Hello and welcome back to the Most Amazing channel on the internet.
I am your host Rebecca Felgate and today we are back at it again with the Disney, only
this time we are talking the dark origins behind the stories you know and love – the
movies that raised you as a child… because guess what…at their very core…some of
them are horribly messed up!
10 - Hercules Ah….
I should have known.
Anything from ancient Greek Mythology isn’t going to have a happy ending….or in most
cases… be safe for work!
In the movie, Hercules is indeed the son of god and he does indeed fight Hades and win
the affections of Megara…..
He is hailed a hero at Mount Olympus….
These things do happen in the origin story… buttt Hecules is a child of rape – Zeus
tricked his mum into sleeping with him.
Hercules marries Meg by force, who later ends up going mad and brutally slaughtering all
of their children.
Rightio then.
9 - The Little Mermaid Ariel the Little Mermaid….
What a great movie.
I loved pretending to be a mermaid every time I went to the swimming pool with my mum!
I’d always make her pretend to be Ursula the sea witch….. and what fun we would have.
I loved the Little Mermaid but I never thought it had a particularly happy ending….
Ariel has to give up being a mermaid and has to live among people that aren’t her friends
and family.
They can visit though, so I guess it’s cool.
WELL in the origin story by the infamous Hans Christian Anderson, who you will be hearing
about lots on this list – things are far far far worse.
As in….
our mate Ariel ends up turning to sea foam instead.
In the original, the Mermaid is indeed a princess and who bargain with a sea witch in exchange
for legs so she can meet a human she rescued.
The only thing is, in the origin every time she walks using these legs she feels excruciating
pain, as if she is walking on knives.
Throughout the story her feet bleed regularly.
She is told if she doesn’t secure the love of the prince, she will die.
She meets the prince – who asks her to dance for him, which she does even though it is
agony and it makes her bleed.
How does he repay her?
He falls in love with someone else, breaking her heart.
Her mermaid sisters sell their hair to the sea witch for a knife that offers the mermaid
a way out.
If she kills the prince and drips his blood on her legs, she can end her pain and become
a mermaid again.
Sadly for her, she loves him too much and instead, as the witch promised, she dies.
Lovely.
8 The Princess and the Frog Okay, sure, anything wherein a human and a
frog fall in love probably has a dodgy back story.
In the very earliest version of the Princess and the Frog, the frog king, the curse is
broken when the frog is thrown against a wall.
In one origin version his head is chopped off and his skin is burned.
Poor frog.
7 Cinderella The good news is that Cinderella and the Prince
DO live happily ever after in the origin story of Cinderella.,… the bad news is that there
is a lot of body mutilation going on there.
When the prince finds the slipper in the original tale, her sisters still try and make it fit
them… but they take more extreme measures.
They cut off parts of their feet – one the toes and the other the heel.
The glass slipper is tarnished with blood.
6 - Frozen Frozen is based on good old Hans Christian
Andersons The Snow Queen.
Elsa, as we know, has the ability to freeze things using just her hands and can be a bit…..
shirty.
She keeps herself away from others by building an ice castle…..she ….ICEOLATEs… herself.
Anyway originally the Snow Queen bewitches a man called Kai to love her by placing a
piece of a trolls mirror in his eye and heart.
She makes him cruel and emotionless and reject his previous girlfriend.
5 Pocahontas Pocahontas is a real character in history
– so is one of the few Disney films based on fact.
In the movie, Pocahontas finds love with John Smith.
In reality, John Smith was settler who established James Town – and when we say established
you can bet there was a lot of violence and blood shed there.
Pocahontas did rescue John Smith from being murdered by her father, but she was only 11
years old at the time.
She married Kocoum but he was murdered, leaving her with two kids to raise on her own.
She was then abused by English settlers, her name was changed to Rebecca and she was forcibly
wed to a tobacco farmer named John Rolfe.
She died young in her early 20s.
4 Sleeping Beauty I loved Sleeping Beauty as a kid.
I used to lay down in the middle of the supermarket and pretend I was sleeping beauty and I wouldn’t
get up till my mum kissed me.
Buuuut the origin story is totally messed up.
Yeah, Sleeping beauty is a Princess, and yes she is cursed by an evil witch….
But she doesn’t prick her finger, she gets a poisoned flax seed stuck in it.
She is enshrined as she sleeps in a mausoleum, and one day a king from another kingdom finds
her.
He rapes her corpse then leaves her.
She then gives birth, and fairies look after her babies, until one day, one of her babies
sucks the flax out from her fingernail and she wakes up.
She names her kids sun and moon as they, like the celestial bodies, are a mystery to her.
The rapey and much older king returns to find her awake an they fall in love… only problem
he has a wife.
His wife then orders her chef to cook her husbands kids and kill the mistress, but he
manages to kill her first.
The King, sleeping beauty, sun and moon live happily ever after.
Shame about all the murder and rape, ehy!
3 The Hunchback of Notre Dame The Hunchback of Notredme is based on the
tale of Quasimode originally created by Victor Hugo, the writer of Les Miserables.
In the movie, Qusi falls in love with a gypsy girl and saves her from being executed in
a church.
In the novel he fails to save her and watches her as she hangs.
He then is so upset that he sits at her graveside until he starves to death…literal death.
It has a scary poetic ending though, their skeletons are found some years later and when
the finder tries to separate them, they turn to dust.
2 - The Jungle book The Junglebook is already pretty dark when
you factor in Mowgli being abandoned by his parents and the whole scary tiger thing…
but the origin was even worse.
In the origin Mowgli kills the tiger Shere Khan, then finds his parents who have been
captured by a village of farmers.
Will the help of animals on a rampage, he kills everyone and destroys the whole village.
Mowgli.
1 - Mulan Disney’s Mulan was released in 1998 but
it is actually based on a Chinese tale – a myth about Fa Mulan or Hua Mulan.
In the movie we know that the titular character joins the Chinese army and pretends to be
a man in order to fight the huns.
Well this happens in the origin story too, but things don’t end so well.
Mulan loses the war and is captured by the enemy Khan who tried to make her his sex slave.
She escapes but when she returns home, she finds her father is dead and her mother has
remarried.
Mulan then decides enough is enough and kills herself.
Not quite the Disney ending.
Blimey what an adventure.
A scary scary adventure.
Hands up if you will look at Disney differently in the future.
Why were these fairytales so grim!
COMMENTS from nursery rhymes dark origins..
WORRYINGLY our top comment was from Michael Myers who said: 1,2.
Freddy's coming for you.
3,4 better lock your door.
5,6 grab your crucifix 7,8.
Better stay up late 9,10 never sleep again?.
Sea Heart said: Twinkle twinkle little star isn't what you think either.
Pretty much every 'little' star is burning out so by the end of the song.
It'll be dead. D:?
Fluffy Pink Chaos said: Hello darkness my old friend....let's sing your creepy rhymes
again.?
A lot of you apparently were scared when I said hello.