The Messed Up Origins of Peter Pan | Disney Explained - Jon Solo

[Music] what is going on Disney fans my name is John solo and welcome to another episode of messed up origins the show where we dive into the dark history of some of your favorite Disney films we are covering a highly requested topic today the story of Peter Pan and trust me when I say you're gonna want to watch this episode the whole way through because not only are we gonna discuss the story which in and of itself is pretty dark we're also gonna shed some light on the surprisingly creepy backstory of the author Jay and Barry because when you know his backstory and his inspiration for writing the Peter Pan book let's just say it gets pretty dark now Peter Pan's original conception was different than the one we know from Disney he was first mentioned in a short story in a book by JM Barrie called the little white bird where he's described as a magical boy who escaped from being human as a baby and ever since flies around with fairies unlike the Peter Pan were familiar with this version is only a week old so a newborn baby it's important to note this is not a prequel to the older Peter Pan story the book specifically says there's not the slightest chance of his ever having a birthday so he stays a baby forever but this character is what inspired Barry's creation of the older Peter Pan so there are some connections between the backstories the next piece of work to include Peter Pan was a play by JM Barrie called Peter Pan or the boy who wouldn't grow up the popularity of the play is what led Barrie to write the book Peter and Wendy which is basically the same story as the play but in book format and that is what we are diving into today but before we get started let's first go over what happens in the Disney film just sit back relax hit that like button so we can reach our goal of 5,000 likes and enjoy the story follows Wendy Michael and John darling three kids who live in London while their parents are away at a party they're visited by a magic boy who never ages named Peter Pan who they recognize from stories he teaches them how to fly and takes them to the island of Neverland where his clan of Lost Boys live as well as his enemy Captain Hook at first the darling kids are having a pretty good time but after being harassed by the mermaids and interrogated by Indians they start to get homesick ready to leave on their way out there captured by Captain Hook who plans on making them walk the plank and blowing up Peters hideout with a time bomb thanks to Tinker Bell's intervention Peter survives the explosion and defeats Captain Hook in a duel saving the Lost Boys from his wrath Peter come in dears the pirate ship uses somewhat Tinker Bell's fairy dust to give us some magic and make it fly and then drops off the darlings back at their house in London there's a few details I left out of that summary but don't you worry because we're gonna touch on them in just a bit because the book is actually pretty similar to the movie only the book includes a few more details that make Peter Pan's leadership over the Lost Boys seem a little more evil the story starts by telling us about Wendy darlings childhood and how she came to learn that it wouldn't last forever her mother would often tell bedtime stories to her and her brothers Michael and John and the boy who never ages would secretly eavesdrop on those stories every night on one random evening Peter is spotted sneaking through the window of the nursery and the darlings dog mana scares him away but latches on to his shadow with her teeth mrs. darling folds up the shadow and puts it in a drawer and a week later Peter and Tinkerbell come back to the house to retrieve it they wake up Wendy who reattaches the shadow to its owner and during the conversation that follows Peter learns that Wendy knows lots of bedtime stories and would therefore make a great mother to his gang of Lost Boys he offers to bring her to Neverland and she accepts and she takes her two brothers with her the children head for the second start of the right and half a magical flight to Neverland and have a few interesting encounters on the way they're flying for quite a long time and on this journey they learned that Peter Pan has horrible memory beyond horrible honestly there's points of their flight where he'll veer off for a while and when he encounters the darling kids again they have to keep reintroducing themselves I guess that's a result of his childlike innocence or whatever but Wendy found it pretty annoying when they finally arrived at the island Wendy is shot down by an arrow from the Lost Boys thanks to Tinkerbell telling them that Peter Pan ordered it and then The Lost Boys built a house for her to recover in and call it a Wendy house a term that still used to this day while she's recovering her brothers Michael and John make themselves at home with the Lost Boys and start adopting their ways of living Peter shows Wendy around his under camp and she immediately takes on the role of mother figure the darling kids go on several adventures and spend a lot of time with Peter and over that unknown amount of time they learn a few things about him that are a little scary for example he says that all the Lost Boys are kids who lost their parents in a public park in London called Kensington Gardens so I imagine he's approaching these kids the same way he approached the darlings just encouraging them to go to his magical Island where there's no rules and kids can do whatever they want but he's doing it the kids who wander away from their parents in a public park so it kind of sounds like he's a child predator we also learned that he kills the Lost Boys to thin the herd or when they get too old he periodically alters their body so they can fit through the tree holes that lead to their hideout don't even want to know what that means and he'll sometimes feed them pretend food because he can't tell the difference between real and make-believe it turns out that a magical child with the memory of a goldfish not the best at raising children the first really dangerous mission that Peter takes the darlings on happens at mermaids Lagoon similar to the movie the mermaids in the book were rude to Wendy and the entire Lost Boy game also similar to the movie this is when Hook's pirate ship comes out of the nearby fog it turns out that Hook's men had kidnapped the Chiefs daughter and planned on getting her to reveal the location of Peter Pan's hideout but she refused so their new plan was to tie her up and leave her on a rock in the middle of the ocean at low tide so when the tide rose she would drown but Peter saves her by sneaking up to the ship and impersonating the voice of Captain Hook who apparently wasn't on board at the time and just ordering the pirates to let her go coincidentally the real Captain Hook climbs on board the ship just a few moments after Tigerlily has jumped off and this is when Peter Pan reveals himself and a short battle ensues a cool detail about hook I didn't know about he doesn't have anyone standing guard on his ship because the souls of the people he's killed protect it for a mile in every direction I'm sure there's other responsibilities the souls don't take care of like pulling up the anchor and mast maintenance but they got the standing guard thing covered Captain Hook ends up injuring Peter who winds up stranded on the same rock that Tigerlily was supposed to be on unable to fly he makes peace with his incoming death but luckily a nearby bird volunteers her nest for him to use as a boat to sail back on he makes it back to his camp everyone regards him as a hero into paying back for saving Tiger Lillies life the Indians agree to stand guard over his hideout Wendy starts to fall in love with Peter at this point but when she asks him what he thinks of her he says that she's his mother and he is her loyal son that's a whole nother level of friendzone but it reminds Wendy of her own parents back in London who must be worried sick about them at this point as it's been a few days since they left she decides it's time for her and her brothers to fly back home and even invites the Lost Boys to come along with to be raised by their parents everyone is down for the idea except for Peter who decides to take a nap when the darlings and Lost Boys fly out the problem is they encounter some pirates on their way and are taken captive on the Jolly Roger Peter wakes up from his nap sometime later and Tinkerbell tells him about the danger the darlings and Lost Boys got into he heads out to the Jolly Roger and on the way encounters the ticking crocodile that Hook is so afraid of being the Peters a master of impersonations he copies the ticking sound so that nearby animals and pirates will avoid him when he boards the Jolly Roger he sneaks into the cabin the kids are being held captive in and sets them free and then a battle between the Lost Boys and pirates breaks out it's an intense fight but the Lost Boys come out on top killing all but two of the Pirates and Peter kills Captain Hook by kicking him into the jaws of the crocodile he then takes over the ship and sails back to London with the darlings to be reunited with their parents actually Peter wasn't totally willing to let the darlings go he flew ahead of the ship so he could put bars on their bedroom window so they would think their parents didn't want them to come back but when he got to the house he saw how upset mr. and mrs. darling were and decided against it the story ends in kind of a weird way the kids and their parents reunite the Lost Boys are adopted by the darlings and raised to adulthood and while Peter refuses to grow up he makes a deal with Wendy that he'll bring her back to Neverland for a week every spring so she can help him with spring cleaning the problem is Peter has no real conception of time so after only a few years of Wendy coming to visit him he forgot about her completely for 25 years when he visits her as an adult she also learns he's forgotten all about Tinkerbell Captain Hook and the Lost Boys he makes a new deal with Wendy that her daughter Jane will visit him once a year and when Jane eventually grows older and has her daughter Margaret they make the same deal and that is how the story ends but we're not done just yet because there's a few things I think you should know about the author James Matthew Barry and his weird fascination with boyhood it's believed that his obsession started in 1867 when James was just six years old his brother David was killed just two days before turning 14 when he was knocked down by a fellow ice skater and cracked his head on the ice the word is that David was their mother's favorite out of her 8 living children and the small amount of comfort that she found in his death would be that he would stay an innocent young boy forever and this is how the obsession with innocence and boyhood became anchored in James's psyche it almost sounds like the start of some creepypasta cartoon conspiracy but I promise this actually happened now fast-forward 30 years to 1898 while chilling out in the one-and-only Kensington Gardens James met George and John Davies a four and five-year-old that were walking around with her nurse he was real polite befriended their parents and met their three other sons Peter Michael and Niko he was so close with their family they started calling him uncle Jim on the surface it might not look like there's anything wrong with his relationship with the family but in the book I mentioned earlier James included a passage about a grown man befriending a kid named David weirdly close to the name Davies huh and then lies to David's parents about having his own dead son to create empathy and bond with them I'm not saying that's what he did to the Davies parents but what I am saying is he's coming a little too close to a lena dunham level confession and it gets even weirder some researchers dug up a letter that James wrote to Michael Davies for his birthday and it's thought that Michael was his favorite of the Davies children the letter reads as follows I wish I could be with you and your candles you can look on me as one of your candles the one that burns badly it's a greasy one that has bent in the middle but still hurry I am Michael's candle what I wish I could see you putting on the Redskins clothes for the first time dear Michael I am very fond of you but don't tell anybody totally appropriate to say to an eight-year-old right he refers to himself is a greasy candle that's bent in the middle and I don't even want to know what that's a metaphor for makes a kind of racist comment about Native Americans admittedly the times were different back then but you know he still said it and then said he wanted to watch the child change into the Native American costume which is you know questionable at best and then at the very end he says I'm very fond of you but don't tell anyone I'm gonna go ahead and say this is not normal behavior even for the early 1900's but if you thought it couldn't get worse it does both Davies parents died of natural causes when their kids were still young but for some reason I think maybe because he lived so close to them and because they had no reason not to trust them at this point Uncle Jim was the one responsible for transcribing the parents will and sending it to the boy's grandma and when she received it instead of the will saying the children should go to Jenny it said they should go to Jimmy so he adopted them after their parents died and raised them to adulthood the nature of the relationship is questionable there's some people who firmly believe that JM Barrie was truly scarred from his childhood and had only a platonic obsession with boyhood and innocence others are a little more suspicious and downright accusation 'el I can't pretend to know the truth but I won't deny there were some major red flags popping up as I researched this guy's life it should be mentioned though that despite that scandal Barrie did commit one supremely good deed before he died in 1937 he left the copyright to all of his Peter Pan works to a Children's Hospital in London which still greatly benefits from having the rights to this day and that is the story of JM Barrie and the boy who wouldn't grow up Peter Pan I really hope you enjoyed this episode it's one of my favorites that I've done so far if you can hit that like button so we can reach our goal of 5,000 likes that would mean the world to me also make sure you subscribe for new Disney videos every single week share this video with your Disney love and friends and family and follow me on social media for behind the scenes content and updates on what I'm doing between videos thank you all so much for watching until next time my name is Jon solo and John shot first [Music]

Channel: Jon Solo

Views: 2,596,789

Rating: 4.925457 out of 5

Keywords: Messed Up Origins, Peter Pan, Disney Explained, Jon Solo, Messed Up Origins of Mulan, messed up origins jon solo, messed up origins of aladdin, Peter Pan Original Story, Peter Pan Original Story Summary, Peter Pan Theory, Disney Theory, Pixar Theory, The Little Mermaid, Tarzan, Captain Hook, Peter Pan Shadow, Once Upon a Time, James Matthew Barrie, Peter and Wendy, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, peter pan real story, Mulan, Winnie the Pooh, Rapunzel, Tangled, The Things

Id: DMB_Lav9yJ8

Length: 13min 29sec (809 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 06 2018