ABSTRACT
Over Thanksgiving weekend in 2002, Disney released Treasure Planet, an animated adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's iconic late Victorian tale Treasure Island, that translates the adventure story into a work of science fiction. The film characterizes Silver's work as Jim's mentor and surrogate father figure in such a way that clearly frames him as the particular kind of role model for which researchers of the contemporary "boy crisis" call. In this way, Treasure Planet is an example of "contemporary screen adaptations of Victorian texts that often offer critical interventions or re-readings that might be relocated onto a neo-Victorian terrain in their own right". The general inclination to reimagine Treasure Island as a space opera cannot be called a counterintuitive one; the genres of maritime adventure and space opera are, perhaps surprisingly, closely related. Treasure Island in particular might even be understood as an ideal text for translation into space opera.
