Like This!

And New Guinea

Was Never

With Mutiny on the “Bounty’ ’ not yet finished filming in Tahiti, it seems that the Pacific is going to have to survive another technicolour epic, Swiss Family Robinson.

WALT DISNEY is the man behind this one (MGM are encouraging the Mutiny ) and Walt is spending $5,000,000 to create his version of the story. He is shooting it on the island of Tobago, in the West Indies, but that’s not the point, The setting for the film is really in the “Colony of New Guinea”!

In view of what this Colony of New Guinea is going to look like, nobody should have any real objections about it being filmed in the West Indies. The real Territory of New Guinea would hardly be anxious to get involved in it.

Disney’s Colony of New Guinea has an elephant, three tigers, one lion, and two cheetahs. The New Orleans Zoo also provided ostriches and zebras—which, as every student knows, are standard New Guinea fauna.

Miami has provided a vegetarian tortoise (fed, at the cost of $5OO dollars a week, on airfreighted lettuce).

Great danes, hyenas, vultures and John Mills complete the cast, assisted by 100 or so Tobagoan “Malay” pirates, Dorothy McGuire and several American adolescents playing the part of the children.

The original story of Swiss Family Robinson was written by Johann Wyss and published in Germany in

1813. Its locale was on a fertile island south-east of Java, and the critics of the day regarded it as a steal from Robinson Crusoe.

Disney’s Swiss family of five, abandoned by the crew of a storm tossed ship, fend for themselves on this strange island, and apart from being good at wood work (tree houses, et al) they fight wild animals, pirates and find a teen age girl, Roberta, There had to be a nubile teen ager, of course. Even Disney’s girls these days have busts. (Remember that precocious fairy, “Tinkerbell”, in Peter Pan?) Roberta is rescued from the “Malay” pirates, but this being a Disney production, Roberta is both chased and chaste to the last reel, Disney doesn’t mind what you do with your adult imagination after you leave the cinema but he is using only female monkeys “to stop them fighting over sex problems” (accord ing to some publicity on the film).

Personally, I think Walt is on the wrong track and that what the public wants is a million-dollar expose of the marital morals of Rhesus monkeys. How about, “I was a Teenage Baboon Bride”, set in the African veldt and filmed in New York’s Central Park?— -Alan Fitz gerald.