Ultimately Pete grows unhappy with his lot in life and venturing into the great unknown.

We might assume that Pete is from one such institution and that Pete is little more than a purchased slave. Orphanages, for various reasons, were made to seem vile institutions in the mid-eighteen hundreds as stories like Oliver attest. The story take place in an ambiguous time, a ‘once upon a time’ if you will, yet something about the child being sold by the orphanage sounds slightly wrong. These hardships, however, are not found to be fair by the young boy who has been physically abused by the Gorgans whose motive in the purchase of the boy was simply to ease their life by making the youth do all the work on their farm. The emphasis on legal fees appears often in the cruel family’s dialog as an illustation that the hardships issued to Pete are acceptable within the limits of society. Pete is a young boy who is sold by an orphanage to the Gorgan family for fifty dollars plus legal fees. While Campbell’s thoughts were tied to mono-myth constructions we also find allegoric substance in more current work whether placed there consciously by the author or unconsciously as simple truths that take root with out asking for permission of the writer. As Joseph Campbell suggests there are story types deeply ingrained in our human experience. This does not, necessarily, make them devoid of any deeper archetypical meaning. While many fairy tales have their roots in oral traditions many, such as the works of Hans Christian Anderson, have much more traceable lineage. No, Pete’s Dragon finds itself firmly in the land of the fairy tale. Nor, does the movie hold to be legend by the classic definition. Under the definitions I use to classify traditional stories Pete’s Dragon cannot be defined as a Mythology since, for one, it lacks the pertinent attribute of having been believed as true at some point. The thought has stuck with me for several days to the point that, for better or worse, I have decided to take a swing at my own critical analysis of this childhood favorite. I recently had the chance to rewatch this movie and, having just recently read Robert Bly’s Iron John, was struck by the underlying psychology one might pull from the story. The film was adapted from a short story by Senton Miller in the early 1950s. Pete’s Dragon is a 1977 live action/animated Disney flick about a young orphan boy who runs away to start a new life with his, sometimes, invisible pet dragon Elliot.

Pete's dragon 1977 school bell