Treasure Island is a Terrible Kid's Movie

I remember one day in elementary school, they gathered perhaps the entire school together into the gymnasium and showed us "Treasure Island" (1950) using the old projector and screen. I have no idea why, I would love to know. Do school faculties just decide one day that they don't feel like teaching so let's just watch a movie? My best guess is it might have been weather. I'm not sure but I think it was raining all day so they cancelled all recess or something. Is that possible? Don't know.

Regardless of the cause, it's always been quite a distinct memory for me and what I remember is this: it seemed to last forever. It was just a single movie and, I suppose, was just a single day but the movie was able to alter the nature of time and space and fit an eternity into just one afternoon. It went on and on and on, it was relentless; not only would it not end, it seemed to have no beginning or middle such that I could estimate how far along we were. 30 years later, I decided to watch it again to give it a re-evaluation. My first observation: in objective terms, the running time is 1 hour, 36 minutes. 

Having re-watched it, I absolutely understand the problem I had as a kid. It's a terrible kid's movie. And I don't think it's bad for kids because it has alcohol or murder or guns, or even that it shows a child shooting a man in the face. I think all that's great. It's a terrible kid's movie because it's unintelligible.

Perhaps audiences in the fifties were different but the makers of the movie seem to have made no attempt to update the dialogue for modern audiences. I made a note of a few lines. Imagine a child following this:

"You'll get plenty of cut and rip when the times comes, but until I gives the signal, lay to."

Now, I'm an adult an I can use the context to piece together what's meant here but kid-me had no chance. How about this line:

"I imagine I'll have to strike my colors. That comes hard from a master mariner to a ship's yonker like you, Jim."

It's a movie about sailors and pirates so some mariner lingo is going to be inevitable but come on. It's the rule of threes, so how about this:

"Picked up Hawke's old helmsman, we did, and a bosun what pipes man-o'-war fashion."

My word. Compounding the dialogue is that the lines are delivered with some thick English accents and recorded on equipment from the fifties and when I saw it, it was probably played on a loudspeaker in an auditorium. At one point a character is giving instruction to the main character with his dying breaths. He seems to say "And don't beach and I'll go bears". Listening to it again, it might be "And don't go peach and I'll go pears." It's about fruit? Turning on the closed captions, the real text is "And don't peach and I'll go shares." Oh, I see, I never had a chance to begin with. Neat.

Not to belabor the point, but it is the crux of my point that I have a good sound system, I have the closed captions on, I'm an adult - I've read and enjoyed "Pride and Prejudice" - and I can't understand "Treasure Island." And this is for kids?

All that aside, even if I don't understand it, it's technically an old classic and so I wondered what the stars of it went on to do later.

The main character is a child star, Bobby Driscoll, and he looked kind of familiar to me. I bet he went on to be an adult in some movies I've seen. Well, he was a child star in Disney movies but when he developed a bad acne problem, his contract was terminated and he couldn't find work. He later developed a drug problem and hung out with Andy Warhol. "On March 30, 1968, two playing children found his dead body in an abandoned East Village tenement. Believed to be an unclaimed and homeless person, he was buried in an unmarked pauper's grave on Hart Island, where he remains."

Hmm. Well, how about Long John Silver? Robert Newton created a character so iconic that he altered the perception of pirates forever. Every actor and every person you hear doing a "pirate voice" is really just doing an imitation of Robert Newton. He's a legendary actor, what roles did he go on to? Newton was an alcoholic and had trouble finding work when he became increasingly unreliable. "He died at age 50 of alcohol-related causes although the official report was a heart attack."

Alright, I'm done.