’d add “He’ll be Irish!” They would throw that in, basically because it’s another adjective.

ADAM Beth, following the line of your repeated observation, do you want to talk about the dogcatcher?

BETH What’s my repeated observation?

ADAM About these loutish Irish types.

BROOM Usually I’m the one who brings that up.

ADAM Oh. Well, I wonder when is the last time we’ll see that person.

BROOM I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s still at it. The French chef from The Little Mermaid is the broadest possible joke about “A Frenchman!” – still viable in 1989.

ADAM I know, but France is one of the unique countries that it’s still acceptable to mock. And England. But those Siamese cats, who I think are one of the most memorable things about this movie, are shockingly offensive.

BETH It’s very offensive.

BROOM It’s just the buckteeth that puts it over the line.

ADAM And the slant eyes.

BROOM And the fact that they’re vicious interlopers who are going to take away all of our possessions.

ADAM Through means of subterfuge and cunning. Yeah, they were always my favorite thing in this movie. I was surprised that they were only in it for about 90 seconds.

BROOM I think that I have seen that sequence, “Bella Notte,” and “He’s a Tramp” several times as excerpts, and I’ve seen the entirety of the movie only once, or less. But I’d seen the “We Are Siamese” sequence several times. Watching it this time, I was embarrassed to think that there was a time when I had learned those lyrics and sang that song. “I think maybe we will stay for quite a while,” and all. “There will be a head for you, a tail for me?” I learned to say those things in that voice, because that’s how it went, which is retroactively a little embarrassing to me.

ADAM It’s embarrassing for your parents.

BROOM Why? They just embraced it. They didn’t care. Who did? Certainly nobody cared in 1955.

BETH I thought the movie was a lot of fun. I don’t think it was a great piece of filmmaking, but it was solidly entertaining.

ADAM How did it compare to its fifties brethren, in your view?

BETH It’s not as rich as Alice in Wonderland. What else did we just watch?

ADAM Peter Pan. And also Cinderella.

BETH Well, I really don’t think Cinderella is all that great; it’s not as good as any of the ones that came after it.

BROOM Lady and the Tramp felt very slick and modern. I thought, “boy, there’s really no difference between this and the version of it that they would make today.” Not even in tone. Of course, you’re right, they wouldn’t do as much ethnic characterization now.

ADAM They also wouldn’t make the center of the movie be a demure, doe-eyed upper-class girl.

BROOM You’re right, but that’s just because of a current habit they have. If ethnic stereotypes were a reflexive fallback then, a reflexive fallback now is making a female protagonist with “a quirk,” like “she’s clumsy but she’s smart!” Whereas Lady was “naive but rich.” They wouldn’t use that combo now.

ADAM In basically every scene of the movie, I was comparing it to the equivalent scene in Guys and Dolls, which this was sort of the animated version of. And, you know, Guys and Dolls is a lot of fun. This is a little sentimentalized compared to that – it’s not wrong of Bosley to say that this is an overly greeting-card-like movie, if that’s what he says. But it was fun.

BROOM I felt like this movie functioned more than the previous on the level of, “okay, audience, you know what happens in stories like this…”

ADAM Yeah, I knew everything that was coming. You knew that she’d end up at the pound; you knew that there’d be a reversal of fortune at the end; you knew that Old Trusty’s sense of smell would return.

BROOM What I mean is that in Snow White, when, say, she has to run through the scary woods, it’s delivered without any knowingness or acknowledgement that this is a standard trope for this point in the story. Whereas now, in this movie, it felt very relaxed, like it was pitched from and to people who already know. And as a kid, my disinterest in this movie was partially based on the fact that nothing really happened in it. [Ed: didn’t you just say you may never have seen it as a kid?]

ADAM It has an easy, worldly, slightly cynical quality. Which is also Tramp’s personality. It’s saying, “heya, kid, this is the way things are.”

BROOM Even in those sequences, there was no sense of real danger or dirtiness.

BETH Well, I think that kids are supposed to feel that the pound is a dangerous place, where dogs get murdered. But it’s very watered-down. She’s in there! Maybe it will happen to her! But we only have to feel that for about two seconds.

ADAM They tell you within the first ten seconds that her license will protect her.

BROOM They have the power, with animation, to do things that are truly intense, as we’ve seen. And here they didn’t get anywhere near that. You see Tramp fighting with the dogs in silhouette, and then you see them directly, and you think, “yeah, I guess that’s animation of dogs fighting.” But it doesn’t have any menace to it. The whole movie felt very relaxed.

BETH Do you think that has something to do with the way people thought about raising children in the fifties? With Cinderella we were talking about the change in what parents wanted for their children. Parents didn’t want their children to feel fear, so this was as soft as they could make it.

BROOM The emphasis was definitely on softness and light and loveliness, and “look at how beautiful their lawn is!” and “dogs are so adorable, goddammit!” That was basically what the movie had to say.

ADAM I got a strong moralistic and didactic sense from the whole movie. Most basically, it really hammers you over the head with lessons in dog ownership. The messages “license your dog” and “rescue dogs from the pound” were almost Bob Barker-ish in their directness.

BROOM They didn’t say to spay and neuter them. Baby puppies are adorable!

ADAM No, they didn’t. Maybe they hadn’t thought of that yet. And how can you say that in a children’s movie? But also, Tramp presents what is, at least theoretically, an attractive and compelling alternative to her cushy domestic life. And then he totally gives up without a fight! It’s like the opposite of Revolutionary Road.

BROOM The movie doesn’t really have its heart in either option. When he looks out in the distance and says “we could go out there and be free,” they show us that Disney sun shining on it, as if to say, “he’s right, this is paradise!” And then she says, “but I like staying in a house,” and he says, “ohhh-kay.”

BETH What she really says is, “but who will take care of the baby?”

BROOM Right, but we as viewers know that dogs don’t actually take care of babies. Well, of course it turns out that the dogs did need to be there or a rat would have bitten the baby, which is a truly horrific image. It’s a strange threat to hold over us that this rat might be about to bite a baby in its crib. It’s weird that that’s in a Disney movie.

ADAM And that the rat is unerringly drawn to do this. It’s not an accident.

BROOM That’s right. It slinks out from under the circus poster wall, and gives Lady a look as if to say, “I’m going to bite the baby now! Try and stop me!” But back to what I was saying: dogs don’t really need to be around to protect human babies.

ADAM Nana did.

BROOM That’s true. Well, I don’t know what that means either. Anyway, the movie didn’t really seem to have anything to say about one way of living or the other; it seemed to be saying mostly that dogs are cute. Also, as far as messages, wasn’t the message for kids really that if you’re going to have a younger sibling, don’t worry because your parents will still love you? Don’t run away from home.

ADAM Also just that kids are great, and kids override everything; it ends with a shot of babies and puppies. And those puppies and the little baby were pretty cute.

BROOM The baby was not cute in the sequence where they built up to it. “Let’s see the baby! Here he is, the little star-sweeper…” and then they pull aside the blanket and you see this badly drawn baby as part of the background, with no life in it.

ADAM That was not good. But I meant in the last scene. They have this pale blue wash, which they also used for little Michael’s eyes, which is really cute.

BROOM Beth, as the person here most susceptible to puppies, did you feel like the succession of seven shots of puppies in the pound tearing up was effective?

BETH Not on me. Was it effective on you?

ADAM Kind of! I felt like, “Oh my god, we should go rescue these – bracket beautiful breed dogs unbracket – right away!”

BROOM Yes. Their babies would have just looked like dogs, instead of a bunch of female Ladys and one male Tramp.

ADAM Well, yes.

BROOM The eyes were much bigger than before. The baby eyes got a real ratchet up in this movie.

ADAM Now, you laughed at me for saying that the Tramp is kind of hot.

BROOM I just laughed because I already knew you thought that.

ADAM But you can’t understand the movie unless not only do you understand that the other dogs think he’s hot, but you actually have to think it yourself a little bit. You have to think that he’s hot and that she’s appealing in a non-sexualized but beautiful way.

BETH It’s like the song “Uptown Girl,” by Billy Joel.

BROOM I thought of that too.

BETH Except that Billy Joel is not hot, and has never been.

BROOM And Christie Brinkley is not so demure as all that.

ADAM And one problem I always had with this movie is that Cockers are a really unpleasant breed, in real life. They look bedraggled. So I had trouble seeing Lady as authentically appealing.

BETH It’s the dog that most seems to have flowing long hair like a woman.

ADAM I guess they thought a poodle would be too coquettish and French. I suppose today she would be a Golden, or a Lab. I think of Cockers as a fifties breed. Who has those anymore?

BETH My parents’ next-door neighbors do.

ADAM Are they old ladies?

BETH At this point, yes.

ADAM My grandparents had this succession of poodles that would, like, get bedsores, and they were horrible. That’s how I think about that variety of long-haired little dogs. Anyway, you have to know, to understand the movie, that Tramp is sexually attractive to Lady, even in her sort of proto-sexual way, in a way that Jock and Trusty just aren’t. You’re supposed to be creeped out that they’re proposing marriage to her. What is that supposed to solve, anyway? I didn’t get that.

BETH It’s so that she could live with them, in one of their houses.

BROOM I thought it showed nicely that even if you personally want her to keep living in this protected environment – in an old person’s home, essentially – you still feel, with her, like, “okay guys, but I’m not going to marry you. I would still rather be with the hot guy.” These movies just get more and more dialogue-y and less animation-y, which is something I imagine Bosley will object to. Yes, it had a couple of semi-action sequences, but it really was all about acting. The animation of character acting gets better and better, more elaborate and interesting. Both of the leads were very well done. And that scene with the spaghetti –

ADAM Is one of the great romantic images of the twentieth century. I just want to say that.

BROOM Yes. But because I hadn’t seen it since I had any kind of sophistication at all, I didn’t realize yet that people don’t just like it because of that image, but because the whole scene is played well. When you get there, it’s adorable because of the circumstances, which are absurd. Because of these ridiculous Italian guys. Is the restaurant owner not exactly the same guy as Stromboli?

ADAM “Ey, I make-a you pizza!”

BROOM “I-a break-a you face!” “E’s-a talk-a to me!” The amount of ridiculousness and unreality is just exactly right. And they aren’t really on a date, they’re just wandering around and he says, “hey, check this out,” and then something romantic starts happening.

BETH And that really is romantic.

ADAM And then the stars twinkle in her eyes!

BROOM When the stars twinkled in her eyes, that felt like going overboard. That’s how I felt about the whole movie. “Yes, there is something legitimately cute in there, but you’re gilding the lily.” I was trying to think of what to say about how far they went – that they were “bronzing the lily,” or “putting frosting on the lily.” The movie keeps picking things that have genuine sentimental value, and does it far better than an actual greeting card would do it, and then just goes too far. But I didn’t resent as being totally phony. It didn’t feel like Thomas Kinkade, who’s selling an idea of coziness that isn’t actually at all cozy. This was actually cozy. It’s calculated, but by people who were trying hard to do a good job… at something a little bit tasteless.

BETH I thought some of the background transitions – where Lady would be in the garden and then suddenly in a terrible doghouse in the rain…

ADAM Or when the meat suddenly appears.

BETH I thought those were nice, and something we haven’t seen before.

BROOM There were a couple of fancy effects with the backgrounds. At the beginning, when he puts down the basket, it’s like a piece of the background – it’s a non-animated basket that moves against the background. And when he put down the newspaper, it was a like a painted newspaper rather than a cel newspaper. I thought that was cool.

ADAM You’re right, Beth, there were these storytelling tricks that they’re learning. Visualizations of someone’s thoughts.

BETH Kind of an Ally McBeal technique.

BROOM Some of those were a little bit jarring to me. When he says, “remember that big piece of meat?” and then it’s there in front of them, that seemed like an unprepared jump into the surreal. But I guess that was the one that introduced a whole sequence of them.

ADAM What did you think of the “Johnnie Fedora” sort of setting?

BETH I found it very charming and desirable. The opening shot of the snowy town was very cozy.

ADAM It’s like Whoville.

BROOM Like I said: they were definitely on the mark, and then they laid it on pretty thick.

ADAM There’s a lot of Victorian gingerbread on those houses. And there’s a lot of laundry hanging over the alleyway of the Italian restaurant.

BETH Yeah, it was a lot of laundry. But so what?

ADAM No, I don’t mind. But it was a little shimmeringly vague as to setting. “Where is this?”

BROOM That’s not a mistake, that’s intentional.

ADAM I know. It’s fine.

BROOM But kids don’t get anything out of things like that.

ADAM There was a lot of anachronism. Although I appreciate that dogs have been the same throughout history – it’s nice to know that dogs could scratch themselves back in the 19th century – but I don’t think people played “catch” with their dogs in 1895, or whenever this was.

BETH I think it was 1915 or so, because there were some motor vehicles.

ADAM Oh, you’re right. It was sort of just before the war. I appreciated the Yale jokes. Anything else to say? Emma will appreciate it if we stop now.

BETH It’s interesting to me that I did not remember this very well, even though I saw it many times as a kid. I guess that says something about it.

BROOM That’s what I was going to say just now. There’s just not that much meaning in this movie for kids. It’s just about coziness and sweetness. At least to a boy, that’s not the stuff of movies.

ADAM I was surprised at how much “training Lady as a puppy” there was before Tramp ever comes on the scene.

BROOM I was a little dismayed that it starts with ten minutes of whether or not she’s going to sleep in the kitchen. It reminded me of Cinderella starting with a lot of worthless “business.”

[we read the Times review]

BROOM So you want to see the Switzerland movie but not Nature’s Half Acre that was shown with Alice in Wonderland?

BETH I would see all of them, sure.

BROOM We didn’t say a lot about the music. Something about that tune in the incidental music that corresponded to them walking around the house was very familiar to me.

BETH It’s used in other places; it’s in other stuff from the fifties.

BROOM I think it’s approximated in Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure. But here it was one of the recurring themes. Jim Dear was whistling it. It was clearly owned by this movie.

ADAM “We are Siamese, if you please…” was higher than I remembered, and sounded more exotic.

BROOM It has a cute arrangement.

ADAM I think that Bosley’s opinion, though harsh, is not really inaccurate. There’s not anything in there that could really be disputed. It’s an uncharitable reading of it, but he’s entitled to that.

BROOM Overall, I was just impressed by the effortless confidence of it. I didn’t think that relaxed quality was going to settle in for a while yet. But it really has. It was as much “another Disney movie” as anything you would go see in the nineties.

ADAM It definitely has two or three elements that are, I think, as iconic as anything produced by Disney studios. The spaghetti, the Siamese cats…

BROOM And Goldie Hawn shaking her rump at us is also a pretty well-remembered image.

ADAM When you think of all of the dreck that is to come… I mean, I like Robin Hood, but there’s nothing in it that really flashes into my mind as distinctive. Maybe when he’s got the straw under the water? But not really.

BROOM Their job and intention isn’t necessarily to make icons.

ADAM Well it doesn’t hurt. Dumbo is chock-full of icons.

BROOM I think it’s in inverse proportion to how much the movie is just a dialogue movie, like I was saying. The more it’s plotted and normal, the less the images are objects in themselves. I have one other thing to say: This game of coming up with characters and just tossing them on the pile – the idea that “people just love being introduced to new characters, so let’s see how many we can get in there and give them each their sixty seconds!” – I’m very cynical about that when they do it now. And they did it here, but I thought they did a relatively good job. If you think back, we didn’t really spend any time with that Chihuahua; he only said one thing. They kind of pulled it off anyway. But it’s a dangerous game for them to start playing.

ADAM This might be my new favorite.

BETH I liked it a lot.

BROOM I did too.

ADAM It was awesome.

BETH That dog is amazing.

BROOM The dog is amazing?

BETH It’s taking care of those kids.

BROOM That is remarkable.

BETH I just said that because I thought it would be funny to say that.

ADAM The remarkable thing about the movie is that it makes both childhood and adulthood seem unappealing, but does so in a way that’s totally charming. Well, maybe not “unappealing,” but they’re both mixed bags, like life is. It does not feel like a fairy tale.

BETH That’s true. Neither is presented as better; neither is presented as the obvious choice.

BROOM I was waiting for the moment when they would stab me in the heart with the fact that my childhood was gone, but they never did it. I think they intentionally avoided telling the adults in the audience “you’re in the bad part of your lives, now,” or telling children that growing up is for losers.

ADAM It’s too easy to do that. As Hook does unabashedly.

BROOM As I was saying earlier, I saw the beginning of Hook the other day, but I don’t remember exactly how it ends. You said it ends with him throwing away his cell phone? But he does go back to being a father again; it doesn’t with him actually choosing childhood over adulthood.

ADAM Yeah, but it’s about being a childlike father.

BROOM Wouldn’t you say that this Peter Pan was also saying that it’s good to remember your childhood and not be a grouch?

ADAM Yes. But being a child here seemed chaotic, alternately fun and depressing, which is what it is like to be a child.

BROOM It seems like we’re all in agreement that the correct way to talk about this movie is in terms of allegory about childhood and adulthood. As a kid I didn’t like the Peter Pan story very much, and I didn’t like this movie very much, because –

ADAM He’s a dick.

BETH He’s a show-off.

BROOM No, because who is he and why do I care about him? And more to the point, what is Neverland? There are pirates there, and Indians, and boys wearing animal costumes, and mermaids. It seemed arbitrary, like a grab-bag of stuff. Which is in fact the point; it’s supposed to suggest the imaginations of children, who have He-Man fight Superman. They just mix stuff up. Neverland is a place where Indians and mermaids live. But as a kid, I just thought, “why is this movie giving me this mish-mash? There’s no specific fantasy there for me to get into.” Now, as an adult, I can appreciate that the whole thing suggests childhood.

BETH Well, those things, Indians and pirates – particularly Indians – are specific to the fifties.

BROOM But they come, I believe, from the original material, from the turn of the century.

BETH Really? The Indians too?

BROOM I think to British children, American Indians are all the more exotic.

ADAM I think it was all, you know, savagery in its most delightful forms. And it is pretty delightful.

BROOM As I’m saying, I enjoyed it now. But as a kid I didn’t understand what it was supposed to add up to. I think it only makes sense at a remove from childhood, because it’s a depiction of childhood as seen by adults.

ADAM I imagine I would have felt resentful of Peter Pan as a child, because he was effortlessly cooler than I could ever be. But I also probably would have had a crush on Peter Pan. I think this is the first Disney character on whom we could legitimately have a romantic crush.

BROOM I don’t know about that, man.

BETH I didn’t really like him.

BROOM I didn’t even see him as “cool.” I don’t think the concept of “cool” plays into this movie.

BETH He was like the kid at school who tried to get everyone to laugh at him.

ADAM And did! Everyone wanted to be his friend, and all the girls all wanted to nuzzle with him!

BETH Well, I never liked those kids.

BROOM He embodies a perfect child-charisma – he’s the “spirit of youth,” or whatever she says at the beginning – but what kind of person is he actually?

BETH He’s a hero; he saves damsels in distress pretty frequently.

BROOM Yeah, but just because it’s what there is to do. He always shows that he doesn’t care about anything. “Yeah, okay, I guess I’ll let you go.” “You’re banished forever! Okay, for a week then.”

BETH Well, he’s a kid.

ADAM He’s thoughtless.

BROOM He’s just the spirit of childhood, which is not actually something I have a crush on, Adam. Perv.

ADAM I would have, as a child, had a crush on him.

BROOM A charisma crush. A friend crush.

ADAM No.

BROOM He’s got pointed ears; he’s not even human.

ADAM He does still have a trace of “Casey at the Bat” face.

BETH His face is not cute. He has no nose.

BROOM He’s an imp; he’s not supposed to be “cute.” You just have a crush on force of personality.

ADAM Well, that’s true. But it’s a particularly boyish, male force of personality. This would have been a better movie than Alice in Wonderland to watch with Mike.

BROOM I would have been interested to hear what Mike had to say about this, actually. But let’s segue from that into the sexual politics, which were clearly part of the movie, and yet I’m not sure I could summarize what they were. Female jealousy was a big part of the plot. Tinkerbell has an apparently sexual sense of possessiveness of Peter Pan.

BETH And then later Wendy does too.

ADAM Well, she can’t help herself. Even though she knows better.

BROOM But Wendy is apparently pre-sexual. There’s nothing flirtatious about her interaction with Peter at all. But she wants to give him a kiss. I didn’t really understand where in her development she is.

ADAM It’s not like she wants to have sex with him; she just wants him to treat her more specially than the other girls.

BETH Right.

BROOM But then there are mermaids, who are all about being sex objects. They have crushes on Peter Pan, who seems immune to their charms. He just likes attention. And then they’re jealous of Wendy, who doesn’t understand why. Or maybe she does; I don’t know what she understands.

BETH I think Wendy is in that nebulous place between girlhood and adulthood. She’s like Britney Spears. “Not yet a woman…” – what is it?

BROOM “No longer a girl…”? [ed.: “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman.”]

ADAM I thought the sexual politics were pretty subtle and interesting. It was both totally sexist but also about the electric interaction of men and women. Women are seen as civilizing but also… It seemed a little like a Katherine Heigl role.

BROOM I haven’t seen any of those movies.

ADAM I didn’t see Knocked Up, but I gather that this is essentially how Knocked Up works, plot-wise.

BROOM This is how Knocked Up works plot-wise?

ADAM The interactions. Did you see Superbad?

BROOM and BETH No.

ADAM Well, then this won’t mean anything to you. You know, it’s all about these boastful but insecure slobby boys. At the end, they meet the girls they have crushes on at the mall, and they go off with the respective girls, but they cast a backward look over their shoulders at each other. They want to go off with these girls, but they’re conflicted about it. And an intrinsic part of growing up is becoming sexualized and leaving your playmates for your mates.

BROOM We saw exactly that in Bambi.

ADAM Yes.

BROOM But here that never happened. They’re not at that stage yet.

ADAM They’re not quite there yet, but we know they’ll get there. As Wendy says, they’re “just not quite ready yet.”

BROOM When Wendy is awakened from bed by a boy, and then they’re eagerly talking together in her bedroom in the middle of the night, and she tells this boy she wants to give him a kiss, it’s almost confused. Who does she think he is, that she wants to give him a kiss? And who does he think she is, that he doesn’t want anything from her but still wants to show her around? Their relationship to each other is abstracted. She loves the idea of Peter Pan, but up until then she thought he was just someone to tell stories about.

BETH Well, that’s like, you know, Davy Jones appearing in your bedroom. You’d say, “Oh! It’s you! Can I kiss you?”

ADAM Davy Jones??

BETH Davy Jones from the Monkees.

ADAM Oh!

BROOM You thought she meant the locker owner?

ADAM I was confused. Yes, it is a lot like that. It’s like the Jonas Brothers appeared in your bedroom. For our younger blog readers.

BROOM Her fantasy about Peter Pan is just that she’d get to talk to him. And then when he does appear, he immediately starts saying sexist stuff to her – “girls talk too much!”

ADAM And she sort of takes it – as you would, as a girl at that age in the presence of a charismatic boy – but she sort of doesn’t. She seems to vacillate between those things. You can understand; she takes these sexist barbs, but you can tell that she resents them.

BROOM What do you make of the fact that sexual roles are a recurring element in the “red man” scene? We can talk about the rest of the scene in a minute. I mean, the racist elements of the scene are so ridiculous and obvious they hardly need to be talked about.

ADAM They’re incidental.

BROOM They’re incidental to the fact that the real point of the scene is that the squaw keeps telling Wendy that she can’t participate in this kind of fun.

ADAM And the movie doesn’t really disagree with that.

BROOM Is the idea that she’s more grown up than these boys, and that she has responsibilities in the adult world, while they’re having this childish sort of fun? Or is that she’s a woman and will never be able to have fun? What does it mean?

BETH All of the men were having that sort of fun. It wasn’t just the boys.

BROOM Well, the Indian men were not mature beings.

BETH Who knows what they were? They weren’t really characters. That Indian woman wasn’t partying either; she was just standing around giving orders.

BROOM And then in the middle of that song, we see the sexy young Indian girl and then the mother-in-law who’s a hag, and “that’s the first time the red man said ‘ugh,'” – which, as Adam said, is typical fifties humor – but it’s also about whether or not women really fit into that society. That scene as a whole sends a weird series of signals. I mean, I know they didn’t think about it quite that seriously – this is all the sort of stuff that if someone were saying it, I’d want to say, “It’s a Disney movie!”

ADAM But Disney movies teach us how to be men and women, as much as anything does.

BROOM And that’s clearly the correct way to talk about Bambi. Yes, this movie clearly thought about these issues, at some level. This was definitely the most sophisticated script so far.

ADAM Yes. It was ambiguous. And it really packed a lot of adventure into seventy-five minutes.

BETH I thought that too. Things just kept happening.

ADAM There was not a dull moment in this movie.

BROOM There was also, notably, nothing at all artsy in it. And the fact that it was so successful on its own terms while totally eschewing that stuff – no pink elephants, no falling down a rabbit hole, no ballets, nothing abstract – probably set the tone for the direction they’re going to go after this. Because they nailed this, which didn’t incorporate any of that aspect of aesthetic ambition.

BETH Maybe I’m wrong, but why is this movie not more popular? Is it popular? It seems like we’ve all seen it just once. It’s not a “beloved favorite.”

BROOM I remember seeing it in middle school on one of the occasions that our neglectful chorus teacher just had us watch a movie, and being shocked by the “Red Man” song, and thinking, “did I really ever see this as a kid?” And I’m honestly not sure I ever did. But that was definitely the last time I had seen it.

ADAM Yeah, I assume that scene makes it unsalvageable. It’s too much to just cut it out like the negro unicorns.

BROOM I don’t think I’d want my kids watching this one.

BETH Until they were how old?

BROOM I don’t know. A little older.

BETH Ten?

BROOM It’s emotionally inapplicable for a little kid. This goes back to my comment from before that when I was a kid I asked “who is Peter Pan? Why should I like him? Why should I like pirates and Indians and things that don’t go together?” It’s young-adult content, but presented like it’s for seven-year-olds. So there’s a mismatch there.

ADAM I think this may be the first Disney cartoon in which we are shown a murder.

BROOM When he shot that guy, you could sort of feel the Disney studio winding up in anticipation – “get ready, folks… is he really going to shoot a guy?… Yes he is!” Though it is off screen. There’s also a shooting death in Bambi of course, but that’s traumatic. This was a completely comic, pointless murder. And there was lots of throwing of knives directly at the faces of the characters.

ADAM And when they almost kill Wendy, because Tinkerbell the jealous bitch has lied to them.

BROOM Tinkerbell is not a sympathetic character at any point in the movie – except that she throws the bomb away from Peter Pan. But only because she wants to keep him for her own. Her love for him is not admirable.

ADAM She’s like a Bond female villain.

BROOM And she’s clearly one of these pin-up drawing bodies.

BETH But she has that moment of thinking she’s too fat.

BROOM Several times she’s not happy about her butt. She stands on a mirror and thinks her butt is too big. But her butt has clearly been drawn with loving attention by some animator. When she gets stuck in the keyhole, we just happen to see her underpants and the crease of her buttocks.

ADAM It’s upsetting to me that she is the only character from this movie that Disney has seen fit to market, and that they’re marketing her as the “bad girl” – you know, as the next stage of the princess fixation.

BROOM She’s as close to a Bratz as they’ve got. She’s an oversexed girl with no maturity.

BETH But who is she having sex with? No one.

BROOM She doesn’t have anything to do with the actual act of sex; she’s just sexual and sexually possessive. Of Peter Pan, who’s oblivious. She’s Daisy Mae to his Lil’ Abner.

ADAM It’s a depressing statement about both maleness and femaleness, in the same way that it’s a depressing statement about both childhood and adulthood. But at the same time, there’s something resonant about it.

BROOM Beth and I were having a conversation about Cinderella after our recorded conversation, about the fact that Cinderella was telling people how to be 50s people; that the greater materialism in the movie, the emphasis on the dress, was a specifically 50s thing, and 40s kids wouldn’t have felt that in the same way.

ADAM Whereas this was totally unmaterialistic.

BROOM It wasn’t materialistic, yet it was still “totally 50s,” as you said at one point about some joke. Do you feel like the sexual dynamics and the childhood/adulthood dynamics – the movie’s idea of what it means to be a person – has dated? Because even though it felt so 50s, I can’t identify any aspect of it except for the obvious racism –

ADAM And sexism.

BROOM Yes. Which of course are big and serious issues; they’re why I wouldn’t want to show it to too young a kid. But do you feel like what it was saying about life, beyond that, was limited to a certain era in the American psyche?

ADAM No!

BETH No, I don’t think so.

ADAM I thought it was very penetrating.

BROOM In the moment when the father said, “you’re going to grow up; you’re going to have your own bedroom,” I was struck by that being surprisingly real. “Oh yeah, there actually is a moment when you suddenly grow up.”

ADAM The father’s not a very sympathetic spokesperson for growing up, but the mother is.

BETH And their house is!

BROOM And what does it mean that they’re being raised by a dog? The world of fantasy only comes to life after they go to sleep – the whole thing is clearly Wendy’s dream – but the dog really is their Nana!

ADAM But the father understands that that’s a little improper, because he says to Nana that, “you know, you’re a dog.” Can we talk about the gay domestic violence aspect of the movie?

BROOM Let me try to figure out what he’s talking about!

ADAM Namely the relationship between Smee and Captain Hook. It seemed to me an early prototype for what would be parodied in the Smithers-Mr. Burns relationship.

BROOM I get what Smithers-Mr. Burns is a joke about, but I saw Smee and Captain Hook as totally sexless.

ADAM Well, of course they’re sexless. But the joke of Mr. Burns and Smithers is that it makes explicit what’s here an unacknowledged joke.

BROOM But Mr. Smee does not adore Captain Hook. He would rather not be caught up in his plans.

ADAM I think he’s overwhelmed by him. You know, “I wish I knew how to quit you.”

BROOM I don’t know about that. I think he’s a simpleton and he really would rather just go back to business as usual. He’s like Sancho. This relationship is really Sancho Panza and Don Quixote, which I guess you could say is the prototype for the Smithers-Burns gay joke, but it’s really “I like being around a powerful guy, but this is ridiculous.”

ADAM “You’ve gone too far this time.”

BROOM He keeps saying “Why can’t we go back to sea? Why do we have to be obsessed with killing Peter Pan?” And he’s a drunk.

ADAM He’s not a gay role model.

BROOM I think he may be yet another Irishman.

ADAM But he’s a sort of waddling, effeminate Irishman.

BROOM I didn’t see him as effeminate. He’s just an idiot.

ADAM Like that first scene, where everyone else in the crew is laughing at him while he’s doing housemaid work with his ridiculous little hat.

BROOM I know he is another Sterling Holloway voice [ed. WRONG! You are confusing Sterling Holloway with Bill Thompson – the White Rabbit, as opposed to the Cheshire Cat].

ADAM I think Hook is sort of effeminate too.

BETH Hook is effeminate. He has a collection of fancy hooks.

BROOM One of them was a nutcracker. They went by so fast I didn’t get to see what the others were. I love that he plays the clavichord. Not just because it’s a joke that he’s playing with a hook, but just the idea of it, that he chooses to make it part of his seduction of Tinkerbell to punctuate himself with chords.

ADAM He is a mincing queen.

BROOM He’s genuinely good with the sword. He’s not a total sham as a threatening figure.

ADAM Neither is uncle Scar.

BROOM But Scar is a queen because his ego is tied up in being catty – no pun intended! Captain Hook isn’t like that. He doesn’t have ego that way. He has all this fine stuff, but he never really struts. Does he? He just likes to do things the proper way. “Get me my coat!”

BETH But he does seem like he has that in him.

ADAM He’s like a whimpering baby as soon as he’s touched.

BROOM Yes, he’s a fool. He’s ridiculously afraid of the crocodile.

ADAM If I didn’t already know the whole crocodile story, it would be hard to pick up. It goes by pretty fast.

BROOM Yes. Speaking of things from Peter Pan that we know about but not from this movie: the most famous thing in Peter Pan is that you, the audience, have to clap your hands to save Tinkerbell. So here we have them clearly heading toward that moment; he’s approaching her and she’s just a faintly blinking light, and he’s saying, “I care about you more than anything in the world” – and then there’s an abrupt transition back to the pirate ship, and when Peter Pan shows up, Tinkerbell is fine. Do you think they made a scene where we were supposed to clap our hands, and then decided that breaking the fourth wall for audience participation was not something they wanted to do?

ADAM She’s so unpleasant that maybe nobody would have clapped.

BETH I think it’s probably just to keep the running time down.

BROOM There’s a second disc with other material, but I don’t think we’re going to get that from Netflix. I’ll look it up to see if that scene ever existed, and then I’ll link to the page I find… right here. [Sorry, no link; I can’t find anything conclusive. The commentary on the DVD at that point has one of the animators saying that when he saw the 1924 Peter Pan as a kid, he thought it was stupid and embarrassing that they tried to get the audience to clap, and wanted to see what would happen if they let Tinkerbell die.]

ADAM Okay, I’m gonna walk back some of my “Captain Hook is totally effeminate,” because you’re right, he’s more of a dictatorial bully than he is a… you know, mincing dictatorial bully. Maybe I’m just hypersensitive to anything gay.

BROOM Don’t get me wrong: I love this stuff, I love saying that and joking about it. I just don’t get it from them.

ADAM I just thought it was latent in there, but maybe it’s less latent than I’m saying.

BROOM If there were going to be gay characters in this movie, it would be them. But I didn’t get those signals.

ADAM Well, the mermaids, maybe. You know, “Things are getting interesting.”

BROOM One of those three mermaids was a lesbian. She was just playing along so that she’d be accepted by her friends. The blonde mermaid actually has a secret crush on the brunette mermaid. Something I liked about the movie: I keep critiquing how well they do humans, and I thought that Wendy in particular was the best human they’ve done yet, bar none.

BETH She looked really good. Though she looked a little bit older than I think she was supposed to be.

BROOM Well, it was Alice in Wonderland two years later. I believe it was the same actress.

ADAM John and Michael looked good too. Michael was genuinely cute.

BROOM You kept giggling at his cute lines as though he were an actual child.

BETH He was very cute.

BROOM He was. And the conceit of John being a proper English boy was enjoyable.

BETH Like Harry Potter.

BROOM Like Harry Potter, but even moreso, to the point of it being a joke.

ADAM He’s a little bit of a Percy Weasley type. But he has a good heart. I guess Percy Weasley ultimately has a good heart.

BROOM Percy Weasley would have signed on with the pirates.

BETH True.

BROOM Not only were the people animated better, but the storyboarding and staging – such that slapstick and mayhem became the means by which the plot was forwarded – was better here than anywhere before. I said about Cinderella that the king and his assistant had slapstick staging that I liked, but that there was still a lot of boring staging with the sisters. where they just stood and talked. Here, every scene somehow was conveyed in a hugely kinetic way.

ADAM You chuckled at Captain Hook being pursued by the crocodile, which was pretty obvious but still well done. It was actually suspenseful whether he was going to get eaten.

BROOM There a couple clever bits with the crocodile, where they went for that comic third beat. They’d do something twice, and then they’d go for that extra third one, which felt like a contemporary sense of humor. There were all sorts of satisfying visual choices, like when Captain Hook screams and his face fills the whole screen, or when he’s pointing at the watch and it’s slowly moving toward the camera.

ADAM In an earlier movie, when they had Wendy singing to the boys, it would have just been Wendy singing to the boys, and the whole plot would have slowed down. Here you get that, but you also get the pirates sneaking up on them, at the same time. They manage to interweave those by having Smee crying about his mother, and it’s more satisfying.

BROOM I think that song was maybe my least favorite part of the movie. It seemed like it had originally been designed to be another “Baby Mine,” an attempt to get everyone to cry about mothers, but then they second-guessed it and put other stuff in. Now nobody would cry at it; the scene doesn’t let you cry. So then you wonder, why do we have to listen to this soggy song? I understand that it serves the function of revealing that the children all do want to go back to the world where they’re going to grow up.

ADAM And it makes the Lost Boys into people. It complicates them.

BROOM Thematically, it gives them all a moment where they actually make the decision that they are okay with growing up. Peter Pan says, “if you leave, you’re going to grow up and you’re never going to be allowed to come back,” and they say, “okay,” and go up the stairs and he doesn’t. But it’s not that great a song. I like the other songs, though. I like “You Can Fly.” I sometimes find myself singing it.

ADAM Yes. There’s a moment in it where the music precipitously as they plunge down, and it’s totally effective. My heart sort of dropped with it.

BROOM There are a couple of things in the song’s arrangement that move me that way. The swoops are one of them. Another is that every time they get to a certain place in the melody, the tempo gets a little push, which really gets you in the pit of your stomach. “Think of all the joy you’ll find / when you leave the world behind / and bid your cares goodbye!” – on that phrase the tempo jumps up in excitement. When I was a kid, on the video that we had, of a Disney Christmas special or something that used this clip, the tape was damaged right at the high point. “And bid your cares goodbye…You can flyyRRR” – the tape was suddenly distorted and turned into something else. So when I get there now, it feels especially peaceful and free, like floating in the air, that it doesn’t happen. Because I was trained to expect the dream to get ground up at that point.

ADAM The visuals in that sequence, although they’re not self-consciously poetic, are really very pretty and satisfying.

BROOM The backgrounds throughout are really atmospheric, but not in an aggressive way that makes you think about art. And, you know, I love it when they go artsy, so I’m a little sad that them doing this so well means that they won’t go in that direction very much anymore. Mary Blair is not going to get any more showpieces like she did with the little train back in Three Caballeros. Although here there were a couple slightly stylized shots, like when Captain Hook and Smee are rowing along the horizon, and there are flat, abstracted outcroppings coming out of the water, and the sun is just a big circle.

ADAM Is this where all of our ideas about pirates come from? Like, the idea of pirates hiding out in a rock shaped like a skull?

BROOM Well, I know that Disney’s Treasure Island live-action film came out in 1950.

BETH And what about Pirates of the Carribean, the ride?

BROOM When was Disneyland built? 1954? [Ed.: Yes.]

BETH Something like that.

BROOM Not yet, then. It had probably been designed but not built.

BETH Because I think that’s where a lot of my conceptions about pirates come from.

BROOM This movie does seem sort of contemporaneous with Disneyland. All the stuff in this movie felt in keeping with the spirit of Disney as you experience it at the Land.

BETH It’s 50s-y.

BROOM Well, early 50s-y. Because our next two movies are Lady and the Tramp…

ADAM Which is nowhere represented in Disneyland.

BROOM …which is, I think, an urbane romantic comedy compared to this – though I may be wrong, since I hardly remember anything about it – and then Sleeping Beauty, which is a big stylish Cinemascope spectacular. And then something happened, I guess, because they get smaller-scale after that. But in any case, they don’t really have this sort of family toy chest feeling, which Disneyland does.

ADAM Well, don’t they sort of run out of fairy tales to tell? I know this isn’t really a fairy tale.

BROOM Well, it’s a meta- fairy tale. It actually suits them very well, because built into it are the issues we’ve been talking about: What are fairy tales for? What is childhood for? The story is about real children being taken inside the fairy tale they would tell.

[we read Bosley Crowther’s review (and then marvel at pictures of the old Roxy Theatre)]

BROOM Anything to say about Bosley’s opinion of Peter Pan?

ADAM That it’s wrong!

BROOM I think he does it a disservice.

BETH Yeah. It seems like maybe he was just in a bad mood that day.

ADAM Or had some attachment to the play that we don’t.

BROOM He does seem, in many of these reviews, as though he feels a serious obligation to his readers to make sure they understand whether or not they are going to see a faithful adaptation of the source material.

ADAM Sorry, Bosley, but the source material has been completely supplanted by the Disney version. In all cases! So, ha ha ha!

BROOM And I disagreed with his assessment of the animation of Wendy and the boys as being merely good compared to other characters. Although it’s in keeping with his earlier opinion of Bambi, that the more accurately lifelike the animators get, the less they are true to their art. He doesn’t like it when they get too realistic.

ADAM Well, I thought this was deeply satisfying. And thought-provoking, and subtle.

BROOM Every time I say that I liked it, I feel odd, knowing that this is the less aesthetically ambitious branch of the Disney studios’ work, and it basically is the end of the other branch. I don’t think there are going to be any more dream sequences that take place in fantasy space. They just don’t do that. They hardly even do it in the shorts, after the 50s.

ADAM Well, the aesthetic ambition will come back in a big way in 1991.

BROOM You mean with The Little Mermaid? I don’t think so. I think you’ll be surprised at how The Little Mermaid looks to you now.

ADAM Maybe Little Mermaid doesn’t look so good, but Beauty and the Beast looks pretty good, and The Lion King looks pretty good.

BETH I don’t have any attachment to those movies.

ADAM And you will be charmed by the Fragonard-inspired Rapunzel.

BROOM You’re telling me! But first we gotta see Bolt. Not to mention Meet the Robinsons, which we just saw the preview for. Not to mention Treasure Planet, Brother Bear, Home on the Range, Chicken Little, Atlantis: The Lost Empire…

ADAM Beth is planning to quit before that.

BETH I’m planning to opt out.

BROOM NO! NO! NO! We’re in this together!

ADAM Good night, one and all.

(note the misspelling!)

BROOM We have a guest today.

MIKE Hello.

ADAM I didn’t think that was very successful.

BROOM Well, I’ll begin by saying that I thought it was great.

BETH I thought it was really good.

ADAM Really?

BROOM And Mike, do you want to have a first word in before we start elaborating?

MIKE I thought it was long.

BROOM It was, for the record, seventy-five minutes long. But Mike did manage to take two breaks, so it might have seemed longer to him. Adam, I think you should complain before we praise.

ADAM To me one of the most compelling parts of the book Alice in Wonderland is the sense of malice that emanates from all the characters, which is only imperfectly translated here. The queen is certainly malicious, but everyone else… It just loses some of its delicious arbitrariness.

BROOM Certainly they Disney-fied it. When I was a kid, I was aware of the softer tone of the movie as compared to the book, but while watching it now, I didn’t feel like the differences from the book actually detracted from the pleasures of this movie itself. The fact that it wasn’t totally arbitrary, that she’s sort of on a quest after the White Rabbit the whole time, that she explicitly says “I want to go home,” which she never says in the book – I didn’t think that was actually problematic.

ADAM I guess. The other thing I love about the book is the wonderful wordplay and wit, which is hard to translate into a movie.

BROOM But just having any of that wit in it made this movie so much livelier than many other Disney movies. By borrowing one-fiftieth of the wit of the books, they made the movie seem full of interesting material. And delightful, to my mind.

BETH It was so different from any Disney movie we’ve seen. I thought it felt a lot more daring.

BROOM Well, it wasn’t totally different, if you think of it as Pink Elephants and The Three Caballeros having a baby.

MIKE Have you watched Fantasia yet?

BROOM Right, and quite a few things in Fantasia.

BETH Yes, but it was new that it was a full-length – or Disney-length – narrative entirely in that style.

ADAM It did feel packed with incident.

BETH Also, I didn’t like this at all when I was a kid. It felt like I was in a nightmare. I was supposed to sympathize with Alice, and I couldn’t bear to. Placing myself in her position made me feel horrible. I felt like I needed to get out.

BROOM In every sequence? Even when she’s just going into the White Rabbit’s house?

BETH Yes.

ADAM I can see that. That’s what I meant by “the malicious arbitrariness of it.” Maybe it would be too hard to give kids the full brunt of it. I mean, it’s terrible! With Cinderella, [Broom] said it struck him that the subtext is that she’s an abandoned child and this close to being killed – well, Alice is in deep shit for most of this movie!

BROOM But she’s not, because we know that she’s asleep, and then the movie tells us at the end that she’s asleep, that it’s just a dream.

BETH I didn’t know as a child that she was asleep. I had never read the book.

BROOM Let’s just talk about the movie and not the book for a second. At the beginning of the movie, she actually says, “I want to go to a place where everything is nonsense.” And then she goes there, and people are rude to her, and she deals with it. It shows what her opinion of it all is, which is like “These talking flowers are such snobs!” – just ordinary irritation. Then it gets to the point where she weeps and sings a song about wanting to go home, about not having followed her own good advice.

BETH That’s before the flowers.

BROOM When she first weeps, it’s in front of the doorknob, but I’m talking about when she sits in the woods singing.

BETH Oh, yes.

BROOM Badly singing. Kathryn Beaumont can’t sing and they have her sing anyway, and it’s a little bit sad.

ADAM Mike’s take on it was different from ours, though. You said you had a million things you wanted to say.

MIKE It was like a hyper-sexual über-trippy fantasy.

BROOM I heard you making drug jokes. And I know that the history of the movie, as Adam read the other day, is that it didn’t do well at first, and Disney shelved it, but then they got a lot of requests for private screenings, so they rereleased it as a drug-trip movie.

MIKE Has anyone written about the cryptic messages in Disney movies?

BROOM I’m sure they have.

ADAM What do you mean?

MIKE Well, the caterpillar who’s smoking a hookah –

ADAM Which is perfectly legal!

MIKE – and then offers up mushrooms to eat; it’s all suggestive of a certain lifestyle.

ADAM Right, but that’s all Lewis Carroll. That’s not Disney’s fault.

BETH Also, psychedelic drugs weren’t really around in 1951. I know the hookah was, but…

BROOM Well, the hookah was written into the book in 1865.

BETH Right. I don’t know if mushrooms were a phenomenon yet.

BROOM I think if psychedelic drugs were a thing at the time, they wouldn’t have made this movie. They would have talked about it and realized, “we can’t do any of this stuff; we don’t want to be associated with that.” I think the movie was clearly made in a state of innocence.

MIKE I don’t know. I think it was only in the 50s that you first had the anti-drug movement.

BETH In 1951? Really?

MIKE Yeah, I think it wasn’t until the late 50s that you even had the state entering into controlling these sorts of things. I mean, certainly in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries, cocaine was quite a widely-distributed substance.

BROOM Right, but that’s why there wouldn’t have to be any innuendoes about it. The movie wouldn’t have to have a secret subtext about drugs; if it had wanted to be about drugs, it would have openly been about drugs. I think the “Hey man, you know what’s really going on in that movie?” winking attitude didn’t exist yet. So I can’t imagine that’s what’s really going on in this movie.

ADAM It’s just like when Disney inserted that penis in the Little Mermaid’s castle!

BROOM You know that’s one of the few real ones? I believe that unlike most of those rumors, that one was really put there intentionally by a poster artist to see if he could get away with it. [Ed. Nope.]

ADAM And aren’t there clouds in The Lion King that say “Have More Sex?”

BROOM The cloud in The Lion King says “SFX,” which is supposed to be a shout-out to the special effects department that animated it, but that wasn’t well thought out on their part. [Ed. Snopes says: undetermined.]

MIKE I was surprised by the parallels to The Wizard of Oz.

BROOM Wait; before you go into that, what did you mean about sexual content? I didn’t see anything sexual about this movie. She’s like the least sexual Disney heroine of all, and that includes Snow White.

MIKE Oh, I think Alice is totally this vamped-up sex kitten.

BROOM Okay. But seriously folks, what did you mean?

MIKE Maybe I’m imposing back on to her what they’ve done to her since then. You know, if you think about references to Alice today, they’re often in the form of adult Halloween costumes, or, like, Gwen Stefani in a music video wearing a short short skirt.

BROOM But this movie predates those things and also contains none of those things. I dare you to say where you saw that in this movie. I dare you.

MIKE Well, her figure itself is Barbie-esque.

BETH She has no breasts. I was looking for them. She really has no figure.

MIKE But she has very thin arms, and very big eyes, and sensual hair.

BROOM She is certainly older than the Tenniel drawings, or than the historical Alice, who was six-and-a-half or something.

BETH She looks like she’s eleven, to me. She seems to be pre-pubescent.

ADAM She’s pretty.

BETH They did make her pretty. But her head was too large for her body, and I think that was to make her seem more like a child.

ADAM She’s prettier than the queen, who looks a lot like the dinosaur from, uh…

MIKE She’s like Britney Spears circa “Hit Me Baby One More Time.”

BROOM No! There’s nothing coy about her. She’s all on the surface.

ADAM The queen looks like the steam shovel from that children’s book.

BROOM “Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel?” Because she has that jaw that looks like it’s going to scoop things up. In my animation class in college, a guy came in and showed us preliminary art toward a movie he was going to make, which was all imagery of a young Victorian girl walking around an estate and looking at peculiar stuff. And I eventually asked, “is there a reason that you’re not just doing ‘Alice in Wonderland’? Why aren’t you even mentioning that as a point of reference? This looks just like it.” And the guy was dismayed and said, “Really? I never really liked ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ ” And the teachers and everyone else sort of chimed in, saying, “Who actually likes Alice? Nobody cares about her.”

ADAM As a character.

BROOM Yes. They didn’t care about the “Alice in Wonderland” universe, they were saying, because Alice is a nobody.

ADAM That’s not true!

BROOM And I realized then, and said, that I like Alice because she has this indomitable six-year-old – or eleven-year-old – attitude.

ADAM “Don’t be ridiculous!”

BROOM Yes. “I’m not a flower at all!”

BETH It’s so British. Maybe that’s why Americans might not like her, because she’s a kind of snotty British kid.

ADAM I do think that the book Alice is tarter, just the way that the book Mary Poppins is tarter than Julie Andrews.

BROOM It’s not tartness that I like about the character. It’s the way she parses all of this real chaos in terms of “well, that simply doesn’t make sense.” Not a snobbish superiority to it, just a directness. She is correctly reacting to the fact that it doesn’t make sense, but on a scale much lower than the scale on which it’s nonsense, and that seems like power. It makes her seem in command.

BETH I like her character, and I liked this movie. But I’m saying that maybe the reason that other people might not is because she has a snobby British quality.

ADAM Whereas, to be clear, I’m saying that I thought it was too Americanized.

BROOM You started laughing at the “Alice in Wonderland” song, right at the beginning.

ADAM Well, the songs were not successful.

BROOM I think several of the songs were very successful.

ADAM [caterwauling]

BROOM That’s your impression of the choral singing?

ADAM Yes.

BROOM I think that “The Unbirthday Song” works very well. Not just because, as you said, it has primal associations for you with the Teacups ride.

ADAM Ohhh. I love the Teacups more than anything else at Disneyland.

BETH Why?

ADAM It’s a great, great ride, and I’ve been on the Teacups so many times.

BETH The spinning thing? That’s your favorite ride?

ADAM Because you can get it so that it spins one way while you’re going the other way.

BETH Right, because it’s on a plate too.

ADAM And you can cause yourself to whip around, like a planet in orbit.

BETH That is fun.

BROOM I don’t know how they produce that sound – I remember that when I was at Disneyland on the Teacups, I was trying to figure out what instrument it was making that thick tooting sound. It might be some kind of an organ, or they might have built their own pipes. Anyway, it’s a perfect sound for teapots playing a song. As soon as it started, Adam went into a reverie about the ride. That’s a very nice little song.

ADAM You’re right, that is a nice song.

BROOM And there are a couple other ones. Like, “We’re Painting The Roses Red” is sort of catchy. And I know that “All in the Golden Afternoon” is rather bad, but I do find myself humming the tune of “you can learn a lot of things from the flowers, for especially in the month of June.” I guess you guys don’t. And “Alice in Wonderland.” [Ed. and also the “Twas brillig” tune] I think I watched this movie more than the others when I was a kid.

ADAM This would have appealed to your parents’ style of parenting, I’m guessing.

BROOM My parents? I think it just appealed to my style of being a kid. It was full of incident, as you said, and that was the primary criterion.

BETH I actively tried to avoid this movie. It really upset me.

BROOM Once you’ve seen it, you know that nothing actually scary happens in it. The scariest things in other Disney movies were when people’s faces would become skull-like, or their eyes would glow or whatever, and there’s none of that here.

BETH That’s what scares you. Those types of things don’t scare me.

BROOM That is what scares me: people pulling faces. And there are no pulled faces in this.

ADAM There’s only the sense that the world is arbitrary and hates you, or at least wants nothing to do with you, and that even sympathetic people couldn’t care less about you.

BROOM But what I find invigorating about it still is that it’s not wholly to be understood that way, as though it’s a world; it’s also very much about the visuals. It’s about the excitement of animation going “boing.” During the ballet of the cards, their marching sequence, it’s pretty abstracted. We know what the story space looks like at that point, and they’re not in it. It’s just cards in patterns, Busby Berkeley style, but even more abstract. Or when she first lands and the room is all skewed, it’s just for the visual play. The movie keeps going there and telling us that these are just images, but lets that overlap with the realm in which she’s actually being threatened by the chaos. I find that very satisfying.

ADAM The images are heavily indebted to the original illustrations. Disney didn’t come up with most of the visuals.

BROOM Well, they found their own renditions of some of the same scenes. I mean, this movie doesn’t look that much like those drawings, either. And, you know, the doorknob with a face and lots of other things are just pure Disney, as far as I’m aware. And those weird beachscapes, where a little stone creates a long shadow like in a Dalí painting – that’s a very Disney thing to do. When the doorknob tells her that she left the key on the table and we see it appear, through the bottom of the glass table – when I was a kid, I couldn’t understand what we were seeing; it always looked to me like the key was stuck to the underside of the table, and I couldn’t understand why. But this time it looked fine. I don’t know what was wrong with my head, as a kid.

ADAM Mike, was the caterpillar your favorite part?

MIKE I don’t know that I had a favorite part. I was struck that there was a moral in the middle of the movie that I wasn’t expecting – because I don’t really have strong memories of seeing this as a kid.

ADAM “Don’t be so damned curious?”

MIKE No, there was this whole thing about reason. “I shouldn’t have allowed myself to be undisciplined and fall off the path. I find myself lost and confused in this world that’s spinning around me.”

BROOM That was just bullshit to justify that one song. Because it doesn’t fit with the rest of the movie.

MIKE Well, it does tie in with the beginning, where she wants to go to a nonsensical world and not listen to her lessons.

BROOM I guess you’re right. But the movie is just not coherent on that level, because the rest of it is sort of a celebration of nonsense.

ADAM No, it’s a refutation of nonsense. Alice hates nonsense. She sees it and says, “that’s nonsense!” And ultimately she triumphs over it.

BROOM Wait, when does she say that?

MIKE With the flowers.

ADAM Right, or the Mad Hatter. “But I haven’t had any tea!”

BROOM It’s odd that at the end, we don’t get to find out her reaction upon waking up. She doesn’t get to say either “I was just in the most wonderful place!” or “I’ve learned my lesson and I’ll never do that again!” It just isn’t clear what this version of Alice is learning from her experience. In the books – in both books – she wakes up and is eager to talk about all the wonderful things she’s seen, because she loved it.

MIKE Did Walt Disney have any intention of using his movies for education? Or did he just have this pure concept of entertainment?

BROOM Well, I don’t think this movie had any educational content, but he made a lot of educational films. In fact, when we read the Times review, you’ll see that this was paired with an educational short when it first came out.

BETH You already read the Times review? I’m eager to hear what Bosley has to say.

BROOM I’ll give away that Bosley is reasonably positive, as with all the other ones, but I do know that it didn’t do well on first release, and I don’t know if that’s because it didn’t do well critically or just didn’t match the public mood.

ADAM You think it wasn’t what people wanted from a Disney movie?

BETH It might be because kids found it upsetting, or couldn’t understand it.

BROOM I’m personally impressed by the fact that it has no plot, that it creates a sense of structure without one. At the end, Adam said, “this feels climactic,” because it was sufficiently frenzied, and the movie worked on that level the whole time. The things didn’t relate to each other logically, so they had to just give you the feeling of form – musically, so to speak.

BETH Again, I liked it this time, as a grown-up, but not as a kid.

ADAM I said it during the screening and I’ll say it again now, that according to IMDB, there was a Jabberwocky scene planned, but it was scrapped because it was too frightening. I can only imagine.

BROOM I would have been happy to buy this, but it has gone out of print for the time being so we had to Netflix it, and we only got the first disc of a two-disc set. The second disc might have materials from that segment.

BETH You might be able to find it online. [Ed.: only the non-scary preparatory art here.]

BROOM I think that the Mary Blair designs looked fantastic.

ADAM What in particular?

BROOM Well, in the middle of the scene where Alice is the monster in the White Rabbit’s house, you see the sky for a second, and it’s not a normal sky color. It has nothing to do with what’s going on, but the sky is sort of a gray field with white squares. It’s a middle-of-the-day scene, but there’s a sort-of-night sky and the trees are a funny color, and that’s just one of many backgrounds that go by in that sequences. It gives you the intense feeling I got from picture books, as a kid, where the whole space would be colored. The sky isn’t just the sky, it’s color and it makes an impression. There was stuff like that going on throughout the movie, and I think I responded to that when I was young too.

ADAM We’ll see that again in Bolt.

BROOM Just comparing this to Cinderella, I think it’s a really good an encouraging direction for the studio. To say, “We’re not just going to make…”

ADAM “Princess movies.”

BROOM I don’t think they were specifically deciding between princess movies and other movies. More generally, “we’re not just going to make kids’ movies.” It’s a kids’ movie, but it had the most life in it that we’ve seen since The Three Caballeros. Which covers seven years.

BETH Except for the dress!

BROOM What did you think of the costumes?

ADAM I don’t know. Nobody ever made a pinafore look so good.

BROOM Actually – maybe I’m reading too much into this – but I feel like they might have been sort of refuting Cinderella‘s attitude toward animated movies, in that the sister who’s reading her the lessons is a rotoscoped, realistic person, and Alice isn’t particularly. And then Alice goes into a world that has no room for anything at all like that, and when she comes back out, we’re aware that the traced human world is boring by comparison, and it’s what all of Cinderella looked like. That it’s the ground level from which we descend into something much more entertaining and vibrant. Anything else?

ADAM I’m a little defensive about “Alice in Wonderland,” because I think it’s such a wonderful work. I’m like one of those Star Trek: The Movie people.

BROOM Anti- “The Movie” because it’s not as good as the show?

ADAM Just highly protective of it.

BROOM So you feel like this abused the real property?

ADAM No, I don’t really. I must say that I’m struck that it is as faithful as it is.

BROOM I’m surprised that they put in the actual story of “The Walrus and the Carpenter.” Although they did louse it up by having them sing “We’re cabbages and kings!” at the end of every verse, and then as a coda.

ADAM And it was a little more winking than the poem. “The Walrus and the Carpenter” is supposed to be funny because the walrus is supposed to seem deadly sincere until the end. He’s not supposed to leer like that.

BROOM They telegraphed the whole thing. I actually found that one of the scariest parts, because you couldn’t tell what was going on other than that it was cannibalism of children. The whole time, they’re insinuating, “you know what we’re going to do at the end of this scene… Eat all of the innocents!” The rest of the movie didn’t bother me much.

ADAM When she’s in the forest and nobody gives a shit about helping her, that’s upsetting.

BROOM I love when that creature, that sweeper dog comes and erases the trail. That’s the biggest kick-in-the-gut moment in the movie, and it’s also so cool. She thinks she’s following this trail, but all it takes is a sweeper dog to ruin that. And it has that great brush music that goes with it. I love that moment. But it is upsetting.

ADAM The flowers remind me of Dumbo’s mother’s friends.

BROOM You always like the haughty socialites.

ADAM The flower archetypes map on to the individual elephants. The rose is the one who says “Girls, girls!”

BROOM No, the one with the lorgnette.

ADAM Oh, right, the Iris, you mean.

BROOM The Iris, yes. Don’t get me started about the Irish! I still don’t know Disney thinks about the Irish. I don’t know what it means. I’ve been referring to Tweedledum and Tweedledee every time we saw someone Irish before, and here they were.

BETH They were Irish, yes.

BROOM What does it mean? They bounce off each other’s bellies.

ADAM Really? I hear Scottish.

BETH Oh yeah, you know what? I thought they were Irish, but then later in their performance, I thought maybe they were actually Scottish.

BROOM The tufts of red hair mean they’re Scottish?

BETH Their accents.

BROOM Really? I thought something about them talking in squeaky nasal voices meant they were supposed to be Irish.

BETH They pronounced something in a Scottish way.

BROOM Oh.

ADAM We just rocked [Broom]’s world. It is interesting that this was the first really ethnically specific movie. I know Cinderella was set in France, but here they were all really ethnically British.

BROOM They were?

ADAM She had a British accent. Bill was Cockney.

BROOM Was the Dodo an American, then? Was he a colonial?

ADAM I felt like they were all British archetypes.

BROOM Why does the Dodo have a powdered wig? He’s a seafaring man?

ADAM He’s just a “cap’n.” I don’t know.

BROOM Anyway, I just thought that was fantastic. A real return to form. A new form – not quite the art-object form that Bambi or Fantasia was trying to be, but something very satisfying.

ADAM Let’s see what Bosley has to say.

–[the Times review is read]–

BROOM Makes you kind of want to see Nature’s Half Acre, doesn’t it?

BETH No.

BROOM Well, you can’t see it. It’s not on youtube and it’s not on DVD. Which is sad.

ADAM When are we going to lose Bosley?

BETH In the seventies, I think. [Ed.: retired 1968]

MIKE Remember when Disney used to take over whole days – school holidays – and do a broadcast on a network like ABC from 8 in the morning until 5 at night?

BETH and BROOM No!

BROOM About one thing? Or just show their movies?

MIKE It was everything from “Exploring the Redwood Forests” to bizarre animated shorts.

ADAM This is not the same as when the Disney Channel was free for 96-hour windows, is it?

MIKE No, because we didn’t have cable until I was sixteen. This would have been on ABC.

BROOM They definitely had a relationship with ABC. We used to watch the Disney Sunday Night Movie.

MIKE This would have been around then. Not necessarily the Michael Eisner years.

BROOM I don’t remember that, but that’s cool. Maybe you saw Nature’s Half Acre then. Any thoughts about Bosley’s opinion?

ADAM No. It seemed about right.

BROOM It reminded me of something I wanted to say but I can’t remember what…

BETH …Time’s up.

BROOM Okay, time’s up. See you next time with Peter Pan.

ADAM and BETH Oh no!