Dave Barry: belief

Transcript context

…You have a whole series of books. Peter and the Starcatcher is based on Peter Pan. Many have been bestsellers. It’s believed that more than half of the audience for these books is adults, although superficially, they might seem to be children’s books; they’re that, too. The original novel, Peter Pan, by J. M. Barrie, how do you understand that book? It’s a deeply weird book. What’s your sense of that book, and then how you and your coauthor, Ridley Pearson, modified Peter Pan? We were really naive. Neither one of us had really spent much time on J. M. Barrie. Both of us had been raised in the United States, and our view of the Peter Pan story was the Disney cartoon, the famous Disney cartoon, and Mary Martin on Broadway hanging on wires, you know, this 43-year-old lady swinging around stage. That was our view of the Peter Pan story. And all we were thinking about was that, the American version of the Peter Pan story. The myth with just a few simple elements — He can fly. Tinkerbell, Captain Hook, the crocodile — the simple elements. How could we put those together in a backstory that would be entertaining for kids? Little did we know we were sticking a stick into a hornet’s nest of British people who take their J. M. Barrie very, very seriously, don’t like Americans . . . It’s like trying to revise Star Wars.…

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