Do you remember that time when you watched one of Disney’s classics when you were just
a wee kid barely able to tie your shoelaces by yourself? You snuggled up to your mom on
the sofa as she shed tears of joy and sadness, and let’s be honest, at times,
you had to try your hardest not to cry yourself. Oh, what wonderful memories. What amazing stories.
So rich in color and so heartfelt. The endings were always of the happy type. Of course,
they were; those tales were created for sweet little children like you.
If only back then you’d known what bloody, wretched horror had inspired the stories.
If only you’d known the truth. You would have curled up into the fetal position and
howled in horror. You’d have realized just how utterly watered down the Disney version
of events was. You’d also have understood that kids in the past were tough. They got it all,
the blood, the guts, the doom, and death, and they got it by the bucketful.
Disney doesn’t do the truth. Disney thinks: You can’t handle the truth!
With that in mind, let’s introduce you to one of our favorite Disney characters, a lovely fella who
was born in a body that was a little different from most people’s. His name is Quasimodo.
As you all know, Mr. Quasimodo didn’t have it easy. He was born with a condition known
as Kyphosis. This meant he had quite a severe hunchback. He also had a huge wart over his eye.
It made his life hell, or at least that’s what the writer of the 1831 novel about him, “The Hunchback
of Notre-Dame” said. The writer was Victor Hugo, someone who would have likely been appalled at
what Disney later did to his story. They sanitized it. They turned an epic yarn into a tepid tale.
In the novel, the child was born to some Romani people. They looked at him and thought, hmm, he’s
a bit of a monster, so when the time was right, they swapped him for another baby, Agnes. Agnes’s
mother wasn’t too pleased, especially because she thought the Romani folks had eaten her child.
On top of this, and another thing not in the Disney tale, Agnes’s mother, an orphan herself,
was taken advantage of by a rather cruel man. After that, she went to work as a
prostitute and lived in abject poverty. But then she had Agnes, and she cheered
up quite a bit after that. She adored the girl, despite not really having any cash to
look after her. Then just as she was starting to enjoy being a mother, Agnes got swapped with
Quasimodo. That’s when the small-minded folks in the town told her that the Romani guys must
have eaten Agnes because, well, why not? The mother, now stuck with a deformed baby,
wasn’t exactly scientific about matters, nor was she very sympathetic to a child that just needed
a hug. She thought the boy was the “creation of the devil,” so she exorcised him of his demon.
In the Disney version, there was also a young mother, but she got chased and fell to her
death. There was a child with her at the time. He was Quasimodo. There was some darkness in
this version since the guy who found him, Claude Frollo, wanted to drown him. He didn’t. Instead,
he brought him up, although you could say he embraced the tough-love model of child-rearing.
In the original version, Claude Frollo found the boy after his mother abandoned him on
what was called the foundlings' bed at the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris. That’s where
unwanted babies were dumped. Back then, this kind of thing wasn’t unusual at all.
The day he was left there was Quasimodo Sunday, the First Sunday after Easter,
so that’s why he got the name, Quasimodo. He is described as looking “hideous,”
which we think is a bit cruel. The novel describes him like this:
“That head was deformed enough; one beheld only a forest of red hair, one eye, a mouth,
and teeth. The eye wept, the mouth cried, and the teeth seemed to ask only to be allowed to bite.”
Still with this original version, he grows up, working as the bellringer at the cathedral. It
eventually makes him deaf, as if Quasimodo didn’t already have enough problems. At
least Frollo teaches him sign language. It should be said that Quasimodo has a mean
temper. He’s a sweet kind of guy underneath, but make him mad, and he can snap your neck.
Then Frollo sees a really pretty Romani girl named Esmeralda.
He tells Quasimodo that he should help him kidnap her,
which is also not part of the Disney tale. To cut a long story short,
in the Disney story, Frollo does have the hots for Esmeralda, but she rejects him.
This next bit is quite dark for Disney since he orders her to be burned at the stake,
but Quasimodo comes to the rescue. Frollo and him fight and Frollo dies. Even though
Quasimodo also has his eye on Esmeralda, she falls in love with a guy named Phoebus.
Quasimodo doesn’t have a breakdown and hit the bottle but accepts she loves
someone else. For a man that’s never been loved and has been spat on all his life,
he handles this rejection implausibly well. In fact, this helps him get out of the cathedral,
and the folks in Paris treat him like a hero. The streets are full of cheer, and the hunchback of
Notre Dam grins from ear to ear. The end.
As you know, this probably isn’t how things would have gone down in real life. The book
is closer to what would have likely happened. That is, Quasimodo gets blamed for trying to
kidnap Esmerelda. He’s subsequently put in the pillory as a punishment.
Esmeralda gives him water and food while in there, which is why he falls in love with
her. But in this version, Frollo stabs Phoebus and sets Esmeralda up for the murder. She denies it,
but she’s then told to confess, or she will have her foot crushed in a vise. That’s
an offer she can’t refuse. By the way, Phoebus actually survives his stabbing.
She’s handed a death sentence, but while in prison, Frollo turns up. He tells her he will get
her off if she gives herself to him, something Disney wouldn’t depict. Frollo is basically
saying, get tortured in the worst possible way, or jump into bed with me. Your choice.
She would have been tortured and then hanged, but Quasimodo rescues her. He runs off with her in his
arms and takes her to Notre Dame. “Sanctuary!” he shouts on the way in that inimitable voice
of his. Then, one night Frollo finds her in her room, and let’s just say he has some very
bad intentions. Quasimodo is the hero again as he finds what Frollo is doing and almost kills him.
In short, next, there’s a big fight when the Romani people come to get Esmerelda.
They’re basically slaughtered, after which Frollo again gets his hands on Esmeralda.
He tries the same thing again: Stay with me, and you’ll live, go, and you’ll die. Sometime later,
we find out that Esmeralda is in fact, Agnes. She says she’d rather die than be with Frollo. So,
die it is. The guards come for her. At this point, her mother tries to stop the guards from hanging
her. The mother falls, hits her head, and dies for her efforts. Soon after, Quasimodo looks out of
a window and sees Esmeralda hanging from a rope. Her legs are still kicking. It’s all quite grim.
In a rage, Quasimodo pushes Frollo off a tower and kills him. He then finds Esmeralda’s dead
body in a nearby graveyard, and he stays with her, hugging her until her body starts
to decompose. He puts up with the stink of putrefaction. He stays with her for so long
that he actually starves to death with her in his arms. Imagine the scene: An emotionally
broken hunchback hugging a putrid corpse until he passes away. Ted Bundy couldn’t have beaten that.
So, we reckon if you’d watched this version when you were a kid, you’d have been traumatized so
much you’d be on Valium right now. In fact, the original couldn’t really have been any more
different from the Disney story. The difference is akin to telling the First Blood story but
having John Rambo not fight back and instead decide to start a florist business in town.
Disney did something similar with The Little Mermaid.
In the unblemished version, the mermaid princess Ariel wants to head up to the normal world and
hang out with humans. Her father, King Triton, isn’t too keen on this idea.
The merpeople don’t mess with the humans, he says. That’s just the way it’s always been.
It’s no surprise that she goes anyway, and that’s how she falls in love with a Prince
named Eric. She ends up saving his life on the way, but he doesn’t know who saves him.
Her dad finds out, and there’s a bit of familial discord. To cut a long story short, Ariel knows
that if she finds Eric again, all she has to do is give him a “kiss of true love,” and she can become
human forever and stay with him. It seems there’s no such thing as dual citizenship, in this story.
We’ll abridge a bit more here and just tell you that Ursula the sea witch spoils things somewhat.
She doesn’t want Ariel to have Eric, so she casts a spell on Eric to make him forget that
Ariel ever existed. She does this in the disguise of a beautiful human woman named Vanessa. Vanessa
seduces Eric, but the spell comes undone. A big fight ensues, and Triton takes a beating,
losing his power to Ursula. Eric eventually saves the day and kills Ursula. Triton,
now suitably impressed, allows Ariel to become human and marry Eric. The end.
Again, isn’t that just perfect? The lovestruck pair hardly even knew each other,
but everything turned out hunky dory in the end. We imagine the writer of the original tale,
Hans Christian Andersen, would have called that story mediocre at best.
In his 1837 original story, things weren’t quite the same. Ariel still goes up to the human world
and saves a prince named Eric. She still sees the sea witch, but in this story, it’s to get a
pair of human legs so she can walk on land with Eric. The one downside is that she will have to
live as if knives are constantly stabbing her. The sea witch tells her If she can’t get Eric
to marry her, he will marry someone else. If that happens, she’ll be turned into sea foam
just as soon as the sun rises that day. Ariel then drinks a potion and heads up to the human world,
after which Eric finds her on the beach. He asks her to dance. She can do it,
but all the time, those knives are stabbing into her, causing her unbelievable pain.
Still, she makes an impressive effort to get him to fall in love with her. He likes her a lot,
but he decides to marry another princess. The Little Mermaid’s heart is immediately shattered.
She’s bitter, too, when she thinks about all that dancing she did with the feeling of being stabbed.
This story sounds more like something that Marquis de Sade would write than a Disney tale.
Ariel thinks she is about to become sea foam, but her sisters rock up and give her a special
dagger. They tell her that if she stabs and kills Eric, she will be released from the
spell and be able to live as a mermaid again. All she needs to do is get his blood to hit her feet.
But when the time comes and she has the chance to stab him as he’s sleeping with his new wife,
she just can’t do it. She then jumps into the ocean and is turned into foam just
as the sun rises. It’s not all bad news since she then becomes a kind of spirit
doing spiritual community service. She just has to help humans for 300 years,
and she will get a soul when she’s done. We guess you also know the Disney tale, Tangled.
This is based on the 1812 Brothers Grimm classic fairytale called Rapunzel.
Again, the original is much better than the Disney version. In Tangled,
a woman named Mother Gothel uses a magical flower to stay young forever. But the pregnant
Queen of the kingdom falls ill, and her soldiers take the flower. Gothel is less than pleased.
It irks her somewhat because she’s a bit of a narcissist. Her mood improves
when she sees that the baby princess has the same powers as the flower,
so she does what anyone with a name like Gothel would do and kidnaps the princess. She keeps her
in a high tower and gives her the name Rapunzel. She stays young because of Rapunzel’s hair.
In the original story, the queen also falls ill. But to get better,
she can eat some veggies in a sorceress’s garden. This magic food is called Rapunzel,
and the man doing the stealing is the king. One day, the sorceress catches him stealing the stuff,
and she makes a deal with him rather than outright punishing him. She tells him that when the queen
has the child, she will take it. The king agrees. So far, these are very similar versions. The
Disney one, in short, goes something like this. Rapunzel meets a guy named Eugene. They have a
bit of an adventure, fall in love, and at one point, he climbs up her hair to her tower.
Gothel stabs him when he gets there. Rapunzel could save him with her hair,
but he cuts it off so Gothel can’t use it to stay young. He then dies,
and Gothel does a kind of super-aging sequence and falls out of the tower
a very old woman. As Rapunzel sheds a few tears for her dead lover, the magic in her
tears brings him back to life. The two get hitched with the king and queen’s blessing,
and everyone lives happily ever after. That’s not how our German buddies,
the Brothers Grimm do things, whose stories are more like something written by Quentin Tarantino.
As you might know, in the real story, the sorceress locks Rapunzel in a high tower.
There are no stairs, and there is no door. The only way in is through the window. That’s
why she has to call out to Rapunzel to let her hair down whenever she goes there. She shouts:
“Rapunzel! Rapunzel!
Let down your hair That I may climb thy golden stair”
One day a prince is riding his horse in the forest when he hears Rapunzel singing. Her
voice is totally entrancing. He finds the tower but has no idea how to get in there. Then one day,
he sees the sorceress doing her hair climbing thing. He bides his time,
and when the coast is clear, he tries it, too. As often happens in these stories, no sooner than
he meets Rapunzel, he’s head over heels in love with her. They rush into things like two people
on breakup rebounds and agree to get hitched. Rapunzel’s dress soon doesn’t fit too well, so we
are supposed to think she becomes pregnant. You’d think she’d be careful, but she stupidly gives the
prince away when she tells Gothel that he’s much lighter than her and easy to help into the room.
Talk about speaking without thinking first. Out of anger, Gothel cuts off Rapunzel’s
hair. Then when the prince turns up for his nightly bounce on the mattress, it’s Gothel
who lowers Rapunzel’s recently sheared hair. The prince is more than a little surprised to
get up there and find not his lover but an angry Gothel. She tells him he will never
see Rapunzel again. He then falls out of the tower and lands in a thorn bush. In typical
Grimm style, the thorns blind him. He travels on horseback for years,
not knowing where he is going because he can’t see a damned thing. There’s a happy ending, though.
One day he hears her singing and goes to her. They become reunited. She also has twins, his twins,
and when they embrace, his sight comes back. You can’t get much happier than
that for an ending. But the other version is
hell on wheels. In this version, he falls and is blinded, but Gothel accidentally drops the hair.
So, he spends the rest of his life riding into trees while shouting for his lover, and Gothel
and Rapunzel slowly and torturously die from the lack of food and water in the room they can’t
escape. We expect they only lasted a few days. We think that’s a fitting end to the show. If
you’re wondering why we missed a few gruesome classics, that’s because we did them in a show
you need to watch now, “How Disney Sanitized Fairy Tales That Were Originally Horror Stories.” Or,
look at some real-life horror in “The Most Evil Person in the World - The Bikini Killer.”