MovieChat Forums > Old Yeller (1959) Discussion > I guess I was the only kid who thought t...

I guess I was the only kid who thought the ending was sugar-coated!

posted 14 years ago by eadoe
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When I was 9 yrs old my grandpa gave me some old magazines to cut pictures out of, and some of them were Colliers, and they happened to be the 3 issues in which Old Yeller was serialized when it was first published in 1956. I read and cried and read and cried through the whole series. Then the next year Disney made this movie. I saw it and, at age 10, I was outraged by the way Disney sugar-coated the ending. In the book, these pioneers couldn't take any chances with rabies, so there is no "putting the dog in the corn crib for a few weeks" the way it was in the movie. Instead, Travis shoots him on the spot, right next to the dead wolf. As a kid, I never forgot that line, "I called him over and put the muzzle of my gun to his head and pulled the trigger." Then the beginning of the next chapter- -- I'm writing this from memory, but it's probably pretty close to original text -- that's how much impact it made on a 9 year old girl more than 50 years ago:

"Days passed, and I couldn't seem to get over it. I couldn't eat. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't cry. I felt all empty inside, but hurting. Hurting worse than I'd ever hurt in my life. Hurting with an ache there didn't seem to be any cure for. Thinking every minute of my big yeller dog, how we'd romped together and hunted together, how he'd fought off the killer hogs and taken the beating meant for me, how he'd fought the she-bear off Little Arliss, how he'd saved Mama and Lisbeth from the mad wolf, and how after all that I'd had to shoot him down like he was nothin'."

It's a beautifully written book with so much understated pain -- the movie pales in comparison.

"The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power."
- Julius Caesar, act 2 sc 1

[–] Henahey41 14 years ago

I have never read the book.That is alot sadder then the film.I'll have to read it now along with were the red fern grows

[–] nabo7 12 years ago

That quoted paragraph is a well-written first-person narrative that gets us inside Travis's head and packs an emotional wallop, but it might be difficult to transmit in a movie. It is a period of several days with no action or dialogue being presented. Perhaps it was a justifiable alteration to put the agonizing wait in the corn crib into the movie to generate some tension, rather than shooting the dog immediately as in the book.