Perhaps even more than most Disney films, your appreciation of the animation and live action hybrid Pete’s Dragon is going to depend greatly on when you first saw it. If you meet it in that sweet spot when films are still new and before cynicism sets in, then it might just be for you. For those of us who were already fifteen when it opened, and so obviously above such childish things, or worse still, coming to it as an adult, it’s a challenge. At 128 minutes it’s far too long, padded to the hilt with unnecessary and instantly forgettable songs and far too reliant, like so many of the 70s Disney live action films, on slapstick and pratfalls.

Based on an unpublished short story titled Pete’s Dragon and the USA (Forever After) by Seton I. Miller and S.S. Field that Disney had bought in December 1957, the film follows the misadventures of the two title characters, young boy Pete (Sean Marshall) and his often invisible, sometimes animated friend Elliott (vocalised, not in any recognisable language, by Charlie Callas) through early 1900s New England. Pete is an orphan who has been “bought” by the hideous Gogan family (Shelley Winters, Charles Tyner, Gary Morgan and Jeff Conaway), a grotesque clan of hillbillies who look like they’ve wandered in from a Texas Chain Saw Massacre film. Elliott has been sent (by who, we never find out) to help and befriend him and together they run away, finding their way to the picturesque coastal town of Passamaquoddy, where an invisible Elliott causes mayhem and, turning briefly visible again, terrifies Lampie (Mickey Rooney), the drunken local lighthouse keeper (there’s a surprising amount of alcohol (mis)use for a film aimed so firmly at kids). Lampie lives with his daughter Nora (Helen Reddy) who takes Pete in and tells him of her fiancé Paul (Cal Bartlett), whose ship has been reported lost at sea. She invites Pete to stay with her and Lampie and Pete, in turn, promises to ask Elliott to locate Paul.

Meanwhile, travelling huckster and quack Dr Terminus (Jim Dale) and his assistant Hoagy (Red Buttons) have arrived in town and Hoagy also sees Elliott. The townspeople are becoming jumpy about the dwindling fish catch, blaming it on Pete being a jinx and his lot isn’t much improved when he’s sent to school to be taught by the constantly grumpy Miss Taylor (Jane Kean) and Elliott arrives to half demolish the schoolhouse when she tries to punish Pete. Eventually, Terminus learns that there’s money to be made in fake medicines supposedly made of dragon parts and teams up with the Gogans to try to capture Elliott. The frankly rather turgid film finally splutters into life in the climax wherein Elliott wins over the townspeople and evades capture and leads to a bittersweet ending when Paul returns and Elliott leaves to help another child in distress, Pete now safe with his new family.

Normally one would offer a spoiler warning when giving away the ending of a film, but this is Disney so there’s little doubt about how things will play out right from the very start (the film opens with an arresting sequence of Pete apparently bouncing through the air, actually riding on the back of the invisible Elliott). It’s predictability made celluloid, a film that shuffles from A to B to C with wearying monotony and very few surprises. The turgid pace is slowed even further by the extraordinary number of songs written by Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn, not one of them at all memorable, though Reddy’s Candle on the Water was undeservedly nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song (Joseph Brooks took home the statuette that year for his title song from You Light Up My Life). Trim the musical numbers and the film would be reduced to a far more manageable length and would move along more vigorously too. As it stands, director Don Chaffey (he of Jason and the Argonauts (1963), The Three Lives of Thomasina (1963), One Million Years B.C. (1966) and Creatures the World Forgot (1971)) can’t do a great deal to keep the energy up, having to stop every few minutes for another musical interlude.

Technically, there’s little to complain about. The merging of animation and live action is excellent, and the invisibility effects are fun (Disney had perfected the techniques used here in 1972’s comedy Now You See Him, Now You Don’t), but no amount of technical prowess can overcome the film’s many failings. Elliott literally disappears from the plot for much of the film, making way for often over-the-top turns from Rooney and Dale (Reddy gives the best and most restrained performance in the film – at least she can hold a tune), everything is played very loud and very broad and on occasion, Malcolm Marmorstein’s screenplay slips in a zinger that sounds utterly out of place, as when Terminus tells Pete that he has a potion that can “bring on puberty two years ahead of time.”

It’s a shame, as there was so much potential here. Disney have a good track record when it comes to dragons, from the eponymous beast in The Reluctant Dragon (1941), which also mixed live action and animation, through Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty (1959) to the glorious Vermithrax Pejorative in Dragonslayer (1981) and Elliott is certainly one of the more charming of his breed. But even he can’t do a great deal to save it. It’s by no means a terrible film, but it’s certainly not a great one either. It’s certainly no Mary Poppins (1964), which is what Disney were hoping for. It’s not really even a Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) if we’re being honest.

Disney’s expectations that it would match the performance of their earlier animation and live action hybrids weren’t met. It took $16.1 million in the States and Canada alone, more than making back its budget and a not insignificant figure, but it was far from what the company were expecting it to make. Part of the problem might have been that it opened in the States on 3 November 1977, the run up to Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays, a time previously dominated by Disney’s family friendly fare, but by 1977 they were facing a challenge from a young upstart that no-one had seen coming – Star Wars (1977) had opened in May of that year and kids across the world were perhaps expecting something a bit more from their cinematic entertainment than Jim Dale and Mickey Rooney doing pratfalls and dreary song and dance numbers that added nothing whatsoever to the story.

Disney only had one more animated feature, The Fox and the Hound (1981), to come before the management buy-out of 1984 that started the process of restoring the Animation Unit to its former glories. The Rescuers (1977) had been fun but the 1970s had been lean years for Disney animation, with really only The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (1977), a compilation of short films, standing out. From 1984, things would start to change for the better.

In the bittersweet finale of Pete’s Dragon, a tearful Pete asks Elliott “I won’t see you again, will I?” though of course, after a fashion, he did. It’ll come as no surprise to read that Pete’s Dragon was remade in 2016 (despite all the reservations from someone at who it clearly wasn’t aimed, it retained enough fans to warrant a second go around). Directed by David Lowery, it comes in at a slightly more manageable 103 minutes, thanks in no small part to the wise decision to jettison most of those bloody songs.