It's kind of fun to do the impossible. - Walt Disney

I've been feeling pretty under the weather today, so I went home a little early and took a nap of considerable length.  The dreams that ensued were pretty terrible, they were quite disturbing and violent.  The kind of dreams you keep to yourself in fear of attracting suspicion that you are, indeed, a crazy person.

Once upon a time, it seems that people were not judged by the violence their imagination came up with, even when the violence found itself in children's stories.  I could write a blog a mile and a half long about it, but I'll just stick to a couple stories.  The most famous, of course, are the stories that Disney chose to make into movies.  Disney did a bit of revision to most of these folk/fairy tales for many reasons.  Many times, the revisions were made to represent the values of the time they were produced, or to make them a bit more fun and lighthearted, or to make them more appealing to children (and parents).  The most interesting reason is because some of the folk tales are just plain too violent in Disney's opinion to be marketable or even suitable for children.  They're probably right.

A lot of people look at "Disneyfication" as a negative thing, but people must realize, if Disney wanted to tell some of these tales, there is no way the original messages were going to be something the current audience could relate to, as the original messages reflected what was going on at the time the stories were written.  For instance, Beauty and The Beast was written/created sometime back in the 1700's, when arranged marriages were the only kind of marriages.  These marriages seemed frightful often times to women.  Beauty and the Beast was meant to teach these women that they could learn to love and leave their families and childhoods behind. Obviously, Disney needed to make some changes, as this isn't really a problem that affected most people and children at the time the movie was being made.  This isn't the only changed message in the movie, and no matter how much Disney tried to purify the story, or any story, they often got criticized one way or another for the adjustments.  But I think we all walked away with some favorites, regardless of how Disney portrayed the stories.

In any case, I didn't write this blog to talk about the morals being changed.  I wanted to talk about the omitted violence.  I think most people who are introduced to certain fairy tales retold by Disney might be shocked to find out some of these stories were pretty gruesome in their original contexts.

One of my all time favorite Disney movies is a good example of this.  The Little Mermaid.  I know every word to this movie.  I wanted to be Ariel as a child.  I was so confused as to how you could want to go from being a red haired mermaid swimming around the ocean with cool friends like Flounder and Sebastian to being a human who hangs out with some lame guy like Eric (even if he did have the most amazing chef around). I didn't want to dance and walk around, holding hands, I wanted to swim and hang out in the cave with found treasures!  I spent so much time daydreaming that Ariel would just trade places with me.  I am not exaggerating when I say I was completely obsessed with the idea.  Now, had I heard the original story, I might have been a little more scared to go live in the ocean.



First of all, in the original version by Hans Christian Anderson, Ariel does not live to marry the prince.  She essentially commits suicide because she cannot bring herself to kill the prince (with the knife her sister offers her so she can go back to being a mermaid and return to the sea) who is already married to someone else.  To someone else he was already in love with.  He was never in love with or interested in Ariel in the original story.  But before this happens, she isn't exactly having a good time with her new legs.  She feels immense, indescribable pain with every step she takes because of the curse the witch put on her.  Despite being in this type of pain, she does some sort of a dance for the prince, for reasons I'm not really sure of, but it sounded pretty tortuous.

Speaking of The Little Mermaid, does anyone remember the original cover art on the VHS that had a blatant and obvious penis as one of the castle turrets?:


Oh, Disney cartoonists.  You're weird.

I could talk about many many disturbing original fairy tales and what has been changed from Disney, but I'll just talk about one more, just to give you an idea of the violence we're talking about.

Disney is pretty good at making their villains scary, especially in some of the older movies.  In some cases, they even left a bit of the violence from the original tales, but there was no way they were going to be able to include some of the ridiculously over the top violence in the original version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.

In the Disney version, the evil stepmother was pretty scary.  I'm not really sure what her problem was, because I think she is way hotter than Snow White.  In any case, the evil stepmother wanted the prince to kill Snow White and bring back her heart as proof because she was jealous of her.  Also, in the end, the evil stepmother dies by falling off a cliff.  That's pretty violent, especially for Disney.  So, you must be curious as to how much more violent it gets.



In the original story, this woman doesn't just want Snow White's heart.  She wants to eat it.  By the way, the actual organ she asks the prince to bring back varies story to story, but the eating it remains the same.  Which maybe makes you feel less bad when you get to the point where you read about what happens to her when's she not falling off a cliff and dying as the Disney version suggests.  In the original, she is tortured by being forced to wear red-hot iron shoes and made to dance until she dies.  I don't know what it is with fairy tales and painful leg/feet situations, but it's a pretty colorful form of torture.

Sanitizing old fairy tales is actually a pretty common scenario, and something of a cultural practice.  Not just Disney's doings.  Disney just did it to a seemingly larger scale because Disney movies were huge successes.

Little Red Riding Hood, for instance.  We all know this story even if Disney didn't remake it.  Little Red Riding Hood runs into a wolf, tells him where she's going, and he goes and eats her grandma.  Then he poses as grandma so he can eat her as well.  After she gets eaten, some guy comes out of the woods and cuts them out of the wolf's stomach and saves them.  Pretty violent.  However, if you haven't read the original, you may be surprised to find out it is significantly worse.

First of all, the grandmother and Little Red Riding Hood do not get saved in the original.  They get eaten and die, but not before Little Red Riding Hood does a striptease to distract the wolf.  There is no guy from the woods to save them.  Oh, and the wolf cuts grandma up and offers her as a meal to Little Red Riding Hood before eating her as well.  I'm not sure if she partakes in the meal or not.



Wow.

So, now I'll leave you all with my favorite tale.  It's not the most gruesome.  It's not the raciest.  It's not as controversial by today's standards.  It's just creepy.



Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Little Bo Peep.  My all time favorite.  This wasn't even a fairy tale.  It was a nursery rhyme.  Which is why I feel like it's even more bizarrely amazing.  This is a song you sing your babies.  Why is it creepy?  Well, check out the lyrics:

Little Bo Peep has lost her sheep
And doesn't know where to find them.
Leave them alone and they'll come home,
Bringing their tails behind them.
Little Bo Peep fell fast asleep
And dreamt she heard them bleating,
But when she awoke, she found it a joke,
For they were all still fleeting.
Then up she took her little crook
Determined for to find them.
She found them indeed, but it made her heart bleed,
For they left their tails behind them.
It happened one day, as Bo Peep did stray
Into a meadow hard by,
There she espied their tails side by side
All hung on a tree to dry.
She heaved a sigh, and wiped her eye,
And over the hillocks went rambling,
And tried what she could,
As a sheperdess should,
To tack again each to it's lambkin.

To summarize, someone stole the sheep, then cut the sheep's tails off and hung them on a tree to dry.  I'm not sure why, but it's strange, and I'm sure it served some sort of antiquated purpose.  Anyways, this bums Little Bo Peep out, because I guess sheep are pretty lame without tails.   So, once Little Bo Peep finds the tails, she attempts to tack the shriveled lifeless appendages back onto the sheep.  What the hell?  Also, it never says whether or not she was successful.  I'm going to go ahead and guess logistics prevail this time and it didn't work, those poor sheep.