Dark Disney: The Real And Horrifying Stories Behind The Classics

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From Cinderella to the Little Mermaid, the origins behind your favorite secretly dark Disney movies are more shocking and violent than you could imagine. Disney is an industry built on magic and happily ever after. For kids around the world, Disney movies are what dreams are made of. The s

Dark Disney: Pinocchio

Pinocchio

When people visualize Pinocchio, they see the sweet young puppet with a desire to be a real boy. The Disney movie tells the tale of his adventures with his friend and advisor, Jiminy Cricket, and how they ultimately lead him to his dream of becoming a human.

The original creator of Pinocchio, Carlo Collodi, was hoping for a different image. Collodi created the character for a serial story in Italian newspapers with the goal of showing kids the consequences of being bad. Collodi’s Pinocchio was cruel and mischievous. His Jiminy Cricket was only referred to as “Talking Cricket,” and when the cricket tried to give Pinocchio some good advice, the puppet-boy killed him with a mallet.

Pinocchio Gets Hanged

Pinocchio is constantly tortured in different ways throughout the story, all punishment for bad behavior. Collodi initially ended the tale with Pinocchio’s death by hanging, but because of an outcry from fans, Collodi was forced to continue. So he decided Pinocchio’s life would be spared in exchange for even more gruesome punishments from that point forward.

Sleeping Beauty

Sleeping Beauty

 

Disney’s Sleeping Beauty is a classic tale of a princess in distress and the prince who comes gallantly to her rescue. The original 17th-century Italian tale has similar beginnings: the princess, named Talia, pricked her finger on a spindle and was sent into a deep sleep, fulfilling an earlier prophecy. The rest of Talia’s story is too gruesome to be a children’s tale.

The man who came to Talia’s “rescue” is a king, not a prince. The king’s kiss did not awake Talia. He instead “gathers the fruits of her love,” which is a nicer way of saying he raped her while she slept.

Nine months later, she gave birth to twins, and one of them sucked the splinter from her finger, waking her up. Talia and the king fall in love, but the king is still married. His queen orders the twins to be kidnapped, cooked, and fed to the unknowing king.

Luckily, she fails. The moral of this story was: “Lucky people, so ’tis said, Are blessed by Fortune whilst in bed.”

Cinderella

Glass Slipper

When Disney’s Cinderella II came out in 2002, it turned out that Cinderella’s evil stepsisters weren’t as evil as they were shown in the first movie. One of them, Anastasia, was even featured having her own love interest with a baker, a relationship encouraged by Cinderella.

The fate given to the stepsisters by the Brothers Grimm was not so forgiving. In that fairytale, the two girls cut off different parts of their feet in an attempt to fit into the slipper.

Some doves swooped in to show the prince the blood on the shoe, so he would not be fooled. At the end of the story, the stepsisters attend Cinderella’s wedding, only to have their eyes pecked out by the doves who had betrayed them earlier.

Dark Disney: The Little Mermaid

Little Mermaid

In Hans Christian Andersen’s version of the tale, Ariel makes a deal with the sea witch in order to become a human and pursue the prince she saved in a shipwreck. She gets a pair of legs in exchange for her tongue.

However, part of the deal is that every step she takes with this new pair of legs will feel like walking on shattered glass. If Ariel gets her true love’s kiss, she can remain a human, but if she fails, she will die.

The prince never actually saw Ariel’s face when she saved him, so he ends up marrying someone else. The sea witch tells Ariel she can just turn back into a mermaid instead of dying if she kills the prince.

Of course, Ariel cannot bring herself to do that. Instead, in dark Disney fashion, she throws herself into the ocean and dissolves into sea foam.

Snow White

Snow White

 

Snow White still gets her happily ever after in the original Brothers Grimm fairytale. After the evil queen failed two attempts to personally kill Snow White, she finally decided to try out the poison apple. It seemed to work, but then the prince swooped in with his true love’s kiss to save her.

In the end of this dark Disney story, Snow White and the prince are still married. However, the evil queen is at the wedding and her punishment is that she has to dance around in iron-hot shoes burning her feet until she dies. Even princesses get their revenge.


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virgil sanders 3 años

.....my childhood