I met the animal trainer on Storm Boy and we talked about what the pelicans would be able to do. Birds can be temperamental and if one was grumpy they would use another one.' (3) Scriptwriter Sonia Borg described these 'skill sets' as a major determinant in her adaptation of Colin Thiele's novella: Mike 'Storm Boy' Kingley himself, Greg Rowe, said: 'One was better at certain tricks than the others. So back to 'this pelican'-or, rather, pelicans, since the Mr Percival of the film was a composite of three different pelicans, each with different skill sets and temperaments. (2) Something of an exaggeration, given Potter was a kid-generated cult, and Storm Boy, a triumph of astutely targeted educational packaging and marketing, but there's some grain of truth there. To most schoolkids, Safran's film was-according to media personality David Koch-the Harry Potter of its time. Not that any schoolchild of the late 1970s and early 1980s, particularly a South Australian one, would need reminding of Storm Boy or what it was about. Substitute 'film' for 'book' and 'pelican' for 'whale', and you have something of both the media hype at the time of the making and screening of Storm Boy (Henri Safran, 1976) as well as the way in which memories of the film have lingered in a sort of collective Australian psyche: 'It's about this pelican.' Desperately: 'It's about this whale.' (1) 'It's worth picking up again.' Still no response. In the musical Wonderful Town, in an awkward moment, trying to make conversation, Rosalind Russell said: 'I was re-reading Moby Dick the other night.' Pause. IT MAY HAVE DELIGHTED CHILDREN, BUT ADULTS WERE CATERED FOR AS WELL. NOT MANY PELICANS HAVE AC- QUIRED STAR STATUS AS MR PERCIVAL HAS DONE, AND HAYES' ACCOUNT PAYS CAREFUL ATTENTION TO THOSE COLLABORATORS - APART FROM THE FEATHERED ICON - RESPONSIBLE FOR THE FILM'S CRITICAL AND COMMERCIAL SUCCESS. THE FILM WAS HUGELY POPULAR AT THE TIME, AND HAYES HELPS US TO SEE WHY THIS WAS SO. AS ONE WHO WAS LESS THAN ENTHUSI- ASTIC ABOUT HENRI SAFRAN'S STORM BOY WHEN I FIRST SAW IT FORTY YEARS AGO, UPON READING TERRY HAYES' DIVERTING, ERUDITE AND SPLENDIDLY RESEARCHED ACCOUNT, I NOW FEEL IMPELLED TO WATCH IT AGAIN.
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