The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest by Felix Salten, Alenka Sottler, Jack Zipes

Episode Date: February 19, 2022

The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest by Felix Salten, Alenka Sottler, Jack Zipes A new, beautifully illustrated translation of Felix Salten’s celebrated novel Bambi―the original source of the beloved story Most of us think we know the story of Bambi―but do we? The Original Bambi is an all-new, illustrated translation of a literary classic that presents the story as it was meant to be told. For decades, readers’ images of Bambi have been shaped by the 1942 Walt Disney film―an idealized look at a fawn who represents nature’s innocence―which was based on a 1928 English translation of a novel by the Austrian Jewish writer Felix Salten. This masterful new translation gives contemporary readers a fresh perspective on this moving allegorical tale and provides important details about its creator. Originally published in 1923, Salten’s story is more somber than the adaptations that followed it. Life in the forest is dangerous and precarious, and Bambi learns important lessons about survival as he grows to become a strong, heroic stag. Jack Zipes’s introduction traces the history of the book’s reception and explores the tensions that Salten experienced in his own life―as a hunter who also loved animals, and as an Austrian Jew who sought acceptance in Viennese society even as he faced persecution. With captivating drawings by award-winning artist Alenka Sottler, The Original Bambi captures the emotional impact and rich meanings of a celebrated story.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show.com.

Hey, we're coming to you on your podcast. Thanks for tuning in, everyone, and being part of the Chris Voss Show family. Be sure to refer the show to your friends, neighbors, relatives, dogs, cats. Like, just go and knock on all your neighbor's doors on, like, a Saturday morning, like one of those missionary dudes, and just ask them if they've discovered the light and love of the Chris Voss Show. Because remember, we're a family that loves you but doesn't judge you. So I don't know what that means.

Don't knock on your neighbor's door. You'll probably get shot. You'll probably get sued for that. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book.

It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now.

We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. Or order the book wherever fine books are sold. Anyway, guys, thanks for tuning in. Today we have an amazing story. We're going to uncover the secret behind the Walt Disney film Bambi, and we're going to get the true story. We're going to find out what really happened, I guess, basically.

It's a scandal. It's a scandal. This thing's bigger than Hillary Clinton's emails, Watergate. It's up there. We're going to be talking about it today and stuff. So this is going to be explosive. So stay tuned. Hold on.

Strap yourselves in. I should add that the show, strap yourselves strap yourselves in some sort of piloting thing. Anyway, guys, go to youtube.com for just Chris Voss, the qualification button, go to goodreads.com for just Chris Voss, you everything we're reading,

reading and reviewing over there or everything. We're not reading, reviewing over there. It's a big site. A lot of books. I'll go to all groups, Facebook, LinkedIn,

Twitter, Instagram, all that good stuff. Today we have Felix or I'm sorry. That's I'm used to reading off the author thing. Today we have Jack Zipes on the show. He is the translator and did the introduction, I think the editing, for this book that's coming out February 22, 2022, 2-2-22. Everyone this week has got this date. The book is called The Original Bambi, The Story in the Forest.

And we're going to find out more about what went behind this book, the original story of the book, and everything else. Jack Zipes is a professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota. In addition to his scholarly work, he is an active storyteller in public schools. He founded Neighborhood Bridges at the Children's Theater Company in Minneapolis and has written fairy tales for children and adults. Some of his recent publications include The Golden Age of Folk and Fairy Tales

from the Brothers Grimm to Andrew Lang and Grimm Legacies, The Magic Power of Fairy Tales and a whole bunch of books he's published recently that we'll get into. Welcome to the show, Jack. How are you? I'm fine, thank you. I'm surviving. There you go. Well, that's about all we can do in the COVID changes. I live in Minnesota and the weather never gets higher than five degrees during the winter. Yeah, they can pass laws against that. I live in Las Vegas.

We just pass laws and we don't have that anymore. So except during sometimes really cold winters out in that desert. So welcome to the show. Give us your plug so we can find out more about you and what you do on the interwebs. Thank you. Well, right now in my retirement, I've been, I founded a small publishing house called Little Mole and Honey Bear. And I've been publishing sort of books, fairy tales and fantasy stories in the little publishing house. But my major connection is with

Princeton University Press. I have a series there called Oddly Modern Fairy Tales. And I guess I should tell you the story of how I came across Bambi and why I translated it, re-translated it. So we academics have in the humanities, every year, the Modern Language Association has this big conference where like 20 to 30,000 academics show up and give talks. And there were booksellers and editors there. And about three years ago, I was at this conference and two different editors from two different presses came up to me during the conference and said and asked me, hey, how would you like to translate Bambi and write something about it?

And I looked at them and I said, are you kidding? In my memory, the Walt Disney films stuck it in my brain somehow. And I said, you're joking. And they said, well, look, it's coming in to the public domain in 2022. And we want to get that book published again and obviously make some money. And I said, come on, this is ridiculous. It was a sort of a melancholy, sweet film and so on. But no, I don't want to do it. And they kept persisting during the bump into them during the conference. But I went home. So I went home. And when I got home, I said, this really bothers me. Why are they after me? And I began doing some research.

And I found out that, number one, Bambi was not written by Walt Disney and his collaborators. It was written by an Austrian Jew by the name of Felix Salton. And even that was not his real name. It was Sigman. And a Jewish. He had a Jewish name. And then I began reading further that this was really a novel not written for children, but written for adults. looked up various books about Salton or essays on Bambi, and realized that this is a stunning book that I really have to investigate more. And after I read it, I realized that Salton was using these animals morphologically or as an allegory for the situation of Jews in Austria

during the first half of the 20th century. And I was really knocked off my feet and called up my editor, Anne Savarese at Princeton University Press. And I said, what do you know about Bambi? And she immediately said, well, that's Walt Disney's. I said, no, it's not Walt Disney's book. Walt Disney made it into a film and so on. And I explained to her what the situation was. And she said, go to it. And so I immediately contacted, I wanted an illustrator. And I have a very strong friendship with one of the best prominent illustrators in Europe. Her name is Alenka Sutler, and she lives in Slovenia in Ljubljana. So I called her and I said, how would you like to work with me on this book? And she said, yes.

And she hesitated also. I had to convince her to do some research. And she actually is so thorough as an artist, as a really brilliant artist. She actually went to Vienna where Felix Salten lived and grew up, and did even more research because she wanted to do semi-realistic or surrealistic types of illustrations.

So we had the team, Alenka, myself, and then my editor, Anne Savarese. And we went to work and we published a long introduction to the book because I would say 90% or 95% of people in the world do not know the background, the historical background with regard to the publication of the book. It's amazing. got to the publication of this amazing and i remember reading that there's a lot of the trademarks or trademarks that disney has like mickey mouse i guess and a few other things donald duck and stuff they're all about to expire this year yeah so once they're in the they just enter the public domain and i don't know what happens then but clearly you're able to write about it without getting cease and desist from disney right, right. No, this is, the novel is totally different. It's like 100% different.

Really? Oh, yes. Because in Salton's work, the Bambi is, let us say, educated by this old prince. And the old prince teaches him that you've got to learn how to live all by yourself alone. You are never going to make it out of this forest unless you listen to me and follow the trails that I set and understand that life is loneliness. And this is the total up, the Disney film is all marshmallow sweet. And whereas the novel is really a brilliant examination of, and this is my interpretation, of the life of Jews at that time, because anti-Semitism was a common, totally common during the first half of the 20th century.

And Salton was reacting. He was a brilliant journalist. He was well known. He wrote plays. A lot of Austrians know a great deal about him, but outside of Austria, zero. It's a zero. And the Sultan fought all his life against anti-Semitism, but he was also somewhat contradictory because he also admired the Austrian nobility and wanted to become like them. So he was caught in, let's say, in conundrum because of the fact that he desired to become like the Austrian nobles, knowing that these nobles would probably kill him like they do in the forest, like hunters do in the forest. Yeah. This is pretty amazing.

And he sold the story then, right? He sold the story to Disney, evidently, right? Yeah. No, not directly to Disney. In 1930, the book came out in English in 1928. I re-translated because the translation is not all that. It's not a bad translation, but it's not a really good, sharp translation. And so the book came out in English in 1928. And believe it or not, the translator was Whitaker Chambers, a communist spy living in New York City at that time.

And the book was then bought by the Book of the Month Club. And of course, any book that the Book of the Month Club buys is going to become somewhat of a bestseller in those days. The Book of the Month Club no longer exists. But in those days, it was, and even in my youth, it existed. And so the book was a bestseller, not only in Germany and Austria, but also in the United States in 1928. 1932, the film director was visiting Vienna and came across the book and realized that and knew about the English translation, and he approached Salton and asked him for the complete rights for the book, for all of his books, actually. And he asked for, and Salton asked for $1,000.

Wow. That's all Salton ever got. Wow. And the book has earned billions of dollars. Yeah, in the movie and earned billions of dollars. Yeah. In the movie and everything. The short books, the illustrated books, and so on and so forth. It was all Disney's property up until, at least in America, until 1920, up until 2022. That's crazy, man.

That is wild. And then you mentioned that the book was a totally different sort of plot and stuff. Was it kind of like Animal Farm where it was using animals to describe politics? Yeah, of course. Definitely. I mean, it preceded Orwell's book. And he wasn't the only writer-illustrator during that period, but he was very prominent. And it was quite clear, because that Sultan really wanted to demonstrate or display allegorically what it was like to be a Jew in chaotic times, when anti-Semitism was so strong. I mean, he never, ever denied that he was Jewish. And so that after World War I, and after the Germans and Austrians lost that war, the Jews tended, were blamed for causing

Austria and Germany to lose. And there were many, one of the interesting things that I've only recently discovered, there was a book that came out in Austria in 19, the same year that Bambi came out. And it was called The City Without Jews. And the author was Hugo Betauer, also like Salton, a prominent journalist, very well known, had wrote many different novels. And the book was sold a quarter of a million copies in one year, The City Without Jews. And it was a satire on anti-Semitism. And you can actually go to Amazon and buy the film. There was also a film made in 1924. And so there's a silent film that you could actually look at and based on the novel. And it's all about how the Jews were more or less put in trains like in the Holocaust and sent away from Vienna. However, the Viennese screw up. This was a period of

inflation. The country was very poor and so on. And so the filmmaker, Betheuer was not the filmmaker, but based on the Betheuer book, demonstrates that the Viennese cannot do without their Jews. And so they have to invite them back. This is the satire, the parody, and they have to write them back so that they're invited to Vienna so that they can live a good life. And that's how the novel ends.

And because it was such a satire on the white supremacists and the Nazis, Beto was shot and killed in 1925. There were a lot of killings like this of Jews in the 1920s. And he was killed. And the judge allowed him to go to an insane asylum for eight months. And he was left off free. I'm just sort of giving you a sense of the

atmosphere in which New Salton was living in those days. And so he did write some other, he used the animal tales as fables to really talk about politics and the society.

And he wrote his writing is absolutely brilliant. There are chapters that people don't know about. When the leaves start talking about in one chapter, what's going to happen to them when they fall from the tree? What about their existence? He has leaves talking within the book, not only just animals. Wow, that's pretty amazing. And I think you mentioned that he predicted the Holocaust

or in a way foreshadowed it, maybe? Yeah, for sure. Nobody knew at that time what was going to happen or whether such a thing as the Holocaust was possible. But there are scenes and Alenka Sutler really captures that in her illustrations in the book. This is where the hunters come in and shoot any animal they see and slaughter the animals in this one forest in which Bambi lives. And Bambi manages to escape. And at the very end of the book, he's all by himself. He is totally lonely. He has lost his so-called dear wife. And he may have had children. He doesn't know whether he's had children and so on. So it's a very tragic, sad story at the end. And

if I can say so, it also anticipated his own life, the loneliness that Bambi felt. He actually, in reality, feels in 1938, he had to escape the Nazis. They had taken over Austria. And so because he did have some friends in the nobility, he was able to get a passport to Switzerland. And the Swiss said, you can live here, but you cannot write anything that's socially political. You can write animal stories. And so we, that's why, and he was, as I said, a prominent journalist who wrote on many different topics. And so he was

living there with his wife, and his wife died in 1942, that is four years after he was there. And so now he was totally alone. And in 1942, Bambi, the film, Disney's film, was shown for the first time in Europe because of the war. That was about the only place you could see a film from America. And he was there and the audience clapped at the end. And he said he realized to a certain extent that this was not his novel, but he, out of politeness, he clapped hands and so on, or said it was a nice film.

That's about it. That's about all we know about his reaction, because he died in 1945 totally alone and somewhat a sad ending to his life life just as his novel was a sad ending wow to bambi this is like uh when led zeppelin ripped all the these indie artists off and then like they didn't see the work till like years later and they're like like somehow some of these people didn't hear about it for 20 years like hey that's my song, eh? Jimmy Page ripped me off, eh? And, yeah, that's, you think how much money,

and, of course, the lawsuit settled a bunch of it up. But it was quite extraordinary. But this is kind of interesting to read about and hear about. There was so much anti-Semitism going on during that time and throughout history, unfortunately. And probably a good allegory for our times as well, given the fascist issues we're having lately and some of the things going on, the hate rhetoric.

There's still a lot of anti-Semitism going on, especially with the recent last five years, attacks on Jewish cemeteries and stuff and other racial problems that we have in this country. So probably a good thing for this time. It's going to be interesting to see how many things evolve of all the different Disney trademark characters that lose the trademark. They can't reapply for the trademark once it becomes...

No, no, no. Now everything's in the public domain. What I don't understand, however, is that he did have a son and a daughter and the daughter survived him in Switzerland and had, I think, two children. I'm not positive about this. never sued the Disney or at least requested some money from the Disney Corporation, which they should have done. But for some reason, at least in print, you could not publish the book in German until now, until the book 100 years have passed. And I think my guess is also that there must be great-grandchildren who are living in Europe. But again, I'm not sure about that.

Yeah, we're probably going to find out soon that Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck were original books about some people that had a meth problem or something. I don't know. Which may explain some of their voices. I don't know what that means. I don't know. Do people have meth? Do they have high voices something i don't know which may explain some of their voices i don't know what that means i don't know do people have meth to have high voices i don't know so who knows but you know what i would like to see though is now that uh bambi is free to take on whatever sort of merch bambi wants hey i think i think the second book should be bambi goes rambo and like puts on the whole rambo outfit with the gun slaying belts and then goes and like on the whole Rambo outfit with the gunslinging belts and then goes and kills the family of whoever killed Bambi's mom,

whatever, at the beginning of Bambi. I'd pay to see that film. I'd pay big bucks to see that film. I'd pay $100 to go see that film. A good friend of mine, David Kaplan, a filmmaker who lives in L.A., he has already done a screen and for the original Bambi.

And so I don't, I haven't heard from him recently, but he's desperately looking for funding to support a totally new film. And if it does, I've seen the screenplay, which, and it's excellent. It's really, It's really excellent.

A director and writer. And I'm just crossing my fingers that he finds some backing. He needs some backing for the film. I think it would be great if maybe Quentin Tarantino did that Bambi Gets Revenge movie. It's kind of like Kill Bill with a deer. And then comes back. You could probably get... Who was that director that did Death Proof with him?

Where they did that 70s revival thing. Yes. But he had the chick with a gun in her leg and shit. So it'd be cool. Bambi has, I don't know machine gun weapons stay with my little friend so and he's got like a little

deer sidekick or a skunk sidekick maybe Felix the Pepe the Pew or something so I got a whole screenplay going on right here I'll write this thing up I'll send it over to you. This is pretty awesome it's interesting to learn it's a sad fact of our times that we still haven't learned from history

not to be racist, not to be anti-Semitist and all that stuff. It really is. And so it probably speaks to this and maybe a lot of people can revisit this and learn the original story of the descent of Bambi and it wasn't just about making dolls and selling crap and merch

and stuff. so there you go thank you for being on the show anything more you want to plug out on as we before we go out no except to say that I do think that you can read the book in many different ways and it does shed light to a certain extent on say the African-American in America or any minority group, the title of my introductory essay is Born to be Killed. And to a certain extent, it's shameful to say as an American that, yeah, African Americans are born to be killed or Jews are also born to be killed at some time. So that was the purpose. Once I realized what this book was really about, it was all the more important for me to make my own translation

and write this introduction. That's good. And there still should be the Bambi Rambo who gives revenge on all the killings and stuff. He takes out everybody. He settles all the killings and stuff. Goes out. He takes out everybody. He settles all the scores. Bambi settles the scores. Come into a theater

and you're... I should do my radio voice. In a world gone Bambi. Anyway, it's been wonderful you have on the show, Jack. Thanks for coming on. Give us your plugs so we can find you on the interwebs. Okay. Thanks, Chris. I really appreciate it. I'm thinking of it. In inner world gone Bambi.

Do you want to give me your dot com so people can find where to order the book to, please, if you would? Oh, yeah. Yes, of course, you could go to the Internet and order direct from Princeton University Press. Here in Minneapolis, we have a wonderful independent bookstore called Majors and Quinn. People can also contact Majors and Quinn in Siberia, Minneapolis, Siberia.

Minneapolis, Siberia. It's cold, man. I had a friend go there once. He's like, he came from California and he was visiting there for a week to do a photo shoot. He's like, you cannot believe how cold it is. It's below zero. I'm like, just leave, man. It's like, why?

Anyway, thanks for coming on the show. We certainly appreciate it, sir. Okay. Thank you again. Thank you. Great story. And also to our audience, thank you for being here as well. I mean, we always have to thank you people because, I don't know, it seems like we can't thank you enough, but we do appreciate you.

Remember, we don't judge you. Go to youtube.com for us as Chris Voss. Check out my books, too, that are over there. And also go see all the things on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, wherever those cool kids are going. Thanks for tuning in, everyone. Be good to each other. Stay safe, and we'll see you next time.