12 Wednesday Aug 2026
Posted in Self-Promotion
Honestly, it’s not about the money; the funding goal is quite modest and I’m going to publish the edition whether or not it funds. It’s mostly about learning whether there are enough people interested in learning more about our history and heritage, and whether I’m able to find these people, for me to do more annotated editions like this.
But in any event, off we go!
11 Tuesday Aug 2026
That was the most fun I’ve had in months.
My annotated edition of the Benjamin Franklin pamphlet, “A Modest Enquiry Into The Nature and Necessity of a Paper-Currency,” is largely complete. I just need to do a final pass for completeness and format it for publication. The Kickstarter project should be approved any day now.
Man, now all I want to do all day is do more annotated editions! Bad Oren, must finish existing projects!
09 Sunday Aug 2026
Posted in Economics, Finance, Self-Promotion
I blame it all on Fernand Braudel.
See, this last Thursday I was reading The Wheels of Commerce, and Braudel mentioned a French merchant with really intricate ledgers of his trading activities that Braudel didn’t have the patience to untangle, and it occurred to me that modern computer methods are excellent at that kind of thing, and then I wondered if there are any other publicly available ledgers that could be analyzed, and then I found that Ben Franklin’s ledgers are public domain, and then I learned that he got his start in politics in 1729 by writing a short pamphlet called “A Modest Enquiry into the Nature and Necessity of a Paper-Currency.”
And so I read it and it was really good and important and then I found out that while there are a few academic editions, no one has yet produced an annotated edition that would be helpful for students and other interested readers.
And I was getting a little burned out on big complicated projects, and this seemed like a fun little project for me to do in a relatively short time, and hopefully it would recharge the batteries for my bigger stuff.
So I’m doing it. And it’s almost done.
And then it occurred to me that fun little annotation projects like this could be an interesting sideline, alongside my other work. But I wanted to find out if enough people would be interested in that sort of thing to make it worth my time.
So I’m doing a Kickstarter.
Check it out!
02 Sunday Aug 2026
Posted in Better Fantasy, Economics, History, Politics for Worldbuilders, Writing
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Having recently finished writing a 15k-word novella,* I am now returning to the draft of Book 2 in my worldbuilding guidebook series, the book focused on commerce and political economy. It looks like I’ll be adding a new chapter about class barriers and inequality, which will squeeze in a discussion of Peter Turchin’s theory of political conflict due to elite overproduction. (Much as I do with the work of James C. Scott, I’ll take any opportunity to bring it up!)
Fortuitously, I just found my copy of Fernand Braudel’s The Wheels of Commerce where it had been buried on my shelf behind a double layer of books for about a decade (!), and I have the sinking feeling that I’ll be adding even more material to the draft even though it’s already about 60k words long, which is about as long as you’d want a guidebook like this to be.
Just reading the first chapter, it seems clear to me that Jane Jacobs was inspired by Braudel (or perhaps by the same sources he cites such as von Thünen) in her discussion of “supply regions,” vast rural zones that are economically transformed by the needs of large cities. Braudel discusses how as metropolises such as London and Paris grew, town fairs across their countries became more and more specialized so that they predominantly offered a single good, becoming a predictable supplier to the merchants who would send their wares off to the insatiable cities:
“Cheeses came from Meaux; butter from Gournay, near Dieppe, or from Isigny; beasts for slaughter from the markets of Poissy, Sceaux and further afield from Neubourg; good bread from Gonesse; pulses from Caudebec in Normandy, where a market was held every Saturday . . . . Any region affected by London tended to specialize, to change and become more commercially-minded, in limited sectors as yet it is true, for between the modernized regions there still lay expanses of the old rural régime with its traditional farms and crops. Kent for instance. . . saw orchards and hops cover its fields to supply the capital, but Kent still maintained its identity, with its peasant-farmers. . .”
By about 1600, “[o]f the 800 market towns in England and Wales, at least 300 confined themselves to single trades: 133 to the grain trade; 26 to malt; 6 to fruit; 92 to cattle markets; 32 to sheep; 13 to horses; 14 to swine; 30 to fish; 21 to wildfowl and poultry; 12 to butter and cheese; over 30 to wool or yarn; 27 or more to woolen cloth; 11 to leather; 8 to linen; at least 4 to hemp—not to mention some very precise and idiosyncratic specialties: Wymondham dealt exclusively in ‘wooden spoons, taps and handles.'” (Long excursus into the informational problems of matching buyers and sellers omitted.)
Braudel also cites interesting statistics about markets and towns (sourced mostly from medieval England) that will be of use to the worldbuilder. With a handful of exceptions, villages did not have regular markets; but most towns did, and they tended to serve about 6000 or 7000 people total despite their typical population of 1000 (all these numbers subject to variation by period and locality, of course). In other words, villagers from the surrounding settlements (as well as itinerant peddlers and merchants) would converge on their local town every few days or every week. Each market tended to serve a radius of about six or seven miles, depending on the type of good and its mode of transportation. “In about 1600, grain transported overland did not travel more than 10 miles [ed: recall that a team of oxen traveling more than about 200km would eat more grain than they could carry], and 5 was more usual; cattle could be driven about 11 miles, sheep 40 to 70 miles; wool and woolen cloth would travel between 20 and 40 miles.”
At any rate, it seems that I will once again have to work harder to keep material out of my book than to put it in. But that’s the fun of it, I suppose!
*Currently trying to shop it around for publication, but I’ll probably lose patience and self-publish it before long. Here’s a very early scene that survived to the current draft with few changes.
26 Sunday Jul 2026
Posted in Writing
Some time ago, I wrote a post on Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in which I noted some features of the plot and writing technique that seem out of fashion today—chiefly that the second half of the book lacks a conflict, strictly speaking, yet remains interesting to the reader because it uses two intertwined mysteries to drive the action. Last night, I saw for the first time the 1971 movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the classic movie with Gene Wilder in the title role. Interestingly, several of the creative changes made by the movie were directly responsive to the features I noted in my prior post.
[Spoilers ahead!]
First, the moviemakers clearly picked up on the Wonka-as-devil-figure aspect and leaned into it. According to director Mel Stuart, Gene Wilder was cast partly because “[h]e had the sardonic, demonic edge we were looking for.” The one song that was lifted almost verbatim from the book, the “There’s no knowing where we’re going” sequence in the boat, was accompanied by psychedelic imagery that grew more disturbing as the song went on, with new verses added: “Are the fires of Hell a-glowing? / Is the grisly reaper mowing?”
Additionally, a new temptation theme is introduced into the movie, in the form of the apparent plot to steal the Everlasting Gobstoppers, which turns out to be a scheme by Wonka himself (and just how does “Mr. Slugworth” manage to show up immediately at various points around the world, as if by magic?). Relatedly, Wonka has the children sign a contract with illegible small print, about which more later, and he is quick to invoke the contract to effectively cheat the children out of their promised chocolate. And, of course, Wonka’s seeming indifference to the fate of the children is emphasized in Wilder’s inimitable style (to the point of producing several internet memes). So yes, Willy Wonka as a potential stand-in for the Devil is very much in play.
Second, the scriptwriters decided to change the plot fundamentally, by having Grandpa Joe and Charlie sneak some of the Fizzy Lifting Drink against Wonka’s express instructions. It was probably this and its consequences that led Roald Dahl to sever ties with the movie, because it deeply damaged the central morality play of the book: Charlie was the good boy who sacrificed for others, followed the rules, and deserved the happy ending, as compared to the other children who demonstrate their character flaws by taking what they are not allowed to take. With the script’s change, nothing fundamentally separates Charlie from the others, until his redemptive act in the climax.
Why make this change? I think they were trying to do two things here. First is to reintroduce conventional plot conflict for the movie, by having Charlie break the contract and putting Charlie’s prize in jeopardy. Second, they wanted to make Charlie a more active character in his story. In the book, he displays his virtue in the initial stages of the plot, but then is reduced to a bystander during the factory tour. The scriptwriters, it seemed, felt that Charlie needed a moment of supreme virtue at the climax—his decision to give back the Gobstopper despite every possible reason not to—so that he deserves his happy ending more directly.
Was this a good change? I have my doubts. The plot device of the contract makes Wonka a much more spiteful character than in the book. And Charlie’s decision to return the Gobstopper and doom his family to grinding poverty, just after Wonka betrays him, strains credulity.
So what else could the movie have done? The more recent Tim Burton version decided to hew more closely to the original plot, right up to the point where Wonka demands that Charlie leave his family behind in exchange for the factory. I do not see this as an improvement overall (and the Dahl estate apparently had serious qualms as well), but it has the merit of preserving Charlie’s virtuous character. Off the top of my head, one could also introduce Wonka’s need for a successor earlier in the movie, with various bad options on the table until Charlie is anointed instead, perhaps because of some display of aptitude that he makes during the tour.
Other quibbles could be made about the movie; most of the songs were forgettable or actively inept (Candy Man and Veruca’s showstopper being exceptions). I do think that removing Mr. Bucket was a reasonable change, given that Charlie was forced into more responsibility as a breadwinner (literally). And the movie did cast Gene Wilder; and therefore, much is forgiven!
07 Tuesday Apr 2026
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Ron Farina, author of the Sacrifice trilogy of nonfiction books about American casualties of war (for which I had the privilege of being the editor and publisher), has written a new book forthcoming from Casemate Publishers, In Sha Allah, If God Wills It, telling the incredible story of an Afghan interpreter who served alongside U.S. special operations forces. I read a prepublication draft and gladly contributed a blurb; it’s a gripping book.
It’s open for preorders now. You should definitely check it out.
21 Wednesday Jan 2026
Posted in Writing
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I just finished the latest installment of Jim Butcher’s “Dresden Files” series, Twelve Months. I won’t comment on the book as a whole, other than to say that it was enjoyable. But I do find myself mildly irritated by a bit character that Butcher introduced.
Without spoilers, I can say that despite the grab-bag of Lovecraftian, Celtic fae, and other supernatural bits all thrown in, important aspects of the “Dresden Files” setting are Catholic in flavor. There was a single secular Jewish character up to this point, who ends up taking on a, ahem, religiously incongruous job as the series progresses. But in this book, Butcher chose to introduce a religious Jewish character, Rabbi Aaronson, as an ally to the local Catholic groups fighting the nasties. I am not sure why Butcher did so. Aaronson appears in only two brief scenes, has no plot function and only a few paragraphs of “screen time,” and his only activities are to blow the shofar and be crotchety.
Perhaps Butcher is setting Aaronson up to be a more important character later, which would be consistent with some previous character introductions. If so, Butcher is going to have to step up his game. His thin characterization of Aaronson leans very hard on the stock Hollywood trope of the alte kacker, the old fart, beloved by secular Jewish scriptwriters working out their daddy issues on screen. Butcher also leans on two pieces of religious paraphernalia and depicts questionable things about both.
When Harry asks if Aaronson is carrying a “real shofar,” Aaronson says yes, and that he had forgotten how hard a shofar is to blow. This is unlikely. A shofar is not a rarely-used bit of ancient history. Especially if he is in the habit of using a shofar as a supernatural weapon, it is probable that Aaronson would be one of the men blowing the shofar each year, nearly every day during the month leading up to the High Holidays. (I am also skeptical about Aaronson carrying his shofar around in a baldric, which I have never seen anyone do in real life, but I suppose it’s not impossible.)
Additionally, Aaronson is described as wearing a “shawl.” Presumably, this is an imprecise reference to a tallit or tallis, often called a “prayer shawl” in English. Though a tallis is generally only worn during prayer, its appearance here is in keeping with Hollywood’s lazy stock depiction of rabbis always wearing a tallis under any circumstances, presumably as a reliable visual shorthand that “This Guy Over Here is a Rabbi” for audiences who might not pick up on less blatant indications. (Off the top of my head, this bit of costuming shows up in Babylon 5, Cabaret, and The Simpsons.)
While in ancient times some Jews would indeed wear a tallis during mundane activities, nowadays I can think of only one reason a real-life Jew might wear a tallis outside of prayer or when walking to synagogue—certain mystical practices are best done wearing a tallis. Ironically, that might even be a decent explanation in-universe, given the context. However, Butcher does not seem to be aware of this, given that nothing else in Aaronson’s presentation suggests (yet?) that he is a mystic.
Obviously, it’s Butcher’s story and he is under no obligation to write his characters with verisimilitude. But as long as he feels like putting in a Jewish character, why not make the character more interesting? Why rely on stock tropes, especially when they are low-quality tropes?
I don’t think Butcher has committed any great sin here. He certainly didn’t do anything as obnoxious as Orson Scott Card’s book Enchantment (which made the main character Jewish yet had his Jewishness play exactly zero role in his character or the plot—other than an in-passing ultimatum that he convert to Christianity, immediately acceded to without any drama or plot significance). But I am interested to see if Aaronson will be playing a greater role in the future, and whether Butcher will write him as a more interesting character in the process.
This does, I think, illustrate some of the pitfalls of writing characters from different cultures. I emphatically do not say that no one should do this, or that this is insensitive or cultural appropriation, or that you need to spend valuable page time genuflecting to whatever historical tragedies might apply. But chances are, you don’t know what you don’t know. And to be a good writer, you should do your research.
Butcher notes that he relies on a group of beta readers to review his drafts; knowing that he was introducing a religious Jew, he would have been well served to find an observant Jewish beta reader, at least for those few paragraphs. You really can find us, even in fandom.
13 Saturday Dec 2025
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I’ve noted previously that while I thought Kung Fu Panda 1 and 3 were both excellent movies, number 2 in the series was a missed opportunity. Recently, we rewatched all three movies; so today, I feel like analyzing KFP 2 in more detail. It does a lot of things right, so it’s worth trying to understand where it went wrong.
If I had to summarize, it would be this: the script feels like it wasn’t quite a finished draft. There are at least three major deficiencies:
Let’s dive in. [Spoilers ahead for the first two movies!]
A filler scene, as I’m using the term, is a scene that doesn’t develop the plot or the characters. I should stop and say first that not all filler scenes are bad; an awesome spectacle or funny joke can be its own justification. But leaning on filler scenes to pad the movie length can be a warning sign that your movie doesn’t have enough plot action going on.
If you look at KFP 1, each fight scene has a plot or characterization function:
A similar analysis can be done for KFP 3.
In KFP 2, only some of the fight scenes have a clear function:
By contrast, the entire sequence with the team infiltrating Gongmen City and reaching the prison, and then fighting the wolfpack in a chase scene across the city and to the Palace, could have been significantly shortened or cut entirely. And the two scenes eat up a long stretch of screen time: in a movie that was only 90 minutes long, including nearly 10 minutes of credits, the infiltration scene and chase scene together consume about 9 or 10 minutes.
And that’s not even being picky about the length of the other fight scenes, some of which dragged on a bit.
People being stupid is not inherently a problem. The problem is when their stupidity comes from the writer without sufficient justification, rather than from their character or circumstances.
On the plot side, we’ll ignore some of the minor offenses and focus on two big ones: Lord Shen’s search for metal, and Po carrying the Idiot Ball.
Lord Shen wants to gather together lots and lots of metal to make cannon. This leads the wolfpack to attack the musicians’ village to steal everything metal that wasn’t nailed down, and a few things that were. As a result, Po first meets the wolf leader and sees Lord Shen’s mark.
The problem here is that you can’t make cannon by scrounging random bits of metal. It needs to be high-quality metal that can easily be cast and can withstand the high pressures of gunpowder explosions. (Early cannon of the type Lord Shen uses were typically cast out of high-quality bronze.)
Yes, I’m being a nerd; KFP 2 is a kids movie and not a tract on metallurgy, and the visuals of lots of junk being dropped into vats of molten metal are effective. But while the attack on the Musicians’ Village was a funny scene, it also introduces a big plothole: Why attack somewhere so far away from Gongmen City (depicted as far enough to require several days of hard travel for Po and the Five to reach) in order to carry back a bulky, heavy cargo? Was there really no metal at all anywhere closer? How much metal did Lord Shen really need, and why not simply capture a copper mine somewhere?
If the objective was to introduce the wolf leader to Po, the scriptwriters could have come up with a better pretext that made sense within the setting.
And speaking of Po… Po is without question a comedic figure. He often gets himself into trouble, and his attempts to talk his way out are often ridiculous and add to the humor. But while Po is often ridiculous, in KFP 1 and 3 he is never stupid. Everything he does makes sense in the situation, or because of his personality and history.
In KFP 2, however, Po is handed the Idiot Ball at least twice. The first case is a minor sin; during their audience with Lord Shen, Po mistakes some sort of small device for the weapon and attacks it. This had no plot significance and was played for cheap laughs (and frankly, could have easily been cut).
The second seriously undermines Po’s character. During the first confrontation with Shen, Po freezes and allows Shen to escape when he realizes that Shen was somehow a part of Po’s backstory. When the team regroups, however, Po refuses to explain what happened to Tigress and the others, reduced to mumbling that it was all part of the plan, somehow. Worse, when Tigress benches him, he returns to the Palace anyway without telling the others, interferes with the rest of the team (who just so happened to have everything well in hand), and needs to be rescued at great cost.
Po’s behavior is extremely out of character. The movie has already shown that he trusts the Five and they trust him. In his pre-Dragon Warrior days, he idolized the Five. And we have seen him repeatedly tell the truth even when it was embarrassing, even for relatively small matters like a fun anecdote during dinner.
This all could have been avoided if Po had simply been honest with Tigress. And it would have been in character for him to do that; he had already told her about being adopted during the journey to Gongmen City. On a scriptwriting level, it was not even necessary for Po to lie if the writer was committed to the existing plot structure. Po could have been honest with Tigress without it changing the plot; she could decide to bench him anyway, since he’s clearly not able to deal with Shen yet.
The script makes several gestures toward character development that don’t really pay off as well as they could have. I’m thinking about two in particular: the contrast between “hardcore” Tigress and soft-style Po, and the underexplored character of Lord Shen.
After Tigress describes her training regimen, Po is awestruck and calls it “hardcore.” Tigress notes that it would be a poor fit for Po: “Hard style is not your thing.” Later, in the prison, as Po refuses to explain what happened between him and Lord Shen, he bitterly says, “The hardcore wouldn’t understand.” Tigress responds by hugging him and saying, “The hardcore do understand.” At last, at the end of the final battle, Tigress complements Po by saying, “Now that was hardcore.”
To me, this felt like a false note. Po had won not by being hardcore, but by exploring the subtle principles of soft-style martial arts—his flowing motions are modeled off of Tai Chi. Additionally, Tigress’s character had no further development in KFP 2. In the first movie, we at least learn a little of her stunted relationship with Shifu when she was young, and her resulting ambition to prove herself against Tai Lung; and in the third movie, it is implied that her friendship with the panda toddler helps nourish a neglected side of her personality. But in this movie, her character development is all but ignored. The script could have easily shortened some of the fight scenes to give her more time.
And now, Lord Shen—absolutely a brilliant character, voiced to perfection by Gary Oldman. He’s the most complex of the trilogy’s villains—hungry for his birthright, but also rejecting it; seeking a vast destiny, but fragile and insecure in the face of a single pudgy panda; obsessing over his parents’ rejection of him, but refusing every overture made by the Soothsayer and later by Po himself. But every so often, there is a moment that seems to cry out for further development. Why does he project his own feelings of rejection onto Po during their second fight? Why did he refuse Po’s final offer of redemption? Why does he believe that “[h]appiness must be taken”?
It might seem a bit churlish to demand that Shen’s character be made even more brilliant than it was. But I still think there were missed opportunities there to tighten down some of the loose bits. Again, if the movie did not lean so hard on filler scenes, there would have been ample space to explore Shen more deeply.
What can we take from this? First, spending a little extra time on the script can mean the difference between a fine movie and a great one. It is true that “Great artists ship,” and a studio has deadlines to work under, but that’s no reason to be satisfied with a product that is not yet as good as it could easily become.
(I continue to be perplexed why so many movie productions that cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars often settle for obviously flawed scripts. Given the money on the line, why yoke your movie to a bad script? Yes, writing is hard, but there are lots of skilled writers out there; so why are so many finished movies garbage? KFP 2 doesn’t sink to that level, but the basic question remains.)
Second, if you have to resort to the Idiot Ball, it means that you are trying to cover up a flaw in your script. Take it as a warning light that there is more work to do, and then do that work rather than damaging your characters.
Third, filler that sucks up time from more important characters or themes is a bad thing. The need to resort to filler, even while some of the character interactions could have been fleshed out, should likewise have warned the scriptwriters that there was more work to do.
And on that note, back to my own writing. Sigh…
05 Wednesday Nov 2025
Johnny Cash, aside from the power and pathos of his own songs, famously performed songs by others as well. Some were written for him, such as the haunting “Thirteen,” written by Glenn Danzig. Some songs he covered; he took one of his greatest songs, “Hurt,” from the band Nine Inch Nails; and listening to Cash’s performance, NIN frontman Trent Reznor immediately reacted, “That song isn’t mine anymore.”
A slightly less famous example is the song “The Man Who Couldn’t Cry,” originally written and performed by Loudon Wainwright III. When we compare the lyrics of the two renditions, we notice a number of very slight changes that Cash made from Wainwright’s original (don’t rely on the listed lyrics, both of them have occasional errors compared to the audio). And I think closely examining these changes can teach us a lot about Cash’s craft, and how we might think about adapting other works or even making our own compositions.
(We’ll neglect the changes in emphasis in Cash’s vocal performance, except for a couple of points to be noted later.)
In the first stanza, Wainwright sang:
As a child, he had cried as all children will
But at some point, his tear ducts ran dry.
He grew to be a man and the feces hit the fan…
By contrast, Cash’s version goes:
As a child he had cried as all children will
Then at some point his tear ducts all ran dry.
Grew to be a man, it all hit the fan
Changing “But” to “Then” can be read to emphasize the inevitability of this change, for the protagonist—how his new impassiveness was a natural response to growing up in a cruel world. Whether that was Cash’s intention or not, notice how subtle the change was, yet how powerful. Cash is certainly putting his own stamp on the song, but he’s changing as little as possible in the process.
Inserting “all,” cutting “He,” and to some degree replacing “and the feces” with “it all” are in part meant to hew more closely to the song’s meter than in the original—which has the effect of making the lyrics less obtrusive. In part, I think that “feces” is a smirky word choice, much improved by “it all”; Cash is more matter-of-fact, and also conveys that “all” of the protagonist’s life had hit the fan, not just some of it.
(One might imagine that in Wainwright’s live performances, he would actually use the word “s—” instead of “feces,” but I have no way to check this. It would certainly match the meter better. Compare with The Doors and their live performances of “This is the End.”)
Cash makes no more changes up until the protagonist has gone through his tribulations and is sent to “a place for the insensitive and the insane.” At this point, Wainwright sang:
He played lots of chess
And he made lots of friends
And in his vocal performance, he puts an overt, ironic twist on “friends.” One wonders whether this is a contemptuous commentary on the sorts of friends one finds in an asylum, or perhaps a clue that the man’s friends were imaginary, his chess games played against an absent opponent. In either case, Wainwright is again smirking at his subject.
Cash makes a striking change by simply inverting the order of the verses:
He made a lot of friends
and he played a lot of chess
And again, he sings the verses matter-of-factly. After so much suffering, Cash says, the protagonist finally found friendship and belonging in the most unlikely place imaginable. Where Wainwright is ironic, Cash imbues the song with a great deal of empathy. He feels for the protagonist in a way that I think Wainwright does not. And he conveyed that with a simple change in verse order.
Everything else stays the same, except for Cash changing “prison” to “jail house” in the final stanza—perhaps for reasons of meter, perhaps because he liked the word “jail” better than “prison.”
What can we say about all these changes? For one thing, Cash had a very light, but deft, touch. He gets great leverage from very small changes, knowing where to cut and where to edit. He preserves the bulk of the song as is, keeping what made it worthy of his attention in the first place—but where he does make changes, they deepen the song and make it more powerful.
Second, notice the mileage Cash gets from dispensing with Wainwright’s condescension. On the one hand, Cash understands that the lyrics are strong enough on their own, and don’t need excessive vocal ornamentation. On the other hand, he made the clear choice to feel for his protagonist instead of creating ironic distance, as Wainwright does. He thus allows a lifetime of pain and suffering to color the song, much as he did with “Hurt.”
So: careful attention to each word; not tweaking things for tweaking’s sake, but combining respect for the source material with willingness to make changes where necessary. Creating new meaning by changing emotional content; again, much as he did with “Hurt.”
Not all adaptations need to make radical changes. (Though sometimes such radically different versions are strong in their own right, such as Alien Ant Farm’s cover of “Smooth Criminal.”) Cash teaches us that subtlety, mastery of craft, and willingness to be forthright can go a long way.
28 Sunday Sep 2025
Posted in Uncategorized
Somehow, I had managed to go through my entire childhood without watching the 1953 Disney version of Peter Pan (though I repeatedly watched the Mary Martin musical stageplay version, and I also listened to one of those abridged audiobook versions of the Disney movie on cassette tape). Last night was the first time I watched the Disney version all the way through.
It was generally charming, even with some of the typical early Disney slapstick via the Lost Boys. We were generally having a good time.
And then came the “Injun” sequence.
…
I’m not saying that the Wounded Knee occupation in 1973 was a good idea—but I understand.
Building Worlds 