Dickens, Disney, Oliver, and Company: Adaptation in a Corporate Media Age

Abstract

[...]Pete Young pitched an idea, and his was the one the executives chose: the next Disney animated feature would be "Oliver Twist with dogs" (Stewart 71-72). Sayers's lament that Disney versions are simpler and "sweeter" than the originals, Schickel's worries about homogenization, and Zipes's notion of a "Disney spell" that appropriates the fairy tale tradition all share a common assumption: each sees fidelity to an original as the marker of success, and deviations- whether saccharine, indistinguishable, or spellbinding-as failures.

Shortly after taking the helm at The Walt Disney Company in the mid-1980s, CEO Michael Eisner and chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg began holding "gong show" meetings, at which animators would pitch story ideas. At one such meeting in 1985, Ron Clements, a Disney animator who was at work on a film about a Sherlock Holmesian mouse, suggested "The Little Mermaid"-it got the gong, as it was considered too close to the just-released Splash (1984). Clements then offered "Treasure Island in space." It was also rejected. Finally, Pete Young pitched an idea, and his was the one the executives chose: the next Disney animated feature would be "Oliver Twist with dogs" (Stewart 71-72).

When Charles Dickens began Oliver Twist; or, the Parish Boy's Progress in 1837, he was responding to a particular parliamentary act (the Poor Laws) and a genre-of-the-moment (the Newgate novels, which glorified the lives of criminals). The story climaxes with the violent, sexually charged murder of a prostitute, followed by the murderer's madness and then his gruesome death. A Disneyfied Oliver Twist, it would seem, would have to ignore most of the novel. Yet given the adaptation history of Oliver Twist, as it moved from the pages of Bentley's Miscellany to the stage, to the screen, and back to the stage again, an animated musical "Oliver Twist with dogs" doesn't seem so unlikely. Drafts of Oliver & Company-the fruition of Young's idea-reveal Disney writers' engagement with the cultural history of Dickens's novel. These drafts, and other materials from the Walt Disney Archives, offer compelling evidence for scholars to reevaluate how we approach Disney's adaptations of culturally prominent literary works.

Critics lament Disney's considerable influence on children's culture. Yet "Disneyfication" is a more culturally aware process than these scholars usually admit. If we are to understand how The Walt Disney Company presents clas- sic texts to children, we must move past comparisons with the original stories and consider the process of drafting and revision. Oliver & Company, though just one example from one stage of the company's history, illustrates Disney's tradition of actively engaging with the reception histories of the texts it adapts, a tradition dating back to the company's origins in the 1930s.

Disney Versions and Disney Spells

The tone for academic study of Disney's adaptations was set by two landmark texts in the 1960s: Frances Clarke Sayers's 1965 letter to the Los Angeles Times, "Walt Disney Accused," which was reprinted in The Horn Book along with an interview, and which Beverly Lyon Clark calls "the first widely heard salvo" among "the conscious custodians of children's culture" (Clark 177); and Richard Schickel's The Disney Version (1968), the first critical biography of Walt Disney. 1 Together, these works provide the basis for later scholars' discussions of Disneyfication. Current scholarship in the field of adaptation studies, however, provides a strong incentive to rethink this term.

Sayers, at the time a senior lecturer in English and library science at UCLA, criticizes Disney for oversimplifying and sanitizing classics of children's literature: "everything is made so obvious that it asks nothing of the readers . . . Disney falsifies life by pretending that everything is so sweet, so saccharine, so without any conflict except the obvious conflict of violence." She also worries that Disney's films taint the stories on which they are based. "If you read Mary Poppins," she says in the Horn Book interview, "you will see what has happened to it in the film. If you read Treasure Island, Alice in Wonderland, and The Wind in the Willows, you will see for yourself how Disney has destroyed something which was delightful."

Schickel, by contrast, objects not to Disney's oversimplification and sanitization but to the fact that the feature films are adaptations rather than original works. He argues that Disney "fell prey to the depressing tendency of the time to downgrade the film as film and to think that its elevation as an art form depended on its being ever more tightly tied, through adaptation, to the literary forms" (273). Schickel links this tendency to the ultimate goal of the Disney machine, "forcing everyone to share the same formative dreams," which are packaged and resold. "As capitalism," he believes, "it is a work of genius; as culture, it is mostly a horror" (18). To Sayers's complaints of oversimplification and sanitization, Schickel adds a capitalist motivation and a push toward homogeneity. Together, these traits sum up what most critics mean when they speak of Disneyfication.2

Subsequent scholars followed suit. Jack Zipes, for example, argues that Disney "used his own 'American' grit and ingenuity to appropriate European fairy tales," gaining a "cultural stranglehold" on the genre (21). Finding Disney's fairy tale films "astonishingly autobiographical" (31), Zipes argues that Walt Disney imposes his own rags-to-riches story onto these tales, "stamping his signature as owner on the title frame of the film" (38). Disney's films thus not only "long nostalgically for neatly ordered patriarchal realms" (38), but are also nothing more than variations on the same homogenized theme.

Sayers's lament that Disney versions are simpler and "sweeter" than the originals, Schickel's worries about homogenization, and Zipes's notion of a "Disney spell" that appropriates the fairy tale tradition all share a common assumption: each sees fidelity to an original as the marker of success, and deviations- whether saccharine, indistinguishable, or spellbinding-as failures. Yet, as Thomas Leitch writes, fidelity to an original "is a hopelessly fallacious measure of a given adaptation's value" ("Fallacies" 161). Scholars of adaptation find numerous faults with "fidelity discourse." Focusing on fidelity leads to value judgments-"the book is better"-while modern academic scholarship is generally "not about making polarized value judgments, but about analyzing process, ideology, and methodology" (Sanders 20). Such an approach also "ignores the wider question: Fidelity to what?" (Stam 57). As Leitch notes, "each individual adaptation invokes many precursor texts besides the one whose title it usually borrows . . . no intertextual model, however careful, can be adequate to the study of adaptation if it limits each intertext to a single precursor" ("Fallacies" 165).

A commitment to fidelity also peremptorily elevates the literary original over the cinematic adaptation, precisely the elevation that Schickel complains of when he faults Disney for the "depressing tendency" to base his films on literary texts (273). Kamilla Elliott historicizes this tendency: while early critics "perceived film to be an impressive combination of art forms," as cinema emerged as its own art form it shed its combinatory past by first claiming and then rejecting its literary forebears (114). The novel, particularly the Victorian novel, was the forebear claimed most strongly and most directly. Sergei Eisenstein- the same influential director who called Disney's works "the greatest contribution of the American people to art" (qtd. in Clark 169)-claimed that "from Dickens, from the Victorian novel, stem the first shoots of American film aesthetic" (Eisenstein 195). Such claims, as Elliott notes, imply "not simply that the nineteenth-century novel influenced western film, but that it in some sense became film" (3; emphasis in original). These claims disregard other art forms, especially illustration and the theater, that had more obviously influenced film's emergence in the early twentieth century. According to Elliott, that disregard was a political move: "Quite apart from the prestige and interest early film derived from crediting celebrated popular novelists like Dickens, a debt to the invisible visualities of prose is far easier to cast offthan debts to tangible visual arts in a bid to declare film a unique art" (123).

Viewed in this light, the adaptations that Schickel found depressing represent a strategic choice, one that underscores the capitalist agenda he denounces. Critics who insist on comparisons between a film and the novel on which it is supposedly based contribute to this agenda, ignoring other art forms that might be equally or more important to the adaptation. This is not to say that considering an adaptation's relationship to a source text cannot yield valuable insights. Zipes's essay is important precisely for its focus on Disney's appropriation of the fairy tale, an appropriation that makes sense only in the context of the history of fairy tales that Zipes provides. Similarly, Waller Hastings's main point in "Moral Simplification and The Little Mermaid" is that Disney's version of Hans Christian Andersen's tale superimposes "typical elements of Disneyfication and a happy ending that contravenes the moral intention of the original tale" (85). Hastings's essay is essentially about fidelity, but he concludes by linking the film's Manichean worldview to the "conservative American ideology of the 1980s" and President George H. W. Bush's "transformation of the Gulf War from a geopolitical conflict into a crusade against the person of Saddam Hussein" (90). That this sentence also could have been uttered verbatim ten years later in 2003, during the presidency of George W. Bush, underscores the point. Like Zipes, Hastings links an argument about fidelity and Disneyfication to the cultural work that film performs.

Both Zipes and Hastings closely situate their arguments within the history of film and even within the context of global politics. But, in the process, another history is elided. By arguing that Disney appropriates particular precursors, both Zipes and Hastings ignore other works that more directly intervened. Citing Karen Merritt, Zipes (in a footnote) acknowledges that a theatrical version of "Snow White" might have been Disney's source for the narrative, even as he compares Disney's films to the Grimms' tale (41). And by taking Andersen's tale as the "original" being adapted, Hastings ignores The Walt Disney Company's long history with "The Little Mermaid." The artist Kay Nielson had produced concept paintings as early as 1939, and Disney had plans to collaborate with Samuel Goldwyn on a biographical feature about Andersen (Allan 270). Goldwyn eventually made his own movie, starring Danny Kaye and featuring a ballet sequence based on "The Little Mermaid" (Hans Christian Andersen). There is no doubt that these intermediaries affected the production of the film decades later.3

Leitch cites "a rupture between the theory and the practice of adaptation studies" (Adaptation 1). By focusing on Disney's practice of adaptation, as evidenced by research reports and story notes in the Walt Disney Archives, I hope to offer a different approach to Disneyfication that moves beyond questions of fidelity to an original. I take Oliver & Company as my primary example, linking Dickens to Walt Disney and locating Disney's cartoon in the history of adaptations of Oliver Twist. The most prominent character in those adaptations is Nancy, the prostitute who befriends Oliver and whose murder provides the moral impetus for the novel's denouement. Disney's omission of Nancy initially seems a strong break from what Paul Davis calls the culture text, the popularly remembered version of the story. But drafts of the film show how storywriters struggled to keep her storyline, dropping it only when it proved incommensurate with other adaptive choices.

Dickens and Oliver Twist

Charles Dickens was already famous when he began serializing Oliver Twist in Bentley's Miscellany in February 1837. The Pickwick Papers had earned him national acclaim, and with Pickwick Dickens introduced two elements that would be important for his later novels and would ultimately connect them to the twentieth-century animated musical: serial publication and illustration. While other novelists remained committed to the three-decker novel and the concomitant dependence on lending libraries, Dickens serialized his novels in weekly or monthly numbers (Eliot 44-45). Among the advantages of this method was the relationship that it helped him to create with his readers. His novels brought people together in a literal way, as family members would eagerly await installments and gather round to read them. This cross-generational appeal links him to Walt Disney. "Dad never thinks of children as his primary audience," affirms Walt's daughter, Diane Disney Miller. "The situations in his cartoons are ones adults can enjoy too. 'When we make our movies,' Dad says, 'we try to please ourselves instead of some composite, imaginary child'" (Miller and Martin 82).

Serial publication also divided readers' experiences into periods of waiting followed by (to use a twenty-first-century coinage) binge-reading. Dickens orchestrated what were essentially "synchronized communal readings for tens of thousands of people" (Andrews 20). That divided reading experience was re-created in the text, in a smaller form. As Martin Meisel points out, the illustrations punctuate the reading: "The reading experience assumed in most of the serial fiction produced in the middle decades of the century was discontinuous," and that discontinuity was mirrored in the reader's alternation between text and image, so that "To read was to experience both picture and text" (53). In this alternation we might see the origins of the animated cartoon, another narrative technology that synchronizes discrete images into a continuous display.

The final number of The Pickwick Papers appeared in October 1837. The first part of Oliver Twist had appeared in February of the same year. For nine months Dickens was writing two novels at the same time, while also serving as editor of Bentley's Miscellany. He kept up this pace throughout his career, going on to found and edit two magazines later in his life, and often beginning the next novel before finishing the current one. Like Walt Disney, also famous for his enthusiasm and vitality (he often compared himself to a honeybee [Schickel 32]), Dickens liked to keep busy. But Oliver Twist began differently than did Pickwick, which was launched as a vehicle for the illustrator Robert Seymour; though illustrated by George Cruikshank, it was first and foremost a Dickens novel. And it had a political purpose. From the very first paragraph Dickens takes aim at the workhouses established by the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, and Oliver Twist worked alongside newspaper accounts in shaping public discourse about the Poor Laws: within days of the novel's first number, the London Times excerpted a scene to show the Act's inhumanity (Hadley 77).

Satire of the Poor Laws, however, is not the element of Oliver Twist that would be best remembered by readers. The narrative leaves behind the workhouse after just a few chapters, and its social impetus moves from provincial politics to London's "foul and frowsy dens," as Dickens calls them in his preface (3).4 If in those early chapters the novel's subtitle-The Parish Boy's Progress- most directly alludes to Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, with Oliver in the role of Christian, the allusion shifts register to invoke George Hogarth's The Harlot's Progress. As many of Dickens's early readers noticed, Oliver's story is overshadowed by that of Nancy, the kind-hearted prostitute who tries to protect him. As Richard Ford wrote in the Quarterly Review, "we all sympathise with Nancy's melancholy fate: her death is drawn with a force which quite appalls" (407). For nineteenth-century readers, Nancy's murder was the novel's climax.

As Malcolm Andrews puts it, Dickens was exceptional in wanting not only celebrity but "friendship, personal affection, a permanent place in people's lives, and a corner in their homes" (24-25).5 In his reading tours, begun in the late 1850s, he continued to develop the relationship with his audience that he had been building since his earliest novels. Among his most notorious performances was "Sikes and Nancy."6 Dickens's friends "adamantly opposed" this addition to his repertoire, "fearful of the extraordinary physical and physiological demands it made upon" him (Slater 591). Dickens was a famously active performer, evidenced by the underlining and marginalia in his reading texts and by the testimonies of those who heard him. His manager George Dolby believed that these performances, especially "Sikes and Nancy," hastened the author's death from a stroke (Slater 591). Dickens's histrionic reading of the scene, together with the subsequent rumors of its connection to his death, further elevated the importance of Nancy's murder to the popular imagination of Oliver Twist. It is this "Sikes and Nancy" element with which Oliver & Company seems most incongruous. And that element was even more central to the stage and film adaptations of the novel, both during Dickens's lifetime and after his death.

Adapting Oliver

Dickens's choice to add "Sikes and Nancy" to his readings was likely driven by the prominence that Nancy had earned on the stage even before the novel was finished. The connection between melodrama and Dickens is well documented. Oliver Twist borrows many conventions from the stage, both drawing on and contributing to what Elaine Hadley calls the "melodramatic mode" in which many nineteenth-century texts operate. Dickens most explicitly reveals the link in a famous passage from the novel: "It is the custom on the stage," begins chapter 17, "in all good murderous melodramas, to present the tragic and the comic scenes, in as regular alternation, as the layers of red and white in a side of streaky bacon" (117). Dickens's use of stage conventions in his fiction, combined with his popularity, made his novels fine candidates for dramatic (and later, cinematic) adaptations. In the absence of copyright law protecting reproduc tions in different media, the vast majority of stage adaptations were produced without his permission or control. And because his novels were serialized, they were typically performed onstage before they were even finished, much to his chagrin. Forster recalls accompanying Dickens to a production of Oliver Twist at the Royal Surrey Theatre in 1838, while the novel was still being serialized: "in the middle of the first scene he laid himself down in a corner of the box and never rose from it until the drop-scene fell" (Life 152).

Naturally, and despite the author's objections, these performances shaped the public's reception of his novel. The script for the performance Dickens attended at the Surrey was written by George Almar and became the basis for subsequent adaptations throughout the century (Barreca 87). According to Regina Barreca, the play is "a full blown 'murderous melodrama,' of the sort that Dickens discusses" in the "streaky bacon" passage (89). Nancy's murder is the play's "undeniable climax" as "dramatic versions absorb the horror and transform the scene into the catalyst that turns Oliver Twist into a revenge tragedy better titled Nancy's Vindication" (Barreca 91). Yet, early though it was, Almar's play was not the first. A version of Oliver Twist had been performed even earlier, in May 1838, when only thirty of the novel's eventual fifty-three chapters had been published. Nancy's murder closes chapter forty-seven, which had not yet appeared, but even here her role is enhanced. The "dramatis personae" list her as "Sikes's wife," and she recognizes Oliver when she first sees him (Barnett 4, 20). C. Z. Barnett, who wrote this stage adaptation, ends the story by revealing Oliver to be Mr. Brownlow's long-lost grandson, and Monks the latter's nephew who had hoped to marry his daughter (Oliver's mother). He makes Nancy into Monks's jilted lover, who reveals his identity in the final act (Barnett 37). Barnett thus recognizes Nancy's centrality to the story, even before the murderous conclusion.

The melodramatic adaptations of Oliver Twist enhance the elements that Dickens would later highlight in his public readings. Together they ensured that Nancy's murder was the focal point of the narrative, which would remain true of cinematic adaptations in the twentieth century. While stage adaptations greatly expanded Dickens's cultural presence during the Victorian period, his place in today's cultural consciousness derives more from the film and television adaptations. The first was the American Mutoscope Co.'s The Death of Nancy Sykes (sic) (1897), and since then "more films have been made of works by Dickens than of any author's" (Marsh 204). For the first half of the twentieth century Oliver Twist was the most adapted Dickens text, beating out even A Christmas Carol (John 212). In the process, certain excisions occurred: the Poor Laws, for example, had been crucial both to the novel's first readers and to stage adaptations (scene 2 of Barnett's adaptation opens with the orphans in the workhouse singing, "The Poor Law Bill! / The poor man's shame! / It bringeth him ill, / And it bringeth him pain!" [7]). But in her survey of screen versions, Juliet John finds only one allusion to the bill (230), even as most versions keep the Victorian setting.

If The Death of Nancy Sykes continued the legacy of the melodramatic adaptations and Dickens's own readings, later silent films changed the story's tone, emphasizing the community and marketability of the text. Frank Lloyd's 1922 version, for example, built on the popularity of Jackie Coogan, who had recently won acclaim for his performance in Charlie Chaplin's The Kid (Napolitano 11). After World War II, though, all other film adaptations were overshadowed by two British productions: David Lean's Oliver Twist (1948) and Carol Reed's Oliver! (1968), the film version of the Lionel Bart musical that had just completed its record-breaking run in London's West End. Lean's film reclaimed Oliver Twist's "Englishness" and shifted the public's sense of the novel "from the cheery and sentimental tone of the early American films toward the stark austerity of postwar England," as Marc Napolitano notes (16). But by far the most salient feature was Alec Guinness's portrayal of Fagin. Lean's stated goal was to be as faithful as possible to Dickens's original text, and that fidelity came with a price. Lean's costuming and casting choices (including Guinness's prosthetic nose) were based on Cruikshank's illustrations, a choice that Lean cited to defend himself and Guinness from charges of anti-Semitism (John 220). This defense proved futile, however, and Lean's film caused riots in Berlin and was initially banned in the United States, eventually allowed to be screened only in an edited version (John 219-26).

It was in this context that Lionel Bart produced Oliver!, the basis for Reed's film. In terms of narrative Bart's libretto closely mirrors Lean, who had already successfully reduced the long novel into a manageable script. Most of the scenes in Oliver! correspond with scenes in Lean's Oliver Twist (Napolitano 47). Fagin, though, is much less villainous in the musical, and Bart's choice to focus the ending's "dramatic action solely on Fagin re-emphasizes him as the musical's lead character" (Weltman 382). When combined with the complete removal of Monks (who features briefly in Lean's version but not at all in Bart's), the tempering of Fagin's persona concentrates the villainy in a single character: Bill Sykes.7

The change in theme and tone between Dickens's Oliver Twist and Bart's Oliver! helps to explain why Disney chose such a seemingly inappropriate story. In fact, Napolitano argues that with the mass global marketing of the Reed film, and the fact that it usurped the original in the cultural memory, Oliver! had already "Disneyfied" Oliver Twist (200). But highlighting Sykes's character brings the focus back to the narrative's most violent scene, the murder of Nancy. Nancy's role is even larger in the musical than in the book, as her subplot competes with Oliver's and Fagin's for attention. Napolitano cites early drafts and casting calls for Oliver! that included Rose Maylie and a much-expanded role for Nancy's associate Bet. These characters, it was ultimately decided, distracted from "the relationship between Nancy and Oliver-a relationship that, in several respects, has come to define the entire adaptation" (71). Napolitano argues that while "Dickens's original text is about the power of good to survive in the face of evil," Bart's musical "is about the equally enduring power of love," and the "strange and seemingly fruitless romance between Nancy and Bill" is central to that thematic shift(135).

On the one hand, when Disney writers chose to make an animated musical version of Oliver Twist, the novel's cultural prominence and child protagonist made it seem an appropriate choice. On the other hand, throughout the adaptation history of Oliver Twist, from the earliest stage productions during the novel's serialization through Dickens's reading tours, the early American films, Lean's anti-Semitism, and Bart's musical, the murder of Nancy has been at the narrative's core. Disney's writers would need to find a way to account for her character.

Writing Oliver & Company

Though Disney promoted the film as a contemporary version of Dickens (including this theme in the featurette "The Making of Oliver & Company"), the immediate precursor to Oliver & Company was clearly Bart's Oliver! rather than Dickens's Oliver Twist. Sharon Weltman posits that the title Oliver & Company may be "an homage to Bart's play" since "in the score of Oliver!, several musical numbers are designated in the play's score as to be performed by 'Oliver and Company'" (383). That the "company" featured so many children is likely what made the story plausible as a Disney animated musical. Not only did Oliver! change the tone and downplay the anti-Semitism of Lean's film, but it also was (and remains) a staple of school and community theaters. Since Oliver! calls for a cadre of child performers, budding actresses and actors encounter the narrative at a young age. Even during the musical's first run on the West End, the producers received letters from schoolchildren "in hopes of getting permission to perform songs from the show in recitals" (Napolitano 106).

The stage musical's presence is felt in Disney's casting. In addition to headliners Bette Midler and Billy Joel, the New York Times review highlights "Sheryl Lee Ralph, who studied with the Negro Ensemble Company before playing 1,200 Broadway performances in 'Dreamgirls'" and "Roscoe Lee Browne, a veteran of Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival" (Culhane). Howard Ashman, fresh from the success of Little Shop of Horrors, also worked on Oliver & Company, and his collaborator on Little Shop, Alan Menken, would soon join him at Disney. The studio was beginning to approach its animated musicals as if they were Broadway shows, a strategy that would lead the Eisner era, which saw the release of successes such as The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and The Lion King, to become known as the "Disney Renaissance." For that reason, more than any other, Oliver & Company marks a crucial turning point for The Walt Disney Company.

In the early 1960s, Oliver! had proved that a British stage musical could rival the Americans in the genre they had come to dominate. Together with Lean's Oliver Twist, Bart helped to reclaim the story from the American film industry. With Oliver & Company, which relocates the story to New York City, Disney once again claimed the British source text for an American form: the cartoon musical. But the setting is only one of many changes that Disney made, not just to Dickens's novel but to the culture text of Oliver Twist. Oliver & Company essentially strips Fagin of his villainy-the "character descriptions" describe him as "Autocratic toward his gang, but loves them. He's a bum with a heart of gold" (Character Descriptions)-and tilts the power dynamic between him and Sykes. Brownlow and the Maylie household are condensed into the child Jenny and her butler Winston, and Disney adds an antagonist, Jenny's pet poodle Georgette, whose primary role in the film seems to be as a vehicle for Bette Midler.8 Original story concepts involve a plot to steal a panda from the Central Park Zoo, and a zoo break-in was the story's climax as late as August 1986 (Rough Working Copy). Perhaps most notably, the pathos of Oliver's abandonment is relegated to the opening credits: rather than a workhouse, the film presents a box of abandoned kittens, of whom Oliver is the only one leftunadopted.9 From the beginning, it is clear, Disney had no plans to stick closely to Dickens's novel or even to Bart's version.

Yet Nancy's character, and even her murder, feature prominently in the early story drafts. Even as Disney altered the story, that element of the narrative seemed indispensable. The earliest document in the archives is dated September 24, 1985, though reference to storyboards already in progress indicates that this is not a first draft. A cover sheet lists the goals of the revision: "1. Give Oliver an attitude; 2. Show a more defined relationship between Dodger and Oliver; 3. To develop a warm relationship between Oliver and the Tina character" (Untitled Memo of September 24, cover sheet). Tina Turner was to sing the opening song, and no doubt lent her name to the character. But as the relationship with Oliver indicates, Tina is clearly Nancy. In Dickens's novel Nancy plays the role of Oliver's protector, and the script assigns that role to Tina: when Sykes and his Dobermans arrive, "Tina, using her female charm, sweet-talks the Doberman and distracts him, saving Oliver from certain death" (Untitled Memo of September 24, 4). The ending is even more revealing: "Tina agrees to show Oliver the way through secret alleys, since she is the one who got him involved in the first place. . . . In one of the alleys, they are overtaken by the Dobermans . . . she stalls the Dobermans. As Tina and the Dobermans approach each other growling, we cut to Dodger and the others" (Untitled Memo of September 24, 11). After the plot resolves, Oliver is "eager to share this moment with Tina, but realizes she's not there. He reacts immediately and rushes off. . . . As Oliver runs into an alley, he comes to a sudden stop. Horrified, his eyes fall on Tina, bloodied and dying. . . . Oliver, with tears in his eyes, rests his head on Tina's paw as she dies" (Untitled Memo of September 24, 13). Oliver's presence makes the scene all the more poignant, as does the location in the narrative: after the resolution of the main plot (and so not spurring a "revenge plot," as in earlier versions), but before the final scene, which is still "a happy moment for all" (Untitled Memo of September 24, 13).

Just two days later, the writers already seem unsure about this scene. The next version the script reads, "could have a death scene here, OR Tina survives" (Untitled Memo of September 26, 4). But the connection between Tina and Nancy is made even more explicit in the October 21 draft: the typed copy in the archives is annotated in blue pen, and each appearance of "Tina" has been crossed out and replaced with "Nancy." The alley scene remains: "In a back alley the Dobermans overtake Tina Nancy," and after the plot resolution, "Oliver and the gang race offto look for the missing Tina Nancy. They find her bloodied and helpless" (Story Outline 6). But now she survives, and in the final scene we see "Fagin and the gang, including the bandaged Tina Nancy" (Story Outline 7).

In this version the alley scene is sexually charged, as the plot had earlier implied a relationship between Nancy and one of Sykes's Dobermans. When the Dobermans first appear, the script notes, "Both dogs are cruel, but one a bit less so. We find out that he's Tina's Nancy's ex" (Story Outline 3). By August the character's name had been changed again (to Rita, as it would remain in the final version), but her sexuality is still featured: Rita turns on the television "with a sexy bash of the hip" (Rough Working Copy 11), and when the Doberman Roscoe sees Rita, "The two eye each other. There's a history there" (Rough Working Copy 17). Playing up these aspects links her to Dickens's Nancy and adds a sexual undertone to the alley scene.10

That scene is cut in the film's final version. Rita becomes a minor character, no more developed than the other caricatured dogs in the gang. The first scene with the Dobermans retains an implication that Roscoe is flirting with her, and Katzenberg reportedly calls Rita "the conscience of the gang" (Culhane). That may be the case-Rita is the first to feel guilty about the gang's kidnapping Oliver from Jenny, which unlike the kidnapping in the novel is portrayed as a good faith act, returning Oliver to his friends-but Rita's conscience is far less legible in the final version than in the early drafts.

Ultimately, Nancy's removal results from Disney's combination of human and animal characters. The narrative of Oliver Twist locates Oliver between two worlds: the wealthy, safe world of the Maylies and the Brownlows (replaced, in Disney's version, by Jenny), and the threatening but sometimes enticing world of Fagin and the Dodger. Each world has its own threats and attractions. Dickens contrasts the ineluctable villainy of Sikes and Fagin with the humorous Dodger and the beneficent Nancy, and later adaptations, as we have seen, vary that contrast only by making Fagin less villainous. Disney writers underscored this narrative structure by splitting the cast into human and animal characters. In the underworld, the human Sykes is the villain, and Oliver is welcomed by Fagin and his gang of dogs (the split is reversed in the wealthy Upper East Side townhouse, with its human child, Jenny, and the canine antagonist, Georgette). A Nancy character would have to be emotionally linked both to the human Sykes and to the dogs in Fagin's gang. Early drafts displace the Sykes relationship onto the Dobermans, and develop the relationship between Oliver and Tina/Nancy/ Rita in order to establish the requisite pathos of the Dobermans' attack. But once the death scene was dropped, so was any need to develop Rita's character.

The character who benefits the most from Nancy's removal is the Dodger. He plays a relatively minor role in Dickens's novel (after introducing Oliver to Fagin, he fades into the background, and his trial is played mostly for comic relief), but a major role in Disney's film. The archives show the process. The earliest memo, quoted above, states the goal of defining the relationship between Oliver and Dodger, and later it was suggested that "As a means of strengthening our story structure, OLIVER could be told through Dodger's rather than Oliver's point of view. . . . This would deepen our understanding of the entire cast . . . and clearly focus the story's attention on its centerpiece: Dodger and Oliver" (One Additional Story Concept). Already Dodger has replaced Nancy as Oliver's most important relationship and the presumed centerpiece of the story. In the September 26 draft, Dodger initially resents having to train Oliver, and Tina leads Oliver through the alleyways only after Dodger refuses to help. Dodger is present when Tina dies, and her death solidifies his relationship with Oliver ("'Oliver Twist' Musical"). Dodger's character is privileged even in this early outline, and the casting of Billy Joel as Dodger underscores his prominence in the final version.

If we approach Oliver & Company by comparing it to Dickens's novel, shifting narrative emphasis from Nancy to Dodger is a major departure. But Oliver! had already elevated the Dodger's character. "Consider Yourself," which he sings to welcome Oliver into the gang, is one of the play's most famous songs, and its performance marked a turning point on the opening night (Napolitano 106). So while cutting Nancy is a major departure even from Oliver!, the cut is narratively justified. The choices made in the archived versions of the script show Disney's writers engaging closely with the culture text of Oliver Twist.

Disneyfication Defended

The Walt Disney Company produced its first Dickens adaptation, Mickey's Christmas Carol (1983), only a few years before Oliver & Company. As Leitch argues, Mickey's Christmas Carol was "designed as Mickey Mouse's comeback," aiming not to retell Dickens's story but "to resurrect Disney's signature hero by introducing his backlist to a videotape audience" (Adaptation 88). The accompanying "Making of" special bolsters that objective. The featurette promotes The Walt Disney Company's own legacy, shifting "the subject of 'classic' from Dickens to Disney by invoking a background history that belongs exclusively to the Disney franchise" (89). That goal is not too different from what Sayers had feared, two decades earlier, though in this case it is not just classic texts that Disney appropriates, but the idea of "classic" itself.

In a sense, a similar claim could be made about Oliver & Company. Like Mickey's Christmas Carol, it builds on the company's internal history, albeit in a less overt manner: visually, Disney's feline Oliver is based on the kitten from the Mickey Mouse short "Lend a Paw" (1941), which won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short and is included on the twentieth anniversary DVD of Oliver & Company. And as John has noted, Dickens adaptations rarely remove the author from his Victorian setting: unlike Shakespeare, whose stories have proved temporally and culturally fluid, film versions of Dickens's novels are usually set in nineteenth-century England. When the setting is changed, the result is usually "based on Dickens in only the loosest of ways" (John 239). That looseness is certainly true of Oliver & Company. The New York Times linked the film to Eisner and Katzenberg, both New Yorkers, citing their desire "to make a contemporary live-action musical version of Charles Dickens's 'Oliver Twist' set in New York City" (Culhane). The review traces the film's origins to their time at Paramount, and refers to Oliver Twist as "the Dickens novel that Mr. Katzenberg loved at the Fieldston School in Riverdale" (Culhane). Though, as noted above, Young had first pitched the story, the review portrays Eisner and Katzenberg as the principal creators (just as Walt Disney himself had, in his early films, been claimed as the single auteur).

But Disney's publicity for Oliver & Company still mentions Dickens, rather than the intervening adaptations such as Oliver! that clearly helped to shape the story. In fact, Stewart cites the film's two advantages, from a marketing perspective: "the classic Dickens story and a pop score by well-known composers" led Katzenberg to insist that "Disney put some aggressive marketing behind it," and the choice paid off. When it opened in November 1988, the film "grossed $53 million, setting a new record for an animated feature" (Stewart 89). Even then it was clear that Oliver & Company was the beginning of a new era for Disney. In his review, Culhane notes that the film is "the first in a production schedule that calls for an animated feature a year," and that with this schedule "Mr. Eisner and Mr. Katzenberg are redeeming a promise that Walt Disney made to himself in the 1940's" (Culhane). The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin (referred to in the review as "An Arabian Knight") were all underway when Oliver & Company was released. Beauty and the Beast (1991) would be nominated for Best Picture, and The Little Mermaid (1989), Aladdin (1992), and The Lion King (1993) all won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. This period of success marked the renewed triumph of the foundering animation department and the beginning of the Disney Renaissance. In the history of Disney's growing influence on children's culture, these years feature as prominently as Walt's pre-war period.

Unlike the other films of the Disney Renaissance, however, Oliver & Company has not been claimed as part of Disney's canon. The New Fantasyland at Walt Disney World Resort, opened in 2012, builds on the continued success, decades later, of The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast (Brigante), while to my knowledge no Disney attraction features any character from Oliver & Company. Nor has it sparked the myriad spinoffs and sequels that Disney uses to capitalize on its more successful films. It was re-released once, in 1996, and made available on DVD for its twentieth anniversary in 2009, but in compari son to other Disney features it is relatively forgotten. It is equally neglected in the history of Oliver Twist adaptations. Unlike other Disney films, from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to Frozen (based on Andersen's "The Snow Queen"), Disney's Oliver Twist has not displaced the original. In her survey of screen versions of Oliver Twist in Dickens and Mass Culture, John doesn't even mention Oliver & Company.

But focusing only on Disney's success or failure in displacing original texts is a limited approach. As a moment in company history, Oliver & Company is a milestone. It was the first major success since Walt's death in 1969, and the first animated musical produced under Eisner and Katzenberg. It was also the first project involving Ashman, whose musical collaboration with Menken would prove so important to the organization's success over the next decade. Focusing on this internal history gives us a different perspective on Disney that illuminates both Oliver & Company and the company's history of adaptations more generally. Oliver & Company marks a return not only to the animated musical, but also to procedures begun in The Walt Disney Company's earliest years.

Before deciding which classic or contemporary texts the studio would adapt into animated films, Disney tasked members of the story department to produce detailed research reports. These reports surveyed not only the original text, with chapter-by-chapter outlines and suggestions for how scenes might be approached or characters developed, but also competing film and stage adaptations and even scholarly and biographical works. Al Perkins, in his report about Alice in Wonderland (1938), includes reviews of film and stage adaptations, taking special note of Paramount's 1933 film and Eva le Gallienne's 1932-33 production at the Civic Repertory Theater, and even cites critical biographies of Lewis Carroll by Belle Moses, Harry Morgan Ayers, and Stuart Dodgson Collingwood (11-15). To prepare her 1938 report on Peter Pan, Dorothy Blank read and annotated not just the stage play but also The Little White Bird, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, and Peter and Wendy (Blank, 1 Nov.). Like Perkins, she reviewed existing stage adaptations, especially noting the tradition of women playing Peter and the success of Maude Adams in the role (Blank, 23 Nov.). Blank summarizes Patrick Braybrooke's J. M. Barrie: A Study in Fairies and Mortals (1924) and H. M. Walbrook's J. M. Barrie and the Theatre (1922), and even reproduces a chapter from a critic who will be familiar to readers of Children's Literature Association Quarterly: F. J. Harvey Darton (Blank, 20 Oct.).

Walt Disney presented himself as anti-intellectual, a self-presentation that Schickel's biography helps to perpetuate. Disney was supposedly mystified by "the symbolic meanings people kept finding in The Three Little Pigs," and throughout his life he responded to interpretive criticism with some variation of the now oft-quoted phrase, "we make the pictures and then let the professors tell us what they mean" (Schickel 151-52). Evidence from the Walt Disney Archives, however, belies this claim. Disney may have contended that he waited for the professors to tell him what films meant, but his writers were well aware of those professors' research. By keeping abreast of the cultural prominence of the texts they adapted, storywriters under Eisner and Katzenberg were continuing a tradition begun much earlier in the century, and in an early era of Disney history. If we are to understand The Walt Disney Company's role in presenting classic stories to children, we must account for such histories, taking seriously a film's purpose in the context of a corporate narrative adjacent to but interacting with an original text's reception and adaptation history.

Footnote

Notes

1. Diane Disney Miller's 1956 interview with Pete Martin, published in the Saturday Review, preceded Schickel's book, and thus has claim to the title of first biography.

2. The pejorative actually pre-dates Sayers by a few years. The OED Online gives the first usage as Lawrence Lipton's The Holy Barbarians [1959], referring to "the neon chrome artyfake Disneyfication of America" ("Disneyfication, N.").

3. Richard Wunderlich and Thomas J. Morrissey, in a similar vein, make a strong case that Disney's Pinocchio (1940) owes much to Yasha Frank's stage production, performed in Los Angeles in the late 1930s: Disney writers attended multiple performances (95).

4. At least one early reviewer thought this a blessing: in an otherwise effusive review of the novel during its serialization, John Forster, Dickens's friend and eventual biographer, complains of the "unwarrantable and unworthy use" of "certain bugbears of popular prejudice and vulgar cant connected to the new poor law," and expresses pleasure that satire "only colors the first three chapters of Oliver's history" (400).

5. Taking advantage of the new medium of television, Walt Disney would find an even more literal corner in people's homes, and his persona of "Uncle Walt" might be compared to Dickens's self-portrayal.

6. The reading that Dickens performed begins with Fagin instructing Noah Claypole to follow Nancy to her meeting with Rose Maylie on the bridge and continues through her return home, her murder, and Sikes's madness and then his death in front of an angry mob.

7. As Napolitano points out, Bart had chosen the spelling variant, perhaps as an homage to earlier adaptations. Disney would adopt the same spelling.

8. In her efforts to eject Oliver from the family, Georgette perhaps has roots in Dickens's Monks, but her elevated status, her eventual reform, and the fact that Monks is absent from Bart's musical make the connection less plausible.

9. Disney seems never to have considered an analogue to the workhouse setting. The earliest draftbegins with an overview of New York City and then Jenny receiving Oliver as a birthday present (Untitled Memo of September 24, 1-2). The consequence of this decision is that the novel's most iconic scene, Oliver asking for more gruel, does not fit into the film. Oliver pleads with Dodger to share the stolen sausages, but in the absence of anything like a workhouse setting, the plea lacks the same significance.

10. Though it is still less sexual than Dickens's version: Bart moved the murder from the privacy of the bedroom to the public space of London Bridge, and Disney keeps the scene relatively public.

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