Treasure Island
Treasure Island is Walt Disney's first totally live action film, and it follows the story of the novel more or less faithfully. The film is completely derailed in a very entertaining way by the performance of Robert Newton as Long John Silver. It's this performance that cemented in the popular imagination what a pirate should look, sound and act like. He's got one leg, a parrot which, surprisingly to me was a real bird and the pirate accent, happened to be the actor's natural accent just exaggerated. The movie holds up, which is strange considering it's 73 years old. An interesting bit of trivia about the movie is that it was filmed completely in England, because they had some rule that a certain amount of the box office receipts in England were saved, and film companies were then forced to produce films in England, so all the exotic locales are just places in England and the boy actor Bobby Driscoll was too young to work in England and Disney and his father got fined. I'm curious if Disney paid the fines or not. I would say this film is far better than the majority of the mixed live action and animation films that the company had produced up until then.
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