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Of all the fairy tales that have been turned into Disney movies, Peter Pan is one of the youngest, no pun intended. The first stories of Peter Pan were created the same century as Walt's adaptation, originally drafted as a stage play appropriately titled Peter and Wendy by Scottish author J.M. Barrie in 1904. Though, the character of Peter Pan himself actually first appeared in Barrie's 1902 book The Little White Bird. In that book, Peter is a seven-day old infant who becomes disillusioned with the prospect of adult life and flies out of his nursery to join the fairies in Kensington Gardens. Damn, if only I had known it was that easy, I wouldn't have to be buried in bills and antidepressants. This image of a baby Peter who won't grow older kinda conflicts with the 1904 rendition of the character. His age is never given in the play, and it's only specified that he "still has all his baby teeth", but he's still clearly older in that story, so I'm not entirely sure there's really meant to be much of a "lore" to Peter Pan in that regard. It may also just be that he's older for the sake of the stage play, in which he is traditionally played by a petite young woman. Nina Boucicault was the first actress to be cast in the role, and other famous examples include the maybe-lesbian Maude Adams (who actually designed the iconic costume), Pauline Chase, and Mary Martin.

Barrie would convert the play into a novel in 1911, following more or less the same plot. In 1929, he gifted all the rights to Peter Pan to the Great Ormond Street Hospital, one of Britain's premier children's hospitals, and they still use the royalties from the play's performances to finance children's care. I don't even have a joke to insert here, that's just wholesome. It did, however, make the copyright situation for Peter Pan an absolute nightmare. As I understand it, GOSH still maintains the rights to the play as officially published by Barrie in 1928. It was supposed to expire in 1987, but British law was updated to extend their exclusive rights (in the UK at least), until it expired again in 2007. In the US, Barrie's books up to 1911 are all public domain, but the play is not. The hospital still gets royalties to this day, which… I mean I absolutely despise modern copyright law, but at the same time, it's a children's hospital. I kinda gotta let this one slide. Funnily enough, Walt Disney himself had to contend with the hellish nightmare of acquiring the rights in the exact circumstances his company would drown all the world's public domain in later on. He wanted to produce an animated adaptation of Peter Pan all the way back in 1935, but wasn't able to get the rights until 1939. And well, in 1939, everyone became kinda… preoccupied with other matters, so production was delayed for over a decade, so the movie didn't come out until 1953.

So okay, let's finally raise the curtains on the plot of Barrie's novel. The story goes that a little punk named Peter Pan gets his kicks by spying on the Darling household, but loses his shadow when they spot the peeping tom and he flies away. The daughter of the family, Wendy, reattaches his shadow to his feet, and Peter is enthralled by how motherly she is. He asks her to come to his mythical world of Neverland to be the mother to his tribe of Lost Boys who never grow up, and Wendy obliges, dragging her little brothers Michael and John along because this is what happens when children go unsupervised. After the flight to Neverland, Wendy assumes her role as mother for the Lost Boys, and immediately earns the ire of their little fairy companion Tinker Bell, who I never realized is an evil little bitch, like holy shit, she just straight up unapologetically tries to murder Wendy. Thankfully, her attempts are thwarted, and the gang runs off to have all sorts of misadventures in Neverland, battling such dastardly menaces to society like mermaids, pirates, and… Native Americans. Hooboy… right, this was written by a white guy in 1904.

Fun fact, I had actually never seen Disney's Peter Pan before I started working on the D&D one off to teach my little brother how to play the game. I figured if I'm including these characters, I should probably watch the most famous version. Hooooooly shit that movie is racist as hell. It wasn't even worth asking my Anishinaabe friend what they thought of the portrayal like I normally would. I'm about as white as swiss cheese jerking off into a saltine cracker and even I felt offended watching those scenes. I haven't read the original play but uh… being written just 14 years after the Wounded Knee Massacre, I can't imagine it's much better. The tribe in the story is straight up called the "Piccaninny" (a racial slur usually directed at small black children), and they speak in that stereotypical Tonto Talk. It's uh… it's cringe, to say the least. In the story, they kinda just serve as a plot device to set up Peter's conflict with his dreaded nemesis, the pirate Captain Hook. After rescuing the chief's daughter, Tiger Lily, from Hook, Hook devises a plan to get his revenge, and mercifully directs our attention away from this abysmal portrayal.

After kidnapping Wendy and her brothers, Hook poisons the medicine Wendy loaned to Peter. Peter, having been sleeping, wakes up and mopes about the loss of his new girlfriend, and opts to finally take his medicine like she had been trying to get him to do. Tinker Bell tries to warn him of the trap, but Peter is like nah that's dumb, you're dumb Tink. A frustrated Tinker Bell then drinks all the medicine herself, succumbing to the poison to save Peter. In the play, this leads into a scene where Peter breaks the fourth wall to beg the audience to clap to affirm that they believe in fairies, as that is the only thing which can save Tink's life. I'm not entirely sure Tink deserves that given all she did, but hey, I guess that is one fine piece of ass to go to waste. After reviving Tink, Peter goes off to rescue his pals and defeat Captain Hook once and for all on his ship. Peter wins the duel by kicking Hook overboard into the awaiting jaws of the crocodile who has been following Hook all this time, takes command of the ship, and sails the Darlings back to their home in London. Wendy's mother actually ends up adopting all of Peter's Lost Boys, but Peter is too afraid of growing up to accept the offer himself. He runs away back to Neverland, where he forgets all about Wendy, the Lost Boys, Hook, and even Tinker Bell, who died within the year because apparently fairies drop like mayflies. It's actually quite a melancholy lesson about how to not grow up is to remain stuck in a cycle of forgetting to care and actually value the experiences of life. Maybe I'm just an old crone at heart, but to me that's a much more appealing moral than the more whimsical way it's often glossed as in modern adaptations.

Design notes, this piece, like the other couple of sheets I did for the Peter Pan characters I used in the one off, was relatively straight forward. Being such a modern story which has been performed on Broadway, there's plenty of images out there of the original costume concept art and photographs of the actresses wearing the final designs. I did lean pretty heavily into the Maude Adams rendition of the character, even basing his headshot primarily off of her. Some modern interpretations like to lean more into the leafy natural aspect of the costume, and I certainly get that, but I ended up opting into the simpler tunic pattern that was used in the original performances. I just think it gives off more of the vibe of your old timey rambunctious school boy who hasn't kept his uniform in order. I don't know, maybe it's just because I'm a square who was always a bit of a prissy kid growing up, but I can't get myself into the whole feral child aesthetic. I also found myself better able to explore the composition a little more with the tunic than I was if I just drew him draped in leaves. I'm just really not Peter Pan's target audience But oh well, I like the end result I came up with.

Description
Of all the fairy tales that have been turned into Disney movies, Peter Pan is one of the youngest, no pun intended. The first stories of Peter Pan were created the same century as Walt's adaptation, originally drafted as a stage play appropriately titled Peter and Wendy by Scottish author J.M. Barrie in 1904. Though, the character of Peter Pan himself actually first appeared in Barrie's 1902 book The Little White Bird. In that book, Peter is a seven-day old infant who becomes disillusioned with the prospect of adult life and flies out of his nursery to join the fairies in Kensington Gardens. Damn, if only I had known it was that easy, I wouldn't have to be buried in bills and antidepressants. This image of a baby Peter who won't grow older kinda conflicts with the 1904 rendition of the character. His age is never given in the play, and it's only specified that he "still has all his baby teeth", but he's still clearly older in that story, so I'm not entirely sure there's really meant to be much of a "lore" to Peter Pan in that regard. It may also just be that he's older for the sake of the stage play, in which he is traditionally played by a petite young woman. Nina Boucicault was the first actress to be cast in the role, and other famous examples include the maybe-lesbian Maude Adams (who actually designed the iconic costume), Pauline Chase, and Mary Martin.

Barrie would convert the play into a novel in 1911, following more or less the same plot. In 1929, he gifted all the rights to Peter Pan to the Great Ormond Street Hospital, one of Britain's premier children's hospitals, and they still use the royalties from the play's performances to finance children's care. I don't even have a joke to insert here, that's just wholesome. It did, however, make the copyright situation for Peter Pan an absolute nightmare. As I understand it, GOSH still maintains the rights to the play as officially published by Barrie in 1928. It was supposed to expire in 1987, but British law was updated to extend their exclusive rights (in the UK at least), until it expired again in 2007. In the US, Barrie's books up to 1911 are all public domain, but the play is not. The hospital still gets royalties to this day, which… I mean I absolutely despise modern copyright law, but at the same time, it's a children's hospital. I kinda gotta let this one slide. Funnily enough, Walt Disney himself had to contend with the hellish nightmare of acquiring the rights in the exact circumstances his company would drown all the world's public domain in later on. He wanted to produce an animated adaptation of Peter Pan all the way back in 1935, but wasn't able to get the rights until 1939. And well, in 1939, everyone became kinda… preoccupied with other matters, so production was delayed for over a decade, so the movie didn't come out until 1953.

So okay, let's finally raise the curtains on the plot of Barrie's novel. The story goes that a little punk named Peter Pan gets his kicks by spying on the Darling household, but loses his shadow when they spot the peeping tom and he flies away. The daughter of the family, Wendy, reattaches his shadow to his feet, and Peter is enthralled by how motherly she is. He asks her to come to his mythical world of Neverland to be the mother to his tribe of Lost Boys who never grow up, and Wendy obliges, dragging her little brothers Michael and John along because this is what happens when children go unsupervised. After the flight to Neverland, Wendy assumes her role as mother for the Lost Boys, and immediately earns the ire of their little fairy companion Tinker Bell, who I never realized is an evil little bitch, like holy shit, she just straight up unapologetically tries to murder Wendy. Thankfully, her attempts are thwarted, and the gang runs off to have all sorts of misadventures in Neverland, battling such dastardly menaces to society like mermaids, pirates, and… Native Americans. Hooboy… right, this was written by a white guy in 1904.

Fun fact, I had actually never seen Disney's Peter Pan before I started working on the D&D one off to teach my little brother how to play the game. I figured if I'm including these characters, I should probably watch the most famous version. Hooooooly shit that movie is racist as hell. It wasn't even worth asking my Anishinaabe friend what they thought of the portrayal like I normally would. I'm about as white as swiss cheese jerking off into a saltine cracker and even I felt offended watching those scenes. I haven't read the original play but uh… being written just 14 years after the Wounded Knee Massacre, I can't imagine it's much better. The tribe in the story is straight up called the "Piccaninny" (a racial slur usually directed at small black children), and they speak in that stereotypical Tonto Talk. It's uh… it's cringe, to say the least. In the story, they kinda just serve as a plot device to set up Peter's conflict with his dreaded nemesis, the pirate Captain Hook. After rescuing the chief's daughter, Tiger Lily, from Hook, Hook devises a plan to get his revenge, and mercifully directs our attention away from this abysmal portrayal.

After kidnapping Wendy and her brothers, Hook poisons the medicine Wendy loaned to Peter. Peter, having been sleeping, wakes up and mopes about the loss of his new girlfriend, and opts to finally take his medicine like she had been trying to get him to do. Tinker Bell tries to warn him of the trap, but Peter is like nah that's dumb, you're dumb Tink. A frustrated Tinker Bell then drinks all the medicine herself, succumbing to the poison to save Peter. In the play, this leads into a scene where Peter breaks the fourth wall to beg the audience to clap to affirm that they believe in fairies, as that is the only thing which can save Tink's life. I'm not entirely sure Tink deserves that given all she did, but hey, I guess that is one fine piece of ass to go to waste. After reviving Tink, Peter goes off to rescue his pals and defeat Captain Hook once and for all on his ship. Peter wins the duel by kicking Hook overboard into the awaiting jaws of the crocodile who has been following Hook all this time, takes command of the ship, and sails the Darlings back to their home in London. Wendy's mother actually ends up adopting all of Peter's Lost Boys, but Peter is too afraid of growing up to accept the offer himself. He runs away back to Neverland, where he forgets all about Wendy, the Lost Boys, Hook, and even Tinker Bell, who died within the year because apparently fairies drop like mayflies. It's actually quite a melancholy lesson about how to not grow up is to remain stuck in a cycle of forgetting to care and actually value the experiences of life. Maybe I'm just an old crone at heart, but to me that's a much more appealing moral than the more whimsical way it's often glossed as in modern adaptations.

Design notes, this piece, like the other couple of sheets I did for the Peter Pan characters I used in the one off, was relatively straight forward. Being such a modern story which has been performed on Broadway, there's plenty of images out there of the original costume concept art and photographs of the actresses wearing the final designs. I did lean pretty heavily into the Maude Adams rendition of the character, even basing his headshot primarily off of her. Some modern interpretations like to lean more into the leafy natural aspect of the costume, and I certainly get that, but I ended up opting into the simpler tunic pattern that was used in the original performances. I just think it gives off more of the vibe of your old timey rambunctious school boy who hasn't kept his uniform in order. I don't know, maybe it's just because I'm a square who was always a bit of a prissy kid growing up, but I can't get myself into the whole feral child aesthetic. I also found myself better able to explore the composition a little more with the tunic than I was if I just drew him draped in leaves. I'm just really not Peter Pan's target audience But oh well, I like the end result I came up with.