“If sailor tales to sailor tunes,
Storm and adventure, heat and cold,
If schooners, islands and maroons
And Buccaneers and buried Gold,
And all the old romance, retold
Exactly in the ancient way,
Can please, as me they pleased of old,
The wiser youngsters of today:

-So be it, and fall on!”

A bit more than 50 years ago, Disney gave us a film version of Robert Lewis Stevenson’s Treasure Island with Robert Newton as Long John Silver; Newton later parlayed the role into a TV series that lasted for a year (perhaps until Newton died of a heart attack). Now Disney has redone the movie as a cartoon, but under the assumption that all the old romance cannot be retold exactly in the ancient way but should be updated for an age that takes science-fiction — “that Buck Rogers stuff” that was so sneered at by the populace at large in the era when the original movie was made — for granted as part of its standard literary background.

Jim Hawkins’ mother owns an inn (“The Admiral Benbow”, natch) on a distant planet; Jim (voice of Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a troubled teen-ager whose occasional apprehension by robot cops gives his mother many headaches. To the inn, via his ancient broke-down spacecraft, comes the rather monstrous creature Billy Bones, fleeing from an otherwise unidentified “cyborg” — who, with his minions, follows Bones to the inn and burns it down. Jim and his mother escape with the help of Squire Trelawney … excuse me, with an astrophysicist named Dr. Doppler (voice of David Hyde-Pierce), a regular patron. With them they take Bones’s one possession, a star map that will lead them to the planet where the feared and legendary Captain Flint hid his treasure. With Doppler providing the financing, he and Jim hire a ship, the Legacy (not Hispaniola), and set off for this distant “Treasure Planet”. But unbenknownst to them, the Legacy’s crew, under the leadership of the cook John Silver (voice of Brian Murray), is also interested in Flint’s trove …

There have been changes made in the story, some obvious, some not so obvious. Silver’s parrot is gone; instead, he has a morphing creature, similar to an amoeba in its natural state, which is Disneyishly cute. His crutch and pegleg are also gone; now he has an artifical arm, leg and eye, and the modern generation of youngsters might be forgiven for expecting him to cry out: “Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated!” Captain Smollett has been replaced by Captain Amelia (voice of Emma Thompson!), and I don’t remember that in the original story there was any hint of romance between Trelawney and Smollett. Ben Gunn is now BEN (Bio-Electronic Navigator), a robot. Nor do I remember any members of the original crew speaking a language known as “Flatula”. And I certainly don’t remember the island in the original movie being destroyed by explosion at the end. Still …

Traditionalists may complain about this rewriting of Stevenson’s novel. But we’re looking today at a generation that is living fifty years further away from the age in which Stevenson wrote the book than the one that enjoyed the earlier Disney version of the story. And, let me be frank, in 95 minutes of animation the people who made this film give us maybe 3-5 minutes of scenes that really tickle the old sense of wonder. You can hardly ask for more than that. I think that Stevenson, were he alive today, would not be terribly upset by what the Disney people have done with his story. In fact, he might be willing to stay for a second showing.