A day or so ago, @dduane reblogged a long post - a Canadian magazine article from 1966 - about the Americanisation of Winnie the Pooh.
It's an Impressive Tirade in which the writer (Sheila H. Kieran) says what she thinks about letting Walt Disney have a free hand with a foreign Children's Classic.
There's mention of the previous Adaptation Endeavour, "Mary Poppins" (1964) but it's very brief, perhaps with an eye to limited column space - or maybe because All Was Said Already in a previous review.
There is, however, rather a lot about the English characters being given American accents, and about the inclusion of a new character, an American gopher (which, the article suggests, looked vague enough to the Kieran children - its target audience - that it might as well have been a mole or a beaver).
*****
And that reminded me of another bit of American Animalisation done by Disney, in the 1949 short "The Wind and the Willows" - though in this instance it's visual since the voices are, for the most part, suitably British.
They include Basil Rathbone as narrator, and a horse who sounds like George Formby. In some scenes the horse actually looks like Formby, so this voice may not be entirely accidental.
Badger, however, sounds like a Scotsman - the worst kind of stage Scotsman at that - rather than how I used to "hear" him as a C. Aubrey Smith-voiced crusty retired colonel.
That, however, is just personal preference.
However, Disney's Badger is not a proper British (more correctly, European) badger, Meles meles. Here's one, which though not the most amiable of beasts in reality, still manages to look fairly affable ("I say, old chap, whatever are you looking at?")
Instead he's a North American badger, Taxidea taxus, which not only has a less affable expression ("Hey, bud, you. Yeah, you. You lookin' at me? You lookin' at ME?") but, more important, different stripes.
Here's Disney's version alongside mine. The correction took about five minutes of pixel-tweaking.
Disney's animators could have got it right from the outset just as easily, because I'm pretty sure the reference library which provided costume info for Rat's tweed Norfolk jacket and britches included picture-books of natural history.
Come to that, any "The Wind in the Willows" after the unillustrated first edition would have been enough, and there must have been at least one copy lying around for story adaptation and scene-description purposes.
The first illustrated edition came out in the UK in 1931, and its artist was, at author Kenneth Graham's request, the very same E.H. Shepard who had illustrated the Pooh books just a few years previously...
...while this Arthur Rackham colour plate is from an edition published in 1940 in New York.
So those books wouldn't have been impossible for Disney to get.
The problem, however, is that if a word ("badger", for instance) is well known to mean one thing here, it may be Too Much Trouble to find out if the same word means something else there, with the result that finding out can sometimes come as rather a surprise.
Check the UK / US meaning of "suspenders" to see what I mean... ;->
