Peter + Pan

We've been writing an awful lot about Amy and Eleven and Rory and River...but we haven't been giving good old Peter his dues here on the blog.

You look about 9

And you look about 14...

After spending my entire day pouring over the new Diamond Edition of Disney's Peter Pan, I've got more than just a thought or two on the Boy Who Won't Grow Up.

Don't Tell Me It's Not Canon

Okay. I know what some of you are thinking...DISNEY'S Peter Pan? Don't you mean BARRIE'S Peter Pan? 
Well, yes and no, and here's why.
Barrie's Peter is the original Peter; there's no denying which came first. HOWEVER we're living in a world now where Disney's Peter has become so universally recognized that you'll hardly meet a person who knew the tale before the animated film entered their life. This was actually brought to my attention by my Dad, who was sitting and watching Disney's Peter Pan with commentary with me. The film makers were talking about how, when Disney came to the story, it was a unique tale to adapt, because it had already been adapted so many times before. There was the play Peter Pan, the books Peter in Kensington Gardens and Peter and Wendy, the silent film and most recently (before the animation), the live action movie that brought Tinkerbell out of the flashlight and into the limelight, depicting her as a real person for the first time ever. 
Disney's audience would already be well-acquainted with the tales of Peter Pan, and perhaps most importantly, they knew him to be played as a girl.

Look how FRIENDLY the croc suddenly is!

"Interesting" my Dad said. "Now, it's basically the opposite...I mean, when Cathy Rigby played Peter in the 80s, it was like blasphemy to me!" (I'm paraphrasing here, but he did, in fact, use the word blasphemy).
That tradition lives on today, as people will almost always be introduced to DISNEY'S Peter before any others, and the age for that introduction is getting younger and younger with the creation of "Jake and the Neverland Pirates" and the "Pixie Hollow" franchise. Disney has almost entirely created a monopoly on Peter Pan in the popular imagination. At the very least, they have inarguably monopolized Peter in the American imagination.

Sometimes, perhaps because Peter and the Lost Boys were all played with American accents in the Disney film, even I forget that the tale is originally from a Scottish author, and steeped in British culture and history. That, of course, is factually incorrect, but culturally important, and this is where things come full circle. Because Disney's version of Peter Pan has become so well-known, he is now nearly as American as he is British (or Scottish, however you care to argue it) at this point. This is part of why the American audience latched on to Doctor Who with such a steely grip once Amy became Wendy and Eleven became Peter. THIS is why it took nearly 50 years for our country to fully embrace the series in the same mainstream way that England has embraced it in that same time span, and it's why it's fair to say that we connect to the story because it's part of our cultural history. Walt Disney made sure of that in 1953 by starting the first ever merchandising frenzy connected with an animated film (Second Star to the Right). Peter and his friends were on ads for everything from televisions to kid's shoes; and today you can get t-shirts, mugs, stuffed animals, notebooks, pretty much anything that you can imagine with your favorite character(s) from the movie on them. 

In short, we as Americans have embraced Peter so fully that, at this point, he's got dual citizenship. When we write about Peter in America, this is what we are talking about. The movie was released here sixty years ago to the day--that means almost three generations worth of little American tykes (and maybe even a Brit or two) have grown up knowing Walt's Peter before any other version of the classic "Eternal Child". Those three generations include a certain television show writer, born in 1961--well after Disney's version had exploded in popularity, both here and across the pond.

Steven Moffat, born 1961

Until next time,

--Jenisaur