...and being as insufferably, pretentiously smug as Schlitz about it as ever.

Now, I'm not here to say things couldn't use a refresh - no doubt they could. In theory, we're light years away from 1955.

Walt Disney Imagineering will remove insensitive racial stereotypes and caricatures of indigenous people from Peter Pan’s Flight at Disneyland and install a new scene depicting Tiger Lily and the Never Land Tribe with dignity and cultural authenticity.

The changes to Peter Pan’s Flight in Fantasyland at Disneyland follow recent updates to its sister ride at Florida’s Magic Kingdom.

But couldn't Disney, for once, keep their corporate, self-congratulatory, preening mouths shut? Why couldn't Disney have quietly tweaked characters in a ride that they knew had issues decades later? The answer is they easily could have but took the easy way out so they wouldn't have to spend money while they raked in money from the ride anyway.

It's the flaming, money-grubbing hypocrisy I can't stand.

Don't tell me how wonderful you are by announcing to the world these bold, virtuous actions you are finally taking, which you expect to be lauded and rewarded with lucre for that the Disney Corp should have - and could have - done years ago but chose the easy way around it.

You know - like flashing a cheap 'disclaimer' before the movie plays on your streaming channel instead of actually expending corporate funds.

...A disclaimer on Disney+ that accompanies “Peter Pan” notes the negative and harmful depictions in the 1953 animated movie.

“These stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now,” according to the Disney+ disclaimer.

The new and improved version of the scene in the ride looks pretty darn good, actually (pictures in the article). I really like it.

The question is, why did it take 53 years (Disney World redo) to change something that simple - surely the ride was down for maintenance sometime in those decades - if it's been so racially offensive for so long? Who is Disney kidding?

...Peter Pan’s Flight had been closed since July for planned maintenance, which provided Disney “an opportunity to evolve our storytelling in the scene featuring the Never Land Tribe.”

The previous version of the scene (pictured side-by-side with its replacement below) depicted Tiger Lily and other members of the Never Land Tribe sitting around a fire and looking stern in the face, one of the characters with their arms crossed and others playing drums.

New designs behind the characters now display a sea turtle, an animal’s paw print, and the “second star to the right,” aka the location of Never Land in the night’s sky. The former designs featured a buffalo, a bird, and the sun.

Peter Pan’s Flight opened with Magic Kingdom in 1971 after likewise being an opening-day ride at California’s Disneyland in 1955. Versions of the classic Fantasyland attraction also exist at Disney parks in Tokyo, Paris, and Shanghai.

The LA Times is delighted Disney is ridding one of their oldest rides of the "racist tropes" J.M. Barrie sprinkled through his childhood tale.

One of Disneyland’s original rides plans to remove racist tropes

Disneyland is set to to update one of its oldest rides to correct racist tropes about Indigenous people.

Peter Pan’s Flight, one of the original theme park attractions when Disneyland opened in Anaheim in 1955, will update Tiger Lily and her tribe in the ride, which has come under scrutiny for its racist portrayal of Native American characters.

An updated Never Land Tribe scene recently was unveiled at the company’s Walt Disney World in Orlando, Fla., and the company said riders can expect to see those revisions at all its locations globally. The company did not provide a timeline.

...James Matthew Barrie, who wrote the play “Peter Pan” and then the novel “Peter and Wendy” in the early 20th century, used racist terms like “redskins” and “savages” to describe Native American tribes, and this imagery carried over into the 1953 adaption of his work in Disney’s animated film “Peter Pan,” with musical numbers like “What Makes the Red Man Red?” In 2015, Warner Bros. was accused of whitewashing Tiger Lily by having Rooney Mara, a white woman, portray the Native American princess in “Pan.”

The LAT author really does a disservice to the context of "racist tropes" as far as when Barrie first debuted his gamin gad-about. Peter Pan first appeared as a story character in 1902. That is hardly the "early 20th century" - it was the turn of the century.  Only two years later, he became the leading lad - 1904. 

Let's be fair to Mr. Barrie, the 19th-CENTURY man writing these books and plays during *check notes* the turn of the century.

For context, in Mr. Barrie's defense, who learned what he knew of "Native Americans" (no such phrase in use at the time) whilst living in England (before accurate news was accessible, hello), the American "Indian Wars" continued until 1924. In fact, the last Medal of Honor for action during them was awarded in 1899, a mere two years before Pan's first published appearance. 

The language the LAT objects to, which is rightly seen as "racist tropes" today, was fed by reports from the frontier, embellished by a hyperbolic press (pot meet kettle, LAT...?), and consumed by readers here and abroad...such as J.M. Barrie in the UK. I have no doubt he pulled many of those phrases directly from news copy, and Disney, along with other production versions, later used them verbatim because sensitivities to "tropes" in the 50s were not yet as discerning or acute as our enlightened era.

What the light of time, history, and truth has revealed now about those last skirmishes and campaigns against the Western tribes is a very different animal from what were the reports at the time and for decades to come.

But here are modern eyes, living in an incredibly much better world, looking back 122 years in condemnation. Chill out. Can context never have a place at the outrage table?

I found a thread a fellow did on Disney films - how the older ones are so much more complex than the latest - which had a couple of Xweets about Peter Pan that I thought were funny and intriguing. The 1953 film is a classic and, to be perfectly honest, never one of my favorites (so this post is hardly an emotional defense). But I know there are legions of fans. 

This fellow noted some things about the film that give it some depth, too.

45. Peter Pan is the most Red Pill Disney: resist feminization (civilisation)

r e t v r n to the land as Indians hunting and smoking, go to sea as pirates in camaraderie, rule over beautiful and adoring Pixies/Mermaids

Do not follow Mary into the Victorian home/jail. Trap! pic.twitter.com/mTfWupqgnn

— Misha Saul (@misha_saul) June 19, 2022

The mean-girls thing is hilarious. Gotta watch mermaids, man.

And who as a kid didn't want to be a pirate, or...well. The rest (I can do without any more angry emails already).

As for Tiger Lily herself, in one of the snippets I watched earlier of the animated original Disney film, she's a little badass. The pirates capture her, then try to force her to give up Peter Pan and the Lost Boys...and she won't. Even when they plop her on a piling with the crocodile on the way - she almost drowns, but she's not breaking for anything.

What little girl in her daydreams wouldn't want to be Tiger Lily?

SIGN ME UP

Tragically, so many kids today - locked in their homes for fear of 'stranger danger,' trapped in only organized playtimes, or used to having a game or "educational" console thrust into their hands - will never know what those flights of marvelous childhood fancy are. Dirty hands, wet sneakers, ripped pants, and grass-stained knees, the incredible magic in sticks and twigs.

So, God help Disney if they ever retouch their original, although I have no doubt that thanks to the complete bankruptcy of imagination and creative courage at the current House of Mouse, there will be a totally woke Disney Peter Pan version sometime in the future. 

As for Peter himself, he was already androgynous enough (would that be "binary" now?) that Mary Martin played him in the 1960 musical (I always thought it was ghastly), as have other female gymnasts. For sure, Disney would trans the Pan in that latest version - that's a given.

If Peter's old Never Land crew was considered "stereotypical" for 50s-era kids' imaginations run riot, I can't begin to conceive what kind of demented, tortured, totally inclusive kiddie group the virtue-signaling Karens operating behind Disney's faux family-friendly facade could come up with. I could only believe it would be a nightmare freak show of epic proportions. 

Yeah, our modern world is much less racist, and thank God, right? We are aware of it when we truly see it or when we see where it once was. 

But then there are ways we still fail miserably.

Applauding morally deficient Disney's self-aggrandizing but financially convenient virtue-signaling would be one of them.

It's like smiling at a crocodile.