General Knowledge - General Awareness Quiz - Questions and Answers

Dark Origins of Disney Fairy Tales

Others Disney Fairy Tales

Many of the other old tales have been made mild over time, and Disney has chosen to tell the milder versions: Disney has told the story of the Red Riding Hood by Brothers Grimm through many shorts. Charles Perrault s tale has the wolf eating the grandmother, and the young woman, with no lumberjack, whom the Grimm Brothers added to save them. Older variants narrate how the wolf or ogre, or werewolf pretends to be the old lady, misguides Red Riding Hood into unwittingly cannibalizing her granny, and asks her to burn her clothes, before he devours her. The sexual connotation is not lost. In fact, the contemporary French idiom for a girl losing her virginity was ?she has seen the wolf. Then there is the Pied Piper, based on the many variants of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. In some of these, the Piper takes the children away and either drowns them to death, or has his own nasty way with them, hinting on paedophilia, unlike Disney s version where he returns the children upon payment. Disney s Goldie Locks and the Three Bears is only slightly different from Robert Southey s The Story of the Three Bears, were the bears, three bachelors living in a house, are visited by an old hag. Another version of the tale suggests that the bears, on finding Goldilocks, rip her apart and eat her. Babes in the Woods is based on Brothers Grimm s Hansel and Gretel, which again is based on The Lost Children, where the devil wants to see the children bleed on the sawhorse, but the clever children pretend not to know how to get on. The devil has her wife show them, and before running away with his money, they slit her throat, despite the fact that she tries to help them earlier. Disney s Pinocchio is quite different from the wooden boy in The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi, where the boy kills Jiminy, and even sells off the book that Gepetto gets by selling his last coat. You almost don t feel bad when bad things happen to Pinocchio, because he kind of deserves them all. Finally, The Fox and the Hound is different from the original tale by Daniel P. Mannix in which Tod the fox is chased to death by Copper the hound who is shot by his master before moving to a nursing home. These are not fan theories; these are the original fairy tales that, over time, had been toned down and made less gruesome, probably to make sure that the minds of children would not be scarred. Disney took a big leap, and changed many of the stories completely, while making slight changes and manipulations here and there in the other stories to ensure that they cater the picture of an absolutely happy world where good always triumphs the evil, love prevails, and there is enough power in our hearts to slay every dragon. Be it the initiative of Disney or the people in general, the dark origins of Disney fairy tales have been disguised and toned down for children over the years, to make them appropriate for everyone.