Disney Films/Plays

[seal!]

How many disney films (e.g. Alice in Wonderland) Have been made into plays/stage musicals?

[flashpig]

The Lion King is the only one I can think of straight off based on a Disney film.

But Re: Alice in Wonderland or Mary Poppins. These have been Disney films, but I guess the musical would be based on the original source material, the books by Lewis Carrol and P. L. Travers or whoever. So the fact that they have been Disney films and musicals could maybe be seen as coincidental, merely sharing the same roots.

Mind you, these musicals could be based more on the films. I am not a fan or a boffin of musicals. Just chucking in what I know (or think I know).

Am I blathering on telling you stuff you already knew?

Anyway, in answer to your actual queston, I know of The Lion King and Mary Poppins.

[spudqueen]

You're corrent flashpig in the fact that the Mary Poppins stage musical is based on the books by P L Travers rather than the Disney film, however they have kept the songs from the film in, though there are also some new songs. Of course Peter Pan has often been staged at theatres, but again these would be based on the original book.

[jno]

Beauty and the Beast too. Peter Pan started out as a play (there was a book about him, but it didn't have Wendy or her family in it; they were created for the plahy).

[spudqueen]

jno - I'm pretty sure that the book of Peter Pan has Wendy in it - that's how the name Wendy became popular, from the book.

[Kingaroo]

Keep in mind that Lion King was the first completely original story that Disney made a film of.  All the earlier ones -- Alice, Peter Pan, Sleeping Beauty, Little Mermaid, Mary Poppins, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, etc -- all relied on traditional fairy tales or an existing novel or play. Often the traditional story had been reworked before Disney, for example, Sword in the Stone is THWhite's novel about the youth of King Arthur, so Disney's movie was a variation on White's variation on the original folk tale, which of course had been written down many times over.

 

Hmm now I'm wondering if I am being a little broad in saying Lion King was the very FIRST -- what about the Love Bug movies, and Flubber, and The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes, and all those gems from the 60s and 70s.

But anyway you take my point about the childrens classics.

[jno]

Hi spudqueen... I've been looking at wikipedia and I'm unclear from it whether Wendy was introduced in book or play, see what you think...

Kingaroo some Disney cartoons were original material - Dumbo, Lady and the Tramp, I think; and Basil the Great Mouse Detective and Oliver and Co were sort of classical adaptations. Lion King is said to be an adaptation of Hamlet, come to that.