Dickens, Disney, Oliver, and Company: Adaptation in a Corporate Media Age

“Disneyfication” is typically seen as a pejorative, implying a process of adaptation that simplifies, sanitizes, and displaces classic texts. But such condemnation relies on theories of fidelity that adaptation scholars have long discarded. Drawing on archival materials and internal memos to demonstrate that Disney writers were consciously aware of preceding versions, this article relates Disney’s Oliver & Company both to the adaptation history of Oliver Twist and to the history of the Walt Disney Company. Linking these two histories helps us to understand how classic stories are presented to modern children.