ELIZABETH: everyone we know is drowned
FATHER: what a good opportunity to learn about the Protestant work ethic and animal husbandry
FRITZ: let’s own and eat every animal
FATHER: We can bring colonialism wherever we go
ELIZABETH: from the ship I rescued tallow, donkeys, down blankets, sewing needles, a ham, dishes, pots and pans, quilts, pillows, the Bible, some sealing-wax, an axe, and absolutely no people
FRANCIS: I’m glad everyone we know is dead because now I can learn about cassava
FATHER: I am the dad of this whole island
now let’s talk about geometry
FRANCIS: I have found a woman, I shall keep her and name her Jenny
ERNEST: I will fight you for her
FRANCIS: you lose
here is a consolatory ostrich
ERNEST: I will ride it like a horse
SHIP CAPTAIN: would you like a ride home to Europe or somewhere with people in it
FATHER: no
we have everything we need here, from plants to geometry
get out
FRITZ: lets all ride the ostrich and learn about math
Amazing as always.
Did anyone watch the Disney non-animated SFR movie? I had a pretty major crush on Fritz, unfortunately.
Ahh, I was always so angry at Fritz. He was so condescending and patriarchal. I would make up stories of his failing horribly in some way and Ernst having to save him and his learning a valuable lesson about being so goddamn smug.
But I can see the crush thing too.
I had a crush on Fritz too! Because of that movie and his totally rad ponytail on the book cover. I had very shallow taste in fictional men.
I loved that movie, because I was obsessed with outlandish self-sufficiency in the wilderness stories, but my eternal childhood crush was on Ernst!
Disney did you wrong, Tommy Kirk. Disney did you wrong.
(…I realize as I post that that most people probably don’t know as much random ass Disney trivia as I do, so: Tommy Kirk was fired by Walt Disney for being gay when he was 18, but they made him come back to make The Monkey’s Uncle after they terminated his contract, because he and Annette Funicello were big moneymakers for them.)
Fritz was hot but Ernst was more my type. I’m sort of addicted to this genre even if I know realize it’s super imperialist???? I really like the idea of making stuff and being self-sufficient and having adventures even if this was Sausage Island (like I don’t remember how they were going to handle the whole *no women but Mama* if Jenny/Roberta never showed up?)
Fritz was James McArthur, right? Danno from Hawaii Five-0? Fritz is horrible but the actor was pretty cute.
The only useful fact I learned in grad school: the Swiss family is not named Robinson. The story is a Robinson, as in Robinson Crusoe; it’s a genre.
Did anybody here read Baby Island, where some girls get shipwrecked along with a whole bunch of babies that don’t belong to them?
You just blew my mind.
BABY ISLAND IS A DAMN CLASSIC
Wow. I actually remember reading Baby Island. I don’t want to think about the deeper implications of that story, but I enjoyed it as a kid.
I FUCKING LOVED BABY ISLAND, I was constantly planning on what I would do if I got shipwrecked with a bunch of babies.
This is like when I learned the Nonviolent resistance interpretation of “turn the other cheek”.
this just made my whole goddamn day.
I’m going to tell this to everyone I know. This is amazing.
Baby Island makes the Babysitters’ Club seem so tame.
Learning about this was one of the best sermons I ever heard!
HOLY CRAP THIS IS AMAZING. I’m sad my mom is dead because she would be Into This.
this is why Toasties rock
joining the chorus of Mind Blown
(a) That makes so much sense, because here I’ve been thinking for years that Robinson sounded, well, NOT REMOTELY SWISS, and it bothered me.
(b) Aw yeah I read Baby Island! In my experience, babies are even more reliable preteen-girl magnets than puppies or kittens, and that’s saying something, so there’s a book that is marketed directly to a reasonably common phase. I’m not going to say that the birth of my baby sister when I was in fourth grade was crucial to my awkward tween friend-making experiences, but it sure as heck didn’t hurt. “Let’s go to sorrycassandra’s house! And play with the baby!”
!!!
I thought it was about a family from Switzerland called Robinson!
(I’ve never read it)
OH!
YES! Baby Island! I’m glad so many Toasties have read it, because I’ve brought it up in the past among people who I thought were reasonably well-read and they were all convinced I’d made it up.
Real talk! Did Cher name her son Elijah Blue after the baby in Baby Island?
I can’t answer that question, but I have a perfect story to add here: when I was born, my dad was working on a film with Cher. He told her specifically that he didn’t need her help naming me, and she told him to fuck off.
WHAT I suppose you are going to tell us that Baby Island wasn’t about the Baby Family either?
Thank you, this is a delightful bit of trivia that I fully intend to deploy without attribution whenever the subject of the Swiss Family Robinson comes up in conversation, which up to now has been… roughly never.
The Robinson genre! What other sorts of story genre are named after their species type? I feel like this should be a more common thing. Like, maybe a Dangerous genre for “The Most Dangerous Game?” For that matter, what about “Swiss Family Dangerous?” “We’re trapped on this island, children, and I have all the ammunition. You have 24 hours to elude me.”
THE MOST DANGEROUS BABY
Can we book club Baby Island? And also how creepy was the drunk man (from the ship maybe) who shows up on Baby Island and threatens the babies?!
BABY ISLAND! I still have a copy!
Stuck in my head regularly:
We live on an island
And not on an isthmus
But we can have Christmas and Christmas and Christmas!
I know I’m late to this but OMG Baby Island! I read that so many times. My sister and I might have pretended to be shipwrecked with babies (our dolls).
ELIJAH AND ELISHA
The biggest Baby Island-related shocker to me was realizing as an adult that Baby Island was written by Carol Ryrie Brink, who was the author of Caddy Woodlawn. I HAD NO IDEA!
OMG BABY ISLAND!!!!! Yes!!!! And they run into a shipwrecked Cockney who is a grump with a heart of gold! And sing about bananas!
My biggest takeaway from the movie was that everybody hated Ernest for no reason, and was always trying to mess things up so that he could never be happy.
That was how I felt, too. And I identified with Ernst because he was the bookish one who clearly would not have survived on his own. I think I also had a minor crush on the girl they found, too. I thought she had the cutest hair and looked far better dressed as a boy.
Ernest/Ernst was the Wesley Crusher of Swiss Family Robinson.
FATHER: now who wants to mutilate and explode some ethnics
I remember being so disappointed as a kid that these people got to the island and everything was immediately orderly and survivable and fine. WHAT IS THE POINT OF A SHIPWRECK STORY WITHOUT CONSTANT DANGER.
yes! I was so angry with everything they were able to salvage from that damn ship. where is the danger when they can just nip over to the store / ship whenevs?
of course though I loved Hatchet and My Side of the Mountain and Island of the Blue Dolphins… and I have no idea at this point if they were realistic or not
At least with Hatchet and Island (never read My Side) there are moments where the character is truly in mortal danger!
In Hatchet the kid starts with a hatchet and ends with CIVILIZATION. I don’t remember much of My Side of the Mountain, but I’m pretty sure the kid has, like, a falcon, and lives in a hollowed-out tree or something? ACCEPTABLY NEOLITHIC, you have started over from scratch and improbably survived. If you’re going to go be stranded in the wilderness, bringing anything more than what you can fit in your pockets is cheating.
Oh my god I LOVED My SIde of the Mountain. I was always trying to memorize his tricks in case I had to live off the land. I wrote a short story in the form of a letter to the author in grad school (YES it was a terrible rip of Dear Mr. Henshaw; I did not win the MFA game, but day jobs mean health insurance and no self-employment tax, nyah-nyah)
A+++ for Dear Mr. Henshaw.
There was a section in My Side of the Mountain where he started craving like, liver or something and it turned out it was because his diet was lacking in certain vitamins or w/e. I REMEMBER THIS. I haven’t read that book since I was like, 9.
No joke, I think about the liver thing whenever I imagine myself in any kind of survival situation, which I do weirdly often.
Warning based on british detective shows (and never fact checked): dog livers are poisonous to humans. So don’t kill your sled dogs just because you’re anemic.
I was an enthusiastically Protestant homeschooled nerdchild, and not even I could get into this book.
but but but remember when their donkey got eaten by the snake? and i cried about it for a solid three hours probably? DDD:
(ALSO: intensedebate tells me my password has ILLEGAL CHARACTERS but they JUST let me reset it without any mention of what was illegal, so i’m not logged in and it’s making me angry…)
wait how does a donkey get eaten by a snake
how big is this snake
According to the illustration (I had the same kiddie edition as depicted here!), it was a Snake Of Unusual Size.
Like, Little Prince sized snake.
I could swear I read this book in some oversized kids book format with little sketches of things along the margins (including the snake), same as in Minn of the Mississippi and Paddle to the Sea, but goodreads fails to show me the correct cover.
Like, Little Prince sized snake.
Yes! I loved this book when I was a child despite the fact that it is so SO SO WEIRD. How did a little girl in Southern California in the 80s possibly relate to any of this? I think what finally turned me off the bonkers thing was when I finally realized that all they ever did was shoot animals. “There’s an exotic new animal over there!” BLAMMO. “What’s that, a 20-foot snake?” POW “Is that a walrus?” PEW PEW PEW.
Oh man, I read this as a kid and took copious notes on this island’s completely batshit flora and fauna. Does anyone remember how the father “tamed” the stubborn donkey by BITING STRAIGHT THROUGH ITS EAR? This is a thing that happened, it completely fixed the unbroken donkey, and no one seemed to find it traumatizing or deeply upsetting at all.
Yes! And do you remember the part where they shoot the enormous snake and taxidermy it somehow and bring it back to the enormous cave where they live (?) and wrap it around the circular staircase (??) in their library (???)?
Aaaaa! I forgot that, but do you remember the part where they cause a small landslide to create a valley-sized pen for the antelope they “hunt” which are (a) copious and (b) really far in excess of the food they need to feed the six of them? It is literally shooting fish in a barrel (antelope in a pen). Also they build cages so the beautiful tropical birds that SURROUND them can be decorative on their terms.
Jiminy christmas! The more I think about it, the more this book is just a collection of ways to be a total asshole to animals.
doesn’t work nearly as effectively on people unfortunately
OH MY GOD, THANK YOU FOR USING THE “GREAT ILLUSTRATED CLASSICS” PICTURE. I HAD LIKE A BAZILLION OF THOSE AND I HAD TOTALLY FORGOTTEN. Actually, I had more of the knock-off smaller versions that they sold in the dollar store. Seriously, I had at least 20- my favorites were “The Wizard of Oz” and “Mutiny on the HMS Bounty”.
When I was 8, someone gave me a Great Illustrated Classics version of “Frankenstein.” It gave me intense nightmares, and I always *knew* it was on my shelf. I smuggled it out, and threw it out in the garbage bin of a rest stop six hours away from my house, far far away from anywhere.
My older brother noticed and tattled on me.
But, seriously, this thing was SCARY
I had one the one that was three Sherlock Holmes stories and “The Adventure of the Speckled Band’ gave me YEARS worth of nightmares. I was convinced someone was going to send a snake into my room to kill me for most of my childhood.
These things are for CHILDREN. Who designs them??
On the bright side, I had a Classic Illustrated (the comic book style) version of The Tale of Two Cities that was missing the last page, so I thought it ended with the whole family escaping the city, instead of with the guillotine! I was shocked when I read it later on in life…”HE DIES???”
Oh yeah yeah. I got all my early introduction to lit through my brother’s comic collection. (I got the Classics Illustrated Jr. editions, Sleeping Beauty, etc). We’re talking 1950s. I remember it clearly. “Put you head on the block, Evremond.”
Oh my God, me too! I must have had the real story, because my parents didn’t believe in abridged versions, but I also remember being terrified for years. The snake comes down the bell-pull, right? The fact that I had nothing dangling from my ceiling for a snake to slither down reassured me a bit, but never completely.
On a similar note, here’s some Wodehouse:
Mr. Mulliner smiled indulgently.
“It was not the vicar,” he said. “I happen to have read The Murglow Manor Mystery. The guilty man was the plumber.”
“What plumber?”
“The one who comes in Chapter Two to mend the shower bath. Sir Geoffrey had wronged his aunt in the year ’96, so he fastened a snake in the nozzle of the shower bath with glue; and when Sir Geoffrey turned on the stream the hot water melted the glue. This released the snake, which dropped through one of the holes, bit the baronet in the leg, and disappeared down the waste pipe.”
“But that can’t be right,” said the Draught Stout. “Between Chapter Two and the murder there was an interval of several days.”
“The plumber forgot his snake and had to go back for it.”
Anyone remember the “Something Queer…” series of kiddy mysteries? The “Something Queer In the Library” one (spoiler alert) has the librarian dressed up as a werewolf for halloween, but before you realise that, you read along, turn the page and BAM facing page big old werewolf in the doorway. No joke, I think I had nightmares/’can’t sleep clowns will eat me” sleep anxiety for the next 10 years over that page. It didn’t even matter that he was revealed to be the librarian by the end of the book, it was that image that stuck with me.
THIS IS THE COPY I HAD OF SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON. (and Red Badge of Courage, War of the Worlds, Mutiny on the HMS Bounty, etc etc).
Ahem.
AKA I don’t know what the actual story says because I read the kiddy version.
Yes! These were the best! I stole the GIC version of Jane Eyre from my fourth grade teacher so that I could re-read the part at the end where Jane comes in and Rochester’s blind and she messes with him before the happily ever after, which even as a ten year old I was pleased that she could finally jerk him around a bit for a change. It was totally worth it and that teacher was terrible anyway.
YES I also had a large collection of the smaller versions that were perfect because they fit in my coat pocket and I could take them everywhere.
Great Illustrated Classics! Singlehandedly responsible for my inability to remember what classic books I’ve ACTUALLY read.
Handy when trying to remember plots while writing English exams later in life.
Yep. I had some mini-versions that were maybe 4×5″, and I have never been 100% clear on whether I’ve read the real Treasure Island or any Poe at all.
pro tip: The Tell-Tale Heart and The Cask of Amontillado are not great bedtime reading material when you’re five
I KNO RIGHT?
Great Illustrated Classics? Sorry, but in MY day (yeah, okay, I’m sounding old) they were Classics Illustrated. I think the “great” was taken for granted.
I never read the book and was only dimly aware that there had been a movie adaptation, but I feel like I probably absorbed the essential character of the story from the “Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse” at Disney World. Just the experience of climbing up this multilevel diorama/display/whatever, with all the cleverly salvaged stuff neatly stowed in its place, impressed me greatly with the weird appeal of castaway domesticity. It’s not even a real tree! I was way too overstimulated by the visit to pick up on that detail until someone pointed it out to me. “Only God can make a tree,” Joyce Kilmer? I guess you never heard of WALTER ELIAS MOTHERFUCKING DISNEY.
According to the Disney World website, the Treehouse still exists! It hasn’t been removed or redesigned as the Lion King Sing-Along Savannah Lunch-O-Rama Cafe-Tree-Um or whatever! I am unreasonably delighted that this profoundly old-school attraction with no robot monkeys or moving parts, memorializing a movie that no one remembers, still stubbornly clings to existence.
I’m not sure about Disney World, but the Treehouse at Disneyland has been rethemed, with Tarzan replacing SFR.
Yup, as of the last time I was at Disney World, it’s still there, although they never seem to let anybody up into it anymore. Instead you just sort of walk around it and try to see what you can.
I appear to be in the minority here, and loved SFR. I still have my dad’s copy from the 40s.
How the 60s movie screwed up Jenny makes me so mad. In the book she was shipwrecked on her own, built a house, had a few pet birds that she tamed and that hunted for her, and she survived on her own, like a badass for 3 years. In the movie, she’s immediately rescued by stupid Fritz and Ernst, and has to be rescue like a million other times, and fought over by them like she’s some prize.
it was literally the biggest snake in the entire world. i don’t think i hallucinated the illustration of the freakishly large snake with a pitiful donkey sized lump in its stomach D:
also, didn’t they then kill the snake in an attempt to save the donkey? they killed a lot of animals in that book. my mother’s sole response to anything regarding swiss family robinson is to shout, “oh what a beautiful bird! let’s shoot it!” which i think is very telling.
I was always terrified by the illustrations in my old copy of Swiss Family Robinson. Just got it off the shelf, turns out they were drawn by Mervyn Peake. That explains some things.
Didn’t one of the dogs die heroically saving them from lions or something? They should have thrown them Fritz instead.
Did anyone else read the BSB-esque Lost Girls series (well, there were only two – Adrift and Alone)? I remember there was a character who was such a Dawn, and that the racial politics were super dodgy.
As a fairly young child, I loved — LOVED — Swiss Family Robinson, and had a 1899 edition that I took with me anywhere that I thought I might be nervous. I think, although the details of this has gotten lost through the years, that I figured that the book was long enough that I could, if I couldn’t sleep or was stuck somewhere, just continue reading for days and days, without running out of reading material. At some point, as it slowly began to disintegrate, I retired it to my bookshelf for fear that it would start to shed pages, and I have not opened it since.
I loved Swiss Family Robinson so much! I still pretty much love it, to be honest, though I was disappointed to learn that some of the crazy antics in my edition were not part of Johann Wyss’s original (I don’t think Wyss had any penguins on the island, for example – later editions of the book expanded and edited a LOT). But hell, who wouldn’t love a story where they have both an amazing treehouse AND a fabulous cave filled with glorious stalagtites? (Is the cave also a later addition? I cannot remember now! But if it is is it a GLORIOUS one.)
This is glorious.
Also–
“FRANCIS:
here is a consolatory ostrich
ERNEST: I will ride it like a horse”
We have a 19th century carousel here that has ostriches you can ride. My sister and I always head straight for the ostriches, because they’re objectively The Best Carousel Animal.
That is a VERY VERY FAMILIAR-LOOKING CAROUSEL. Is it next to a playground?
It’s pretty close to one- it’s at Ontario Beach Park in upstate NY.
Oh, is that the one in Rochester? I was there a few years ago. It wasn’t open for the season yet, but the cleaners kindly allowed us in just to LOOK. (I just check my pics. It IS, but I can’t seem to paste mine here.)
Yep, that’s the one! (My hometown).
Also, one of the Toasties gave me a link to these handy instructions for embedding photos:
http://hooniverse.com/image-embed/
Thanks, Mrs. P
Thanks, Mrs. P
Thanks, Mrs. P
I’m so impressed so many people say the Disney 1960s version. Yes, I did too, and I read the BOOK (The Whitman film tie-in version.) Seems to me there were actually 4 sons in the real book, and only 3 in the movie. Oh well.
I feel like I remember that they tried to make alcohol out of sugarcane and it turned into vinegar and everybody was Very Disappoint. I had no idea as a kid why that was so sad but now at the ripe old age of 35 I totally get it. It’s possible this was another book entirely, but in my head it’s this one so here’s an internet comment that may or may not be relevant.
I feel like I remember that they tried to make wine out of sugarcane and it turned into vinegar and everybody was Very Disappoint. I had no idea as a kid why that was so sad but now at the ripe old age of 35 I totally get it. It’s possible this was another book entirely, but in my head it’s this one so here’s an internet comment.