Cinema: New Picture

The Swiss Family Robinson (Buena Vista), like most of Walt Disney's screen versions of the children's classics (17 to date), is good Disney and bad culture. Ostensibly, the film is based on the world-famed boy's book, published in 1812-13, by Johann Wyss, who was inspired by Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe to produce his own castaway chronicle and give his principal characters the good old Swiss name of Robinson.

Wyss piously proclaimed his tale to be a tract intended to teach children "how blessed are the results of patient continuance in well-doing." What he actually wrote was a sort of sissified, Swissified Tarzan...

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