Review of Newsies

A 1992 Disney musical film about the 1899 New York newsboys' strike, recently adapted into a stage musical and now on in London. It's not a great film, and I have already forgotten all the songs, but it's likeable, and it's an actual Disney film and a musical about a strike in which the strikers are the heroes, beating up scabs is celebrated, and the strikers win through calling on working class solidarity. 

Sure, there are some less correct touches - at one point the strikers appear to have decided that physical confrontation with scabs is not a good thing, because it makes them look bad...though if my memory serves me right they then carry on doing it anyway. They also fight with the cops, who are almost always depicted negatively. And there's an intervention by NY Governor Teddy Roosevelt which means that the strike is at least partly won by appeal to the "good" authorities over the bad ones. And the depiction of Joseph Pullitzer verges on the antisemitic, which should be no surprise in a Disney film. And there's some schmaltzy scenes with the hero getting the girl at the end, though I'd have been disappointed if they didn't end up together.

But still, it's a strike movie with strikers as heroes, and with lines like "My dad's got no protection, they don't have a union in his factory." And somebody must have decided that now was a good time to turn it into a stage musical, which is interesting.

Watched via informal distribution and and HDMI cable.