SHOWS FOR YOUNGSTERS AND THEIR PARENTS TOO : This little ‘Fauntleroy’ is funnier, feistier and more his own lord

His soft, blond pageboy locks skim his shoulders. He calls his mom “dearest.” For parties, he dons a blue velvet jacket-and-knickers outfit replete with a large lace collar. For years, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy has been the prototype for “a mama’s boy”--as director Andrew Morgan calls him.

Morgan helms the latest film version of the story, debuting this week on the Disney Channel.

“We’ve had a lot of luck with period pieces,” says Douglas Zwick, vice president of the Disney Channel’s original specials and acquired programming department. “The story’s enduring. It’s a classic. Some aspects seem old-fashioned,” Zwick says of its seemingly dated aspects. “But it really expresses today’s American themes of equality and democracy. It’s about American ideals.”

The classic novel relates the story of an American-born boy, Cedric, a.k.a. Ceddy, (played here by British-born American actor Michael Benz), who learns he’s heir to an English aristocracy. He goes to England with his widowed American mother (Betsy Brantley), who is shunned by his snobbish grandfather, the Earl of Dorincourt (George Baker). But Ceddy’s good nature turns the dour Earl around. Cedric even inspires the Earl to change his slumlord ways. Then Cedric’s claim to the title is questioned when another woman says her son is the true heir.

“There was a very great danger of Ceddy being perceived as a wimp, a little mummy’s boy,” Morgan says by phone from his London studios. “I was very determined to get rid of all that.”

In Morgan’s version, Cedric is “now more outgoing, more butch if you like,” the director says. Morgan added a fight scene that was neither in the original novel nor in previous film adaptations. Originally filmed in 1921, the story was remade in 1936 starring Freddie Bartholomew and C. Aubrey Smith, then remade for TV in 1980 with Ricky Schroder and Alec Guinness.

Morgan acknowledges that new film and television adaptations of Burnett’s popular stories (“The Secret Garden” and “The Little Princess”) provided inspiration: “It was the BBC’s idea originally, and some of that was likely jumping on the bandwagon.”

Morgan’s telefilm is an edited version of a six-part BBC miniseries.

The new production, filmed in England, offers “a fresh idea,” Morgan explains, adding he made sure not to be influenced by the earlier films by just not viewing them. Cedric’s not merely “a goody-goody, but a real person, not a mother’s boy all the time,” Morgan says.

Zwick’s convinced that today’s kids will “like the boy himself, like the fish-out-of-water aspect, like that Cedric sticks to his guns and has his own personal beliefs. They’ll also like the poignancy of his separation from his mother.”

“It’ll hold a modern audience,” Morgan asserts. “Cedric’s upright and now has a bit of a sense of humor. He’s pretty much an ideal person. [And] It’s one of the greatest stories of all time.”

Families, Zwick believes, will find “that values are inherent throughout [the movie]. When you know something is right, you should stand by it. Ceddy’s raised with a very strong set of values, even when you take into account that it’s a very different time and environment, those values come through, as he perseveres with them and prevails.”

“Little Lord Fauntleroy” airs Friday at 5 p.m. and early Saturday at 1:45 a.m. on the Disney Channel. For ages 6 and up.