When Was the Movie Swiss Family Robinson Placed in Timeline

Things Only Adults Discover In Swiss Family Robinson

Disney made a lot of live-action movies in the 1960s and 1970s, simply few are as fondly remembered equally Swiss Family Robinson. The highest-grossing motion picture of 1960, this accommodation of the classic 19th-century novel by Johann David Wyss is one of the most enduring non-animated Disney films, thanks to home video, reruns on cablevision Television, and the Disney+ streaming service.

But on height of that, Swiss Family Robinson looms so large in the hearts and minds of millions because it offers big, grand, unpredictable adventures while also being relatable. Because for all of the dazzling shipwrecks, pirate chases, catchy sailing trips, and fending off wild animals, Swiss Family Robinson is really just the story of a mostly normal, loving family unit trying to survive and stay intact, all while relying on each other.

Swiss Family Robinson is also a family pic, which means in that location's something for anybody in it — fifty-fifty adults. Older, more seasoned viewers will notice things the kids don't, be it suggestive material, plot holes, or things that just didn't age very well. Here are the things in Swiss Family unit Robinson that are totally lost on kids.

Trauma doesn't bother the Swiss Family Robinson

How you lot describe the events experienced by the Swiss Robinson family unit in Swiss Family unit Robinson is all nearly semantics. A more marketable, exciting, and enticing give-and-take for what happens to them on the boat and later they're shipwrecked is "hazard." A more than realistic, accurate, and modern-twenty-four hours word for the Robinson saga is "traumatic." Viewed through a sensitive, 21st-century lens, Swiss Family Robinson consists of one harrowing, dangerous, life-threatening, and thus potentially psychologically damaging consequence after another.

The movie opens with the Robinson family — which includes two teenagers and a little child — trapped in a tiny room on a send as it fills with h2o. They successfully evade drowning by breaking out of their piffling expiry trap, but and then they face peril and destruction again by building a raft to become off the gunkhole in order to reach land. Things are relatively smooth for a while, and the Robinsons get settled ... until their adopted dogs have to fight off a hungry tiger, and then Ernst (Tommy Kirk) and Fritz (James MacArthur) keep a sailing sojourn to explore the rest of the island and rescue Roberta (Janet Munro) from a gang of bloodthirsty pirates. If the Robinsons were existent people, the psychological scars suffered would run deep and would take years of therapy to convalesce. The flick Robinsons, withal, aren't real people, and they just roll with the scary and don't seem much worse for the habiliment. They're relentlessly cheerful, even.

There are a lot of unaddressed dangers

While the Robinsons endure numerous frightening encounters with the ocean, pirates, and roughshod animals, they don't seem too worried about the things most likely to harm or kill them — which are precisely the things an alert, concerned parent watching Swiss Family Robinson would almost certainly notice or think about when assessing how they'd fare on an isle, post-shipwreck.

Female parent Robinson (Dorothy McGuire) gets awfully nervous when her strong swimming married man and sons are swinging on a vine over a swimming hole, but neither she nor anyone else seems agape of that unclean water. Begetter Robinson (John Mills) playfully spits out the h2o after falling in, and that water is nigh definitely full of all kinds of germs, bacteria, and the diseases spread by virulent microscopic life. The Robinsons, in all of their survival activities, don't devote any fourth dimension to water purification, and nutrient doesn't seem to be much of a problem, either. They consume random fruit off trees, which could hands be poisonous, and no responsible parent would allow their kids to sample wild jungle plants. Heck, the Robinsons don't even deal with sunburns. If Swiss Family Robinson were real, those Alpine mountain folk would burn to a crisp and apace.

Wait, their names are Female parent and Father?

When adapting Johann David Wyss' classic novel, Disney filmmakers didn't worry nearly toning down any of the Swiss references and historical markers. Viewers both immature and old understand early and often that the Robinsons initially got on a boat spring for New Guinea, departing from their home in Bern, Switzerland, to escape the European conquest of Napoleon Bonaparte, placing the story somewhere around the year 1800. Those unique cultural indicators made the final cut of Swiss Family unit Robinson, and the boys' names stayed every bit Swiss-High german as they were in the original 1840 novel — Ernst, Fritz, and Francis.

It's noticeable then for adult viewers, by the act of omission, that the Robinson parents' names are never revealed. Their first names are never given considering they're never used. In a very formal and outdated fashion, all the Robinson boys phone call their mother "Mother" and their father "Male parent." Not fifty-fifty in one of the handful of scenes when Mother and Father are lone with each other do they slip up and do something and then informal as to refer to their spouse by their name instead of their championship of parentage. It's more than than a little goofy and unsettling.

The accents are all over the place in Swiss Family Robinson

Here's the polar opposite of a spoiler. As the family unit at the center of Swiss Family Robinson, the Robinsons are from the nation of Switzerland. They're Swiss, in other words, and they discuss their Swissness frequently and in loving detail. Adults volition catch the occasional reference to "Bern," that beingness the capital metropolis of Switzerland from which the Robinson family presumably hails. Fritz and Ernst hash out their homeland'south beautiful mountains and snowy climate, and both have High german-sounding names, which fits, because German language is one of Switzerland'due south four official languages, which older viewers may remember from a high school geography course.

Adults may also find how none of the Robinsons speak in a Swiss accent, and in fact, their song characteristics vary wildly. Male parent speaks with the natural, clipped British accent of the human who portrays him, John Mills, while Female parent speaks in a mid-Atlantic dialect — that highly theatrical, vaguely British, mid-20th mode of speech used primarily by actors like Katharine Hepburn. Curiously, all three kids don't sound like they're from Switzerland or England, braying about in their quintessential mid-century American accents.

There seems to be a wearing apparel lawmaking

Technically, Swiss Family Robinson is a beach picture. At that place aren't whatever surfing scenes, bonfire parties, or other tropes found in the genre that was pop around the time of Swiss Family unit Robinson'southward initial release in 1960, only information technology's a film that takes place almost entirely in, on, or around a tropical beach. Adults might assume that characters would be dressed in embankment-advisable attire — shorts, swimsuits, T-shirts, or for the guys, naught on top. But that's not the case with Swiss Family Robinson, which will amuse and mildly startle developed viewers.

Despite the hot sun beating downward, Mother Robinson never appears in anything other than a wearing apparel that covers equally of skin from her cervix down to her ankles. The male characters, meanwhile, do take off their shirts, if working in the sun, only they're careful to rarely brandish their navels. In a strictly small Disney movie from 1960, showing off a belly push would be downright profane, so most instances of shirtlessness involve the Robinson guys hilariously pulling up their long pants almost up to their chests and then equally to not flash anything untoward.

Father Robinson has needs

Maybe that mostly enforced apparel lawmaking placed on the Robinson family is just an attempt to kill any and all throbbing biological urges indicative of teenage boys. Older viewers will notice that multiple male person members of the Robinson family take physical needs besides nutrient and shelter on the brain, and they demonstrate information technology in as explicit a fashion that a Disney movie from 1960 would allow. After the Robinson guys build their elaborate, multi-part, caster-enabled network of treehouses, Male parent whisks Mother up to show her their literal beloved nest and bedroom. Youngest son Francis (Kevin Corcoran) shouts that he wants to follow his mom up in that location, only for his knowing brothers to gently hold him back from doing and then, to give the married people their infinite. Father fifty-fifty gives the guys a look that definitely says, "Hey, dorsum off, I'k going to see where this goes," as he follows Female parent into the treehouse, where they reminisce near their honeymoon, and everyone simply the most little of piffling kids knows what happens on a honeymoon.

Fritz and Ernst are single and ready to mingle

Quite a bit of euphemism-heavy birds and bees talk permeates Swiss Family unit Robinson. Afterward a nice day of diving and swimming at an idyllic spot, Father Robinson proclaims his want and intention to never go out the island. Information technology then takes him a moment to effigy out exactly what she'due south saying, but Mother laments how if they were to never go rescued and if they stayed on this isle paradise forever, their boys would "never get married" or find themselves wives ... by which she means "succumb to their natural physical needs equally men." In a scene that kids would accept literally — in that people desire to marry other people — Father agrees, in very few words, that this could cause a problem the longer the family stays on the island.

Fritz and Ernst, however, are way ahead of Male parent on the matter because they're feeling those familiar feelings already. While camping ground out on the beach during their exploratory sail around their island, Ernst wonders, "Do you recall when we get to New Republic of guinea, if we always do, there'll be whatever girls our historic period?" And then Fritz gives a inexplainable, hormonal, and almost predatory answer with, "By the fourth dimension nosotros become to New Guinea, we won't intendance what age they are!"

Where did the Robinsons learn their survival skills?

The plucky, crafty Robinsons of Swiss Family Robinson are and then good at surviving the harsh weather of a tropical island (and getting off a sinking ship with enough of supplies) that they make information technology look easy. Viewers of all ages might lookout this picture show and call back, "Hey, if I crashed on a random isle, I could totally survive and thrive, just like the Swiss Family unit Robinson!" And that includes viewers who have no survival training or experience roughing it in the wilderness — just like the Swiss Family unit Robinson.

Thoughtful viewers may wonder where and how the Robinsons got so practiced at living off the land. Through a few statements pieced together, information technology'southward established that the Robinsons were a wealthy family from Bern, Switzerland. Mother wears very dainty clothes, Fritz and Ernst attended a individual school, and they could afford the expensive passage to their in one case-final destination of New Republic of guinea. The life of a well-to-exercise group from snowy, landlocked Switzerland doesn't propose in that location would be much opportunity to larn the expert-level abilities the Robinsons demonstrate in their tropical paradise. They manifestly accept such a deep knowledge of institute life that they know what to consume and what to avert, their raft-making skills are on point, the older boys can spear fish, and the family unit somehow manages to build the fanciest and well-nigh complicated treehouse in world history.

The diverseness of wild fauna in Swiss Family Robinson is light-headed

Older viewers (and more acute, geographically educated children who listen well) tin effigy out exactly where the Robinsons in Swiss Family Robinson go shipwrecked and take up residence. They were sailing from Europe to the Republic of indonesia-next island of New Republic of guinea in southeastern Asia. However, even a brief flake of wildlife knowledge makes it articulate to viewers that filmmakers went for less of an accurate take on what sorts of animals and plants would be found on a tiny island in that vicinity and instead embraced a more generalized life-rich isle where most any cool, exciting, exotic, or photogenic creature could make an advent.

A baby elephant named Rocky makes a memorable appearance and becomes as much of a pet to the Robinsons as Duke and Turk, the big dogs they relieve from their ship. Those dogs get into a fleck with a tiger, and the Robinsons afterwards try to salvage a zebra that gets trapped in what seems to be quicksand. The family too befriends a large turtle and walks by some flamingos and ostriches at ane bespeak. Such large and various wild animals aren't generally constitute all on 1 isle together, adults may point out, only for Swiss Family Robinson to feebly explicate this away by suggesting that the island wasn't e'er an island but was once connected to a continent via some kind of "state span."

The animals endure a lot of corruption

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Despite the geographical peculiarities and inconsistencies in their depiction, the animals in Swiss Family Robinson are one of the film'south biggest attraction points, both in the present mean solar day and most certainly when information technology beginning hit theaters in 1960, when less media and less zoos and aquariums meant fewer chances to get a glimpse of a tiger, zebra, shark, or ocean turtle up close. Generally speaking, kids love and are fascinated with animals, then they'll notice the many fantastic beasts that roam the Robinsons' island domicile and the body of water around it, but information technology's the adults who will realize that these animals seemingly didn't take a neat time shooting Swiss Family Robinson.

Animals are used equally beasts of burden and made to work, and they endure through some frightening sequences, neither of which are depicted in more gimmicky family films. For example, while trying to make state, the Robinsons fight off sharks and successfully get them to dorsum off past shooting at them, and moments later, they marvel at a turtle that winds up towing their heavy boat full of salvaged junk. Add in the drowning and flailing zebra, Francis attempting to violently trap an elephant, and two dogs brutally fighting off a tiger in a scene that goes on for way too long, and Swiss Family Robinson isn't the cute and innocuous movie adult watchers remember from their childhood.

The Roberta situation

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In that location are all kinds of things wrong and shocking about how the character of Roberta is handled in Swiss Family Robinson. Fritz and Ernst discover her in their sailing expedition on another part of their island, taken captive past pirates along with her gramps. Notwithstanding, at the time, Roberta isn't Roberta — she'southward just some lowly cabin male child. Her granddad had her wrap her head in a scarf to make the pirates think she's a man, which viewers presume is and so they wouldn't kidnap her and do horrible things to her.

And in much the same way that Clark Kent'south glasses muffle Superman's identity, in the world of this film, that head wrap somehow makes the pirates and the boys non detect 26-year-old actress Janet Munro's adult, feminine facial features. (However, the Robinson boys practise notice that this new friend isn't the virtually macho of men, and they compare him to a school chum from back home they bullied for existence a "sissy.") The guys but figure out Roberta'south truthful identity when her scarf falls off, just so they don't really have a romantic interest in her until their female parent gives her a blench-inducing, ultra-feminine makeover. Information technology's all very dated at best and problematic at worst.

This isn't some obscure isle

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Probably because of the cultural dominance and popularity of Lost, adults watching Swiss Family unit Robinson may be predisposed to not accepting a tropical island at face value. As the island from Lost wasn't only some tropical isle where a plane crashed and a bunch of survivors had to make do with limited resources, adults will realize that the seemingly innocuous (if abundant and danger-laden) setting of Swiss Family Robinson is also not at all random or obscure. Information technology'southward a little contrived that the island witnessed two canoeing disasters in the same short time frame — the Robinsons crawling ashore after a shipwreck, every bit well as the pirates who attacked a gunkhole and took Roberta and her gramps captive. Those aforementioned pirates threaten the Robinsons' safety on multiple occasions. This means that if pirates are constantly swirling about the general area, looking for haul, treasure, and whatnot, then this isle isn't exactly off the beaten path but right forth a major shipping road. Information technology's puzzling that the Robinsons aren't spotted past a friendly seafaring vessel right away.

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Source: https://www.looper.com/240702/things-only-adults-notice-in-swiss-family-robinson/

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