This is a much darker movie than I think people realize. It’s got a 1970s reputation. There’s a certain way people look at Disney films from this era, whether that really fits the film itself or not, and it’s been obvious to me since the remake came out (no, I haven’t seen it yet) that people are talking about what their memories of the film are rather than the film itself. I freely admit that it’s not a great movie, but I love it anyway. And I don’t think it’s just nostalgia.

Young Pete (Sean Marshall) is an orphan adopted by a really awful family. He runs away. So far, nothing out of the ordinary, except that he’s accompanied by a dragon named Elliott (Charlie Callas). Which is kind of odd. Anyway, the pair end up in the small fishing village of Passamaquoddy, Maine. Pete is hoping to find a home, but Elliott creates so much havoc that he’s afraid he has no chance. However, he meets and befriends lighthouse keeper Nora (Helen Reddy), who tells him that high tide can catch the cave where he’s staying and invites him up to the lighthouse with her. She wants to raise Pete, who wants a home.

It’s true that the movie glosses over the fact that, yes, Pete is a slave. The Gogan family, led by matriarch Lena (two-time Oscar winner Shelley Winters, ladies and gentlemen!), gets a song called “Bill of Sale,” where they inform Nora that they have bought Pete and intend to keep him. That’s both awful and mostly played for laughs. On the other hand, I was an adult before I discovered that the “home children” who occasionally appear in the books of L. M. Montgomery were quite possibly kidnapped off the streets of London to be slaves for Canadian farmers, so glossing over child slavery is pretty common in children’s fiction.

Though I do find myself wondering what recourse Nora would have. The mayor (Jim Backus) seems to be the main town authority, and he doesn’t like Pete much. And while it would be fairly easy to argue that any adoption accompanied by an actual bill of sale is illegal, I’m not sure what law there is in the area to look into that. In the book Rainbow Valley, the seventh book featuring Anne of Green Gables, there’s a “home girl” who is so brutally mistreated that she runs away, and the person who essentially owned her dies, I suspect because Montgomery herself couldn’t think of another way to keep Mary Vance safe.

Elliott is expressly said to take care of children who need him. However, I’m not convinced he’s much better than an imaginary friend most of the time. He does good things in this movie, but he can’t himself keep Pete out of slavery. Pete does a fair amount of that himself, with help from Nora. The only thing he really does to protect Pete from the Gogans is to become visible, which basically makes you wonder why he didn’t do that at the beginning.

This is another one of those movies where alcoholism is played for laughs, with one of the most famous scenes being one where Mickey Rooney as Lampie and Red Buttons as Hoagie stagger over one another to get to Elliott’s cave. Apparently, the actors were trying to one-up one another the whole time. And it is funny. On the other hand, Lampie is officially the lighthouse keeper, but in practical terms, we know it’s Nora, because her father is too much of a drunk to take care of things himself. Nora does all the work, and everyone pretends she doesn’t.

Not to mention that Nora spends the majority of the movie believing that her love, her fiancé, is dead. She had no particular reason to believe otherwise, because it is likely that he has been lost at sea. However, she still holds out a certain amount of hope, because there’s no certainty. She’s torn, and the movie allows that to appear onscreen. Pete is not the only one with emotional trauma, it turns out.

I’m not trying to claim Pete’s Dragon is high art, of course. It’s not even one of the best Disney films of the ’70s, my fondness for it notwithstanding. But it’s definitely better than its reputation. Jim Dale as Doc Terminus is a delightfully sleazy villain. The fact that Nora insists that Pete get an education so he won’t turn into one of the Gogans is nice. It’s all it takes to convince him that he needs an education, and that’s believable.

And I like the songs. It lost the Oscar for song score to A Little Night Music, which frankly gets into the whole problem with having original and adapted work in the same category. And it’s the second movie we’ve covered for this column that lost to “You Light Up My Life” for Best Original Song, which is just depressing to contemplate. I grant you that the dance number in “There’s Room For Everyone” shuts the movie right down. Okay, fine. But “Candle on the Water” arguably does, too, and I still like it. And several of the funny songs are extremely funny and a lot less creepy than “Bill of Sale.”

Oh, and there’s the technical aspect—my DVD comes with a featurette about the history of blending Disney animation and live action, and the making of this movie was super complicated and drew on decades of technical innovation from Disney. I’m sure the technical effects on the remake are better, but they’re also a heck of a lot easier.