From Jean Seberg to transsexualism, Walt Disney’s Peter Pan has probably had the biggest Influence of all his films. If you include the tradition of women playing Peter Pan, than J. M. Barrie’s play may be the most influential art work of the 20th century.

I recall being obsessed with it as a kid and today I can’t remember why. Re-seeing it in DVD form after so many years I get a strange Proustian hit over the bomb in the ticking alarm clock (and clocks and time are a theme in the show), but it is a feeling, a mental atmosphere, a cloud of emotion, more than a tangible or solid memory. When, in the post hippie, early feminist era, women began wearing their hair short, a la Jean Seberg in Breathless, I attributed it to the precedent of Peter Pan (not Wendy). And isn’t Woody Allen’s title What’s Up, Tiger Lily an evocation of the Disney movie’s comic alien and shipboard hazards?

One of the clever things about the film is that, as the supplementary material reminds us, the crocodile is the real villain. Captain Hook is a cowardly fop, whose Dickensianly named assistant Smee, serves to make him seem slightly more masculine. And for a short movie (77 minutes) a lot happens in it. The Darling family life is set up briskly. The flight to Never Land feels like a real escape. In Never Land there are pirates, caves, Indians (unfortunate, that), ships, gang planks, and more and more and more. To a tiny mind learning to absorb story, it must have seemed like an epic. Spielberg and Lucas have been trying to remake it, literally and figuratively, for decades.

It’s great to get re-acquainted with it. Disney DVD’s two disc Platinum Edition hits the street on Tuesday, March 6, 2007, for $29.95. It boasts a new digital full frame restoration with DD 5.1 (along with a restored version of the original track), French and Spanish audio tracks, and subtitles.

First off, you are greeted by the choice of Fast Play or menu options. Fast Play simply starts the trailers and movie; to get anything else you need the menu. The animated, musical menu offers 31 chapter scene selection.

Supplements on disc one begin with the audio commentary track, hosted by Roy Disney, who says correctly that Peter Pan represents Disney animation at the height of its “second golden age,” and joined by Leonard Maltin, animators Mark Davis, Ollie Johnston, Frank Thomas, and Ward Kimble, and voices and models Kathryn Beaumont (Wendy Darling) and Margaret Kerry (the leggy, buxom lass who served as the physical model for Tinker Bell), authors Jeff Kurdy and John Canemaker, and finally Walt Disney himself in oral history excerpts, in which he bemoans the “failure” of Alice in Wonderland, and confesses that, “I’m corny enough I want to be hit right here in the heart.” Alice, it turns out, didn’t have “any heart,” and one of the animators on the yak track feels that Disney blamed them for that.

In other supplements, you can play the film’s five official songs, with optional follow along lyrics, read or have read to you “Peter’s Playful Prank,” a digitalized version of the Golden Book version of the movie, and see a sneak peek of the forthcoming Tinker Bell spinoff, presumably straight to video.

Finally (actually first, as they are the first thing you see) are trailers for
Jungle Book 40th anniversary, Meet the Robinsons, a forthcoming mix of computer generated and drawn, Peter Pan in Return to Never Land, the straight to video sequel, and the new Tinker Bell.

As often happens, by the time you get to the second disc, DVD contents begin to feel thin and repetitious. Disc two is divided into four parts: Music, Backstage, Games, and Peter Pan’s Virtual Flight. That last item is a nothing, a three or four minute computer generated tour of the film’s unpopulated settings.

I barely looked at the Games section which has “Read Along Peter Pan,” “Camp Never Land: Train To Be a Lost Boy,” “Smee’s Sudoku Challenge,” “Tarrrget Practice,” and “Tink’s Fantasy Flight,” which I tried to play but couldn’t figure out.

Music contains a pirate song deleted from the film, or more precisely never shot, an interview with composer Richard Sherman who resurrected an unfinished song, wrote it up, and which we hear in a music video sung by Paige O’Hara. Finally, the Disney Channel’s T-Squad offer a music video of “The Second Star to the Right.”

Backstage Disney offers up “You Can Fly: The Making of Peter Pan” (15:55), a modern making of; “In Walt’s Words: ‘Why I Made Peter Pan'” (7:41), a reading of an article that appeared in something called Brief magazine around the time the movie came out, and which is surely not really “in Walt’s own words,” but ghosted by a staff writer; “Tinker Bell: A Fairy’s Tale,” (8:27) an account of the fairy’s role in the Disney universe, from Disneyland gatekeeper to inspiration for subsequent “take charge” Disney dames; “The Peter Pan that Almost Was” (21:01), which offers variations on the finished film (Pan was supposed to be Disney’s second feature, but the war intervened; in one variation, Nana goes to Never Land); Art Galleries (Visual Development, David Hall Concept Art, Mary Blair Concept Art, Character Design, Storyboard Art, Layouts and Backgrounds, Production Photos, Live Action Reference, and Publicity), and “The Peter Pan Story,” a black and white promotional film from 1952 (12:04).

Inserted into the box is a thick promotional catalog of Disney wares, and a six page and not completely helpful guide to the DVD (it doesn’t list the yak track participants).

Comments: None