To any children who dream of excitement on earth instead of in a space-ship, there are still thrills galore in the old shipwreck tale, The Swiss Family Robinson. Even the young actors, who went recently to a tropical island to enact the story for a movie, got in the spirit of the famous 140-year-old yarn and kept on playing their parts between scenes. They waged mock battles with pirates, cavorted with giant turtles and baby elephants, not to mention pigs and zebras. The lush isle of Tobago, with its special zoo imported just for the show, became a kids' heaven on earth.
The movie, made by Walt Disney, hews closely to the adventures of three children and their resourceful parents, played with charm by Dorothy McGuire and John Mills. Stranded on a deserted crumb of land, the do-it-yourself Robinsons make a cooling system out of a waterfall, dig a trap to catch lions and live luxuriously in a split-level treehouse with a picture window in the ceiling. Disney added a few things — pirates and a pretty girl — but the movie is so permeated with the book's spirit of family fun that it broke holiday attendance records all across the country.[…]
