Some facts about The Swiss Family Robinson and Robinson Crusoe:

• The “Swiss Family Robinson” was not named Robinson.
• Robinson Crusoe was of German heritage.
• Daniel Dafoe, the man who started it all, published a sequel called The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, in which Crusoe’s man Friday dies at sea.
• Walt Disney made a movie about climbing the Matterhorn, filmed in color on location in Zermatt, but the name of the world’s most iconic mountain is never uttered.
• Walt Disney loved Switzerland and spent time in Zermatt in 1958 during filming. His time there inspired a key Disneyland attraction.
• The Walt Disney Company has a technical R&D team in Zurich, DisneyResearch|Studios (in cooperation with the ETH university).

Those are just several of the fascinating things one discovers when researching Daniel Defoe’s 1719 classic novel and its influence on everything from language and literature to cinema and amusement parks. But there’s much more.

The first edition of Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel, the one that started all things Robinson Crusoe, did not mention the author’s name. PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons

The Original Crusoe
Daniel Defoe’s novel Robinson Crusoe (almost full title: The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America…) was published in 1719 as an autobiography of the title character, whose birth name is Robinson Kreutznaer. His father, a merchant named Kreutznaer, had Anglicized the family’s German name to Crusoe. Robinson is a castaway who spends 28 years on a remote tropical desert island near the coasts of Venezuela and Trinidad (roughly resembling Tobago, where the 1960 Disney film was shot). On the island Crusoe encounters cannibals, captives, and mutineers, before ultimately being rescued and returning to his home in England.

Crusoe is shipwrecked on an island off the Venezuelan coast (which he names the “Island of Despair”) while on an expedition to kidnap and enslave people from Africa. Years earlier, he himself had been enslaved by Moors, but managed to escape with a boy named Xury, whom he then later sells to a Portuguese ship’s captain. Crusoe later gets religion and regrets his past transgressions. He brings his servant Friday with him to England. On the way to Lisbon to claim his Brazilian fortune, the two cross the Pyrenees in yet another adventure involving wolves. – I’m getting tired just writing about this, and I’ve left a lot of details out.

So this adventure story, considered by some to be the first English novel, written over 300 years ago, is still inspiring imitations and knockoffs, some better than others. These are known as Robinsonades (below). But Defoe’s own fictional account may have been based on a true story. Alexander Selkirk was a real-life Scottish castaway who lived for four years on a Pacific island called “Más a Tierra,” now part of Chile and officially named Robinson Crusoe Island since 1966.

Robinsonades
The term “Robinsonade” (in English and German) describes the genre of stories and films created since Defoe’s original Robinson Crusoe, with similar themes and tales. (The word was coined by the German writer Johann Gottfried Schnabel in 1731 in his preface to Die Insel Felsenburg/The Island Stronghold.) And there have been many Defoe imitators, and even some predecessors (Homer’s Odyssey). One of the best known Robinsonades is The Swiss Family Robinson (Der Schweizerische Robinson, 1812) by the Swiss author Johann David Wyss (1743-1818). The book was edited by his son, Johann Rudolf Wyss, a scholar who wrote the Swiss national anthem. Another son, Johann Emmanuel Wyss, illustrated the book. For a time, the elder Wyss was a Swiss army chaplain with a Bern regiment abroad. He originally wrote the stories for his young children. Only later did his son Johann Rudolf edit it all into a book format for publication. Der Schweizerische Robinson became a bestseller and was soon translated into other languages, including English.

The cover of a later edition of Der Schweizerische Robinson by Johann David Wyss. PHOTO: Wikimedia Comons

No less than Jules Verne also caught the Crusoe bug. Inspired by the Wyss novel, Verne wrote a sequel, picking up where the German original left off. Published in French as Seconde patrie (“Second Fatherland”) in 1900, Verne’s adventure was first published in English as two separate volumes, but later appeared combined as The Castaways of the Flag.

But it would be a new 20th century form of storytelling, motion pictures, that would bring the 19th century Swiss Robinson tale to an even wider audience.

The Movie Versions
Walt Disney, known to have borrowed/stolen from a lot of European/Austrian/German/Swiss source material, made a fairly successful movie in 1960 that was somewhat loosely based on the Wyss novel. But he was not the first to film the Swiss story. In fact he was partly inspired by the 1940 RKO motion picture titled Swiss Family Robinson. That black-and-white picture, starring Thomas Mitchell, Edna Best, and Freddie Bartholomew, was probably more faithful to the book, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. The book is fairly preachy (being written by a pastor) and sexist (reflecting its time). Disney and his film director, Ken Annakin, are said to have used the RKO film as a guide to what not to do.

NOTE: If you’re a Disney+ subscriber, you can stream several of the movies mentioned here, and compare the 1940 and 1960 versions of Swiss Family Robinson. It’s a bit ironic, considering that Disney bought the RKO film to keep it out of circulation.

The “Swiss Family” book is also an informative wilderness survival manual, and the Disney film went with that in spades. Disney also further capitalized on this with his “Swiss Family Treehouse” at Disneyland, California – at least until 1999 when Disney released a Tarzan film and remodeled the treehouse to be a Tarzan Treehouse. (Currently it is closed for refurbishment, but Florida’s Disney World still has the original Swiss Family Treehouse attraction.)

A film poster for Disney’s 1960 version of Swiss Family Robinson. PHOTO: Wikimedia Commons

But the 1960 Disney film also departs in several ways from the Swiss book, introducing pirates and a veritable exotic animals zoo on the island, with a cast of “wild” animals never seen in one place before or since. (Borrowing perhaps somewhat from the Defoe original.) Despite the goofiness, the cast (John Mills, Dorothy McGuire, James MacArthur [later of Hawaii Five-O TV fame from 1968 to 1980; “Book ’em, Danno.”], Janet Munro, Tommy Kirk, Kevin Corcoran, and Sessue Hayakawa) helped make the picture the fourth-largest grossing film of 1960 behind the tough competition of Spartacus, Psycho and Exodus. The film was also boosted by being shot in Panavision largely on location in Tobago.

Zermatt and Third Man on the Mountain (1959)
A year before filming Swiss Family Robinson in warm Tobago, Walt Disney was enjoying the spring and summer beauty of Zermatt, Switzerland. Producer Bill Anderson, the same one who later worked on Swiss Family, had brought to Walt’s attention a book by James Ramsey Ullman. His fictional Banner in the Sky was based on the story of the first ascent of the Matterhorn peak. But Walt, Switzerland fan that he was, wanted to film on location in and around Zermatt. And that’s what happened.

The Technicolor scenery in Third Man on the Mountain is spectacular, even if the film itself is less so. Released in November 1959, most critics found something good to write about it, but it performed poorly at the box office. The Shaggy Dog was Disney’s only real hit that year. James MacArthur, who would later also appear in Swiss Family Robinson, starred as the son of a fictional mountain climber. One day he rescues a famous mountain climber (Michael Rennie), who then invites him to take part in a climb he has planned. Perhaps because the film was based on a fictional book, no one ever utters the word “Matterhorn” in the film, despite that famous recognizable peak being seen in half of the movie! But the climbing scenes look authentic, more authentic than the acting in many cases.

But if Third Man on the Mountain was a cinematic disappointment, it produced one of the most enduring and iconic attractions at Disneyland. It was during filming in Zermatt that Walt Disney sent a picture postcard of the Matterhorn to Vic Greene in California with a brief but clear message: “Vic. Build this. Walt.”

Still one of the most popular rides at Disneyland today, the Matterhorn bobsled ride opened at the park in June 1959, only a few months prior to the film’s premiere. After struggling to develop a good concept for a toboggan ride for years, Walt had his epiphany in Zermatt. The artificial Matterhorn peak has become perhaps an even more iconic symbol of the Anaheim park than Sleeping Beauty’s Castle.

– HF