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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.
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