Jilly Gagnon’s previous work for The Toast can be found here.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarves:
A teenage runaway, broken by years of psychological and physical abuse at the hands of her stepmother, moves in with seven middle-aged men, becoming their domestic slave. After several months hiding out in their filthy hovel (it’s so rundown that dozens of varieties of vermin infest it), Snow White’s stepmother finds her and, enraged, escalates her abuse so drastically that she leaves the young girl in a coma.
Though Snow White eventually recovers, she’s so psychologically scarred that she’s unable to break out of the cycle of abuse, instead seeking a relationship with a man who forced himself upon her comatose body in the woods.
Toy Story:
Like many young children, Andy isn’t particularly good at caring for his things, which results in him losing first his spaceman, then his cowboy action figures.
He eventually finds them under the backseat of the car, but by this point, Andy’s experiencing the first signs of oncoming adolescence, and will permanently abandon the toys soon, anyway.
Aladdin:
A clever street urchin follows the royal vizier into an underground treasure room. While there, he manages to steal a lamp.
Emboldened by his success, the young man progresses to more and more elaborate cons, eventually convincing the sultan that he’s a visiting royal seeking the princess’s hand.
Though the royal vizier alerts the royal family to the ruse, the princess enjoys slumming, and manipulates her father—half-witted due to generations of inbreeding between the royal houses—into letting her marry the up-jumped beggar.
Frozen:
It is extremely cold in Scandinavia, no matter when you visit.
The Little Mermaid:
A mute girl, Ariel, charms the royal court with her simple-minded capers, including imaginary friendships with potential menu items, a comically lacking sense of proper table etiquette, and occasional nudity.
Her antics at the royal wedding, however, make it impossible for the prince to keep her at court any longer. Her current location is unknown.
Beauty and the Beast:
A beautiful young girl is sold by her father to a cruel prince in exchange for leniency for his own crimes against the prince’s property.
Imprisoned and separated from all human contact, the girl eventually experiences an extreme psychotic break, and begins conversing regularly with objects around the castle.
After several months of imprisonment, she falls in love with her captor, refusing to return to her tiny village even after her father’s debt is considered paid. Though townspeople describe the prince who has imprisoned her as a swarthy, hideous man, she seems to truly believe that he looks like a woman in a shampoo commercial.
The Jungle Book:
Due to continuing overpopulation problems and severe poverty in the more rural regions of India, a woman is forced to abandon her newborn baby in the jungle.
He is quickly eaten by wolves. Or panthers. Or tigers. It’s hard to find that sort of information out after the eating has happened.
Tags: disney, humor, jilly gagnon, magic
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That Aladdin one is more fun than the original! Gotta love the long con.
It reminded me of one of those unusually erudite threads the A.V. Club sometimes produces:
It’s well known that during Jafar’s tenure as Grand Vizier Agrabah had a flourishing Jewish community, including the noted scholar, historian and physician Ya‘acub Musa ibn Saba. Indeed, despite Jafar’s reputation for managing Agrabah with an iron hand, the city’s intellectual and commercial standing never recovered after he was deposed. With his successor—according to popular lore an illiterate boy Sultan Abu al-Ma‘ali’s daughter became infatuated with—unable to manage the city’s defense and civil services to the same level of competence, Agrabah became easy prey for approaching Turco-Mongolian armies.
I felt this way about the Lannisters. They were the only ones who seemed clever enough to run a continent.
Turning Cersei into an idiot later on is buuuuulllshit
Toy Story is BRUTAL.
What about The Fox and The Hound? oh god no.
Pretty much exactly the same until the last ~10 minutes, really
“he looks like a woman in a shampoo commercial”
*snort*
Seriously. I always “got” Prince Eric. But Prince…the Beast? Even 9-year-old me was like “pass.”
We were watching it in French in middle school French class, and during his transformation at the end a classmate shouted out that “he’s prettier than she is!”
Top-notch comedy among 11-year-olds, gotta say.
Lumiere is where it’s at in BatB. Unf.
Choked on Diet Dr. Pepper in the office, yeah.
Willing to stan for human Beast. I think he’s pretty and I like it!
(What’s his real name though? He has one besides Beast but I forget.)
Prince Pantene, if memory serves.
His name even SOUNDS like a shampoo brand.
I had to look it up on IMDb:
“Neither the movie nor the stage musical give him a name. In the DVD commentary to the movie, the creators mention that they neglected to give him a name. However, in a licensed CD-Rom trivia game that came out years after the movie, he’s referred to as Adam.”
Adam.
He will forever be Prince Twinkletoes to me.
That transformation sequence!
He was pretty, but he had really huge nostrils. LIke a horse.
I think my favorite one of these things was for ALIEN “An unexpected pregnancy causes complications.”
Oh my god
STOP, STOP, HE’S ALREADY DEAD 🙁
Poor eaten Mowgli.
Without magic, The Little Mermaid becomes one long story about body modification to please a potential romantic interest, with a weird silent-submission subplot.
Unless it’s a weird Lifetime-esque tale of stalking by a mentally deranged individual who actually believes she used to be a mermaid, and whose silence makes her even more terrifying…
Also about how teenagers SHOULD marry the first guy they have a crush on, and that’s not going to go horribly south or anything.
Isn’t that most Disney movies until recently?
Probably, but I remember it being the first one where I explicitly knew that she was 16 years old.
Sidebar: One of my friends came up with this amazing theory about how Ursula is Ariel’s mom and her relationship with Triton ended badly and now they are battling over their daughter, and I kind of like that movie better, because Ursula is pretty great.
That is pretty great.
There are sadly prequel movies that thoroughly debunk that. But you don’t want to see those.
Adam.
Also about how teenagers SHOULD marry the first guy they have a crush on, and that's not going to go horribly south or anything.
Probably, but I remember it being the first one where I explicitly knew that she was 16 years old.
Sidebar: One of my friends came up with this amazing theory about how Ursula is Ariel's mom and her relationship with Triton ended badly and now they are battling over their daughter, and I kind of like that movie better, because Ursula is pretty great.