It took $5,000,000, an "impossible" shipwreck and much ingenuity to film the classic story of The Swiss Family Robinson after the Disney cameras journeyed to Tobago.
In the now somewhat remote days when I was a jug-cared moppet in Charlottesville, Virginia, one of the most popular books in the Methodist Sunday School lending library was The Swiss Family Robinson. The fact that the story was rather baldly stolen from that earlier classic, Robinson Crusoe, didn’t bother us kids in the slightest. It was a story of high and improbable adventure, and we ate it up.
Nowadays, I am sure, The Swiss Family Robinson is less widely read than it was forty or fifty years ago. Yet that dreary fact did not deter Walt Disney, who has just spent $5,000,000 to re-create the story in a full-color film which will be released later this month. The entire picture was made on Tobago, the last island of the Lesser Antilles before the curving scimitar of that archipelago reaches out to Trinidad and South America. And because I had heard of some fearful and wondrous goings-on down there, I journeyed to Tobago while the picture was in the making – to see for myself.
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