In 1954 Walt Disney Company undertook two challenges that could easily have changed future of what would become world's leading entertainment corporation: within a period of months, studio produced its first science fiction film and also broke ranks with major Hollywood studios to begin making a weekly television series for ABC. Both were risky ventures, in terms of authences as well as economics. The film, adaptation of Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues Under Sea, was studio's most expensive production to date, and carried extra risk because, by 1954, science fiction was associated with themes that might put off Disney's traditional family authence. The television series, Disneyland, for its part, was risky because ABC, in return for much-needed financial backing for Walt Disney's pet project - Disneyland theme park - paid studio only $2 million (far less than expected cost) for a full season of episodes. Both singly and together, these projects threatened studio's financial stability and its very future. Yet both Disney efforts proved highly successful, in large part, because of way they looked to future. The company pointedly linked these risky initiatives, using each to publicize or sell other, and as a source of texts that would condition other's reception. Following 20,000 Leagues Under Sea across screens - from film to television and back again - reveals not only broad and well-chronicled Disney synergy at work, but also early effort at exploiting a phenomenon that would become increasingly important in contemporary landscape, what Henry Jenkins has dubbed media convergence. As he explains, that practice of convergence involves the flow of across multiple platforms, cooperation between multiple industries, and migratory behavior of authences. With 20,000 Leagues Under Sea we glimpse not only Disney's fairly common effort at allying its works with their literary forebears, but also its new concern with bringing those earlier into a profitable collaboration with new form of television - and even theme park. In effect, we see its recognition and move to capitalize on a cultural climate in which, as Jenkins offers, important story gets told, every brand gets sold, and every consumer gets courted across multiple platforms. 20, 000 Leagues Under Sea appealed to Disney in part because it provided studio with another opportunity for elaborate live -action adventure film in style of such successes as Treasure Island (1950) and Rob Roy, Highland Rogue (1954). Adapted to screen, it would provide action, exotic location scenery, and even some spectacular violence, thanks to its scenes of ship rammings, cannibal attacks, a fight with a giant squid, and apocalyptic, explosive conclusion. These elements clearly aligned film with wave of science fiction films marked by what Susan Sontag famously termed the imagination of disaster and an aesthetics of destruction. As she would explain, science fiction film, at least in this period, seemed fundamentally disaster, which is one of oldest subjects of art, and she suggested that genre's elaboration of imagery that inevitably evoked destructive potentials of modern culture provided both one of its key satisfactions and one of its more disconcerting consequences. Those different elements posed a challenge for Disney's marketing, since they could well scare off studio's core family authence, and, as well, they would prove costly to film. Moreover, they represented something of a distortion of Verne novel, a book far more focused on providing scientific details and deploying a naturalist's eye - emphasis that has led many critics to describe Verne as a writer of scient fie fiction rather than science fiction. Verne's novel is grounded in a sense of place and facti city - or rather, many places and many facts - information that it sought to convey about natural world. …