Disney's first all-live-action movie. Walt Disney started the project when postwar restrictions stopped him from transferring profits from his cartoons out of the United Kingdom. Rather than set up a new animation studio, he used the profits and existing facilities to produce a conventional film. The movie was filmed in England, not in the West Indies, using Disney's frozen U.K. profits.
The featured performance of Robert Newton as Long John Silver is so iconic that it is thought by many to be the origin of today's stereotypical "Arrrrr"-laced pirate patois.
Walt Disney considered putting in a brief animated sequence, as he had with his previous live-action movies Song of the South (1946) and So Dear to My Heart (1948). The animated sequence, "Reynard the Fox", would have been a story told to Jim by Long John Silver. Ultimately, Disney decided to leave out the "Reynard" tale, but the concept art developed by Disney's animators for the sequence later became the basis for Robin Hood (1973).
Robert Newton would later reprise his role as Long John Silver in Long John Silver's Return to Treasure Island (1954) and The Adventures of Long John Silver (1956).
One of the first Disney movies to be shown on television, this was first telecast in January 1955, as part of the The Magical World of Disney (1954) television program. It was the first Disney live-action film to be shown complete on television, in two one-hour installments shown a week apart, rather than having the entire film on a single evening. It was broadcast again in the 1960s, in the same format, after the series had changed its name to "Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color" and the show had moved to NBC.