The Naboombu Files

Images & information related to the fictional island of Naboombu, as depicted in Walt Disney Productions' 1971 film Bedknobs & Broomsticks

This, Mary Poppins, The Jungle Book... Disney just riffing on source literature has yielded a lot of magical stuff. It also often meant that things were changed without obvious reasons. Like, in the book Emelius Browne was named Emelius Jones and why they changed that probably isn't an interesting story. But how they got from a stereotypical tropical island with dangerous natives in the book to a different island with a talking lion king wearing the pendant of a murdered sorcerer around his neck as he goes off to play football with crocodiles and warthogs in the film... that we need to know.

Sadly, I don't think we'll ever know the whole story behind that but I could be wrong. Maybe answers lie in the Walt Disney Archives or in lost drawings to one day be found. We can, however, try to figure out what happened with at least the evidence on hand.

Illustration from A Visit To Naboombu Tell-A-Tale Book, 1971

~ WYW ~

The island of Ueepe in a 1943 illustration by Waldo Peirce 

For starters, the Island of Naboombu, its inhabitants and what it looked like has been a fixation of mine since my child brain first started processing references to Disney's Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) when I was around four years old, in 1973.

Why the island and its magical animals would resonate in the mind of a child isn't hard to imagine. Why it still dogs me as a 55-year-old revolves heavily around what I still don't know about its origins and have yet to conclude about its crossed-referenced / proper mythology (something I do in my head with things that have blanks yet to be filled in) and how *that* would be transposed, Disneyesque, into an alternate post-1971 world. There are many post-1971 versions with varying characteristics to look at in the real world.

The earliest reference to what would (eventually) be called Naboombu that I can find is the "South Seas Island" of Ueepe in Mary Norton's original 1943 manuscript of The Magic Bedknob, which was first published as a book in 1944. The children Carey, Charles and Paul along with witch-in-training Miss Price use their flying bed to visit the island and land along the edge of a horseshoe shaped lagoon.

The same book contains the first illustrations of such an island by artist Waldo Peirce.

~ WYW ~

In 1943's The Magic Bed-knob by Mary Norton, the name Naboombu does not appear but the "South Seas Island" of Ueepe served as a predecessor to the 1971 Disney film's Naboombu.

There is no reference to anthropomorphic animal inhabitants of Ueepe - or elsewhere - in the books, but rather the island is populated by cannibals. Their depiction would have been familiar to many readers in 1943 as it was a racial characterization (generally racist via factual inaccuracies and denigrating attributes) often ascribed to native societies of Africa, South America and southern Pacific islands.

I'm still learning about that subject and can't speak well to exactly how prevalent the cannibal trope was in English literature, but it went back to at least the 19th century. In Norton's depiction, the cannibals are led by a witch doctor and they capture Eglantine Price, Carey, Charles and Paul. They escape as a result of Miss Price doing magical battle with the witch doctor.

Note: They travel to the island because it's the one place they could think to travel by magical bed in the daylight and not be seen by anyone else who would be startled. In their encyclopedia set, Ueepe is described as an island yet to be explored. Carey assumes that this means the island is uninhabited, therefore safe to visit.

Erik Blegvad illustrated the 1971 edition of the book (which was combined with Norton's second book under the new title Bed-knob and Broomstick).

1971 edition illustration of Ueepe by Erik Blegvad

~ WYW ~



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