7 Classic Disney Movies Based On R-Rated Stories
As happy as they were to give us the occasional nightmare, Disney's favorite way to misshape our world view was to coat classic stories in a suffocating saccharine wrapper, damning us all to a lifetime of naivety.
But all you have to do is look at these (very real) original endings to tales Disney sanitized to be thankful for their protection, and baffled that they chose to adapt such horrifying stories to begin with ...
#7.
The Jungle Book: Everybody Dies
The Disney Happy Ending:
The film follows Mowgli, a baby who winds up in the jungle and is befriended by talking predators. After avoiding the human world for years and spending most of his childhood being awesome in the jungle, Mowgli stumbles upon a village and is instantly smitten with some doe-eyed floozy. The girl bats an eyelash and Mowgli disappears into the village forever, living happily ever after with his own people and leaving Baloo the Bear and Bagheera the Panther in the dust. Roll credits!
"Y'know, in hindsight we probably should've just eaten him."
The Original Ending:
The original "Jungle Book" was a short-story by Rudyard Kipling, a man with surprisingly little tolerance for anything resembling Disney bullshit.
His mustache would not allow it.
In Kipling's version, when Mowgli decides to return to polite society, polite society isn't so certain it wants him back. The village Mowgli tries to return to in the short story re-banishes him to the wilderness, and the family that was kind enough to take him in gets tortured as sorcerers.
In response, Mowgli recruits Hathi the Elephant for help. But the thing is, the book's Hathi isn't the cuddly, forgetful old Major of the film.
No, he's a bloodthirsty, scarred old elephant who likes nothing more than seeking revenge on humans for an old wound he received in a spike pit. The "help" Mowgli gets from his old friend is in destroying the entire goddamned village. That's right. The lovable kid protagonist whose goofy antics you grew up laughing at recruits his elephant friend to, along with Bagheera and a bunch of wolves, storm in and raze the freaking village to the ground.
"LEAVE NONE ALIVE!"
All the houses get stomped into dust, supplies are destroyed, the wolves chase away the cattle and good old Bagheera kills the horses. Damn, we're thinking this franchise is due for a gritty reboot.
#6.
The Little Mermaid: Blood, Heartbreak, Death
The Disney Happy Ending:
After an entire movie of trying to turn from a mermaid into a human girl so she can marry a prince, things aren't looking good for Ariel. Due to cunning contractual stipulations, the evil witch Ursula winds up with Ariel and Triton's magical crown and trident.
Really, she has all the ingredients for a prog-metal album cover.
Springing into action for the first time in the entire movie, Prince Eric drives a ship's broken bow right into her stomach, like that time we attempted to use chopsticks at a sushi bar. The day is saved, the crown is restored and Ariel gets to marry her prince as the unicorn of happiness explodes into gooey rainbows.
The Original Ending:
After having her tail split in two by the evil sea witch's potion, the mermaid goes upon land and proceeds to bleed absolutely everywhere.
The prince, finding this delightfully amusing, commands her to dance for him while she grins and bears the excruciating pain.
"And maybe later I can choke you while we have sex!"
Afterward, the mermaid finds out that the Prince is to marry another woman, and that if he does so she will dissolve into sea foam, but all can be saved if she can somehow persuade the Prince that she was the one who saved him from drowning. But she doesn't, and he gets married anyway. The sea witch tells the mermaid that in order for her to survive, she must kill him.
Instead of descending upon his sleeping body with an X-Acto knife, she instead chooses to believe in the power of love.
Unfortunately, this does the complete opposite of "work," and the mermaid dissolves. And since mermaids don't have souls (at least according to Hans Christian Andersen), she has to do 300 years of good deeds in order to earn one, only every time a child cries, she has to do an extra day for each teardrop.
Damn, Old Yeller probably tacked on about 500,000 years alone
#5.
Pinocchio: Chewed Up by Dozens of Ravenous Fish
The Disney Happy Ending:
Pinocchio is a tale about the humanity of a little wooden puppet as he is led through the trials and pitfalls of growing up. He learns many important moral lessons along the way.
Such as how to deal with assholes like Lampwick.
After experiencing wage slavery, peer pressure, gambling, alcohol and donkey transformation, he gets swallowed by a whale, presumably representing teenage pregnancy. He rescues his father from the whale but dies in the process, prompting the Blue Fairy to resurrect him as a real boy before she moves on to Haley Joel Osment in Spielberg's A.I.
Along with some aliens. Because in case you forgot, A.I. was stupid.
The Original Ending:
After Pinocchio is turned into a donkey, he gets bought by a musician who wants a new drum head made out of donkey skin and tosses Pinocchio into the sea to drown him, presumably because there were no knives or heavy rocks available at the time. Fortunately, Pinocchio is saved by a school of fish that proceed to devour his flesh, reducing him to wooden bones.
In five seconds this is going to get bloodier than a GWAR concert.
Not only that, but in the Disney film, Gepetto is rescued from the whale in a relatively snappy time frame. In the original story, Gepetto is eaten by a shark and lives there for two years before Pinocchio finally gets off his splintery ass and does something about it.
On second thought, we're with Pinocchio on this one.
#4.
The Fox and the Hound: Everybody Dies (Again)
The Disney Happy Ending:
Despite it being a story of unlikely friendships and insurmountable obstacles, Disney nevertheless finds room in The Fox and the Hound for a happy ending and a kickass bear fighting sequence.
The scene ends with Copper the Hound protecting his childhood friend Todd the Fox from his master, achieving a mutual respect and understanding between species. Todd settles down with a vixen and Copper goes on with his life as a working dog, presumably ripping apart foxes he didn't grow up with.
And eating cat poop from the litter box.
The Original Ending:
Daniel P. Mannix, the author of the original story, probably hadn't met a child before writing The Fox and the Hound. In his version, the Hound is a bloodthirsty killer out for revenge against the Fox for the accidental death of another hound on a previous hunt. Once he discovers the Fox's lair, his master proceeds to gas the hell out of it, killing both the vixen and her cubs. At this point, the author obviously didn't think the book was depressing enough, so he threw some rabies into the mix, and then a child dies from an infected bite.
Not the obvious choice for a children's film.
The story reaches its climax with a chase longer than the one in The Matrix Reloaded in which Todd the Fox collapses and dies of exhaustion. The Hound and the Master go home to celebrate, a term which here means "the master shoots the hound in the face and then gets sent to a rest home."
And they all lived happily ever after.
Still a better love story than Twilight. :)
ReplyWow. Well. My childhood is ruined.
ReplyLol just kidding, I don't give a shit.
This was actually kind of depressing...
ReplySomeone probably already said this somewhere, but it's only in the first book of Tarzan that he doesn't get with Jane. In the second one Clayton dies, Tarzan gets with Jane, and they go on to get married and have a son.
ReplyYou forgot Sleeping Beauty. In the original, ORIGINAL story, Prince-whatever-his-name-is rapes Aurora in her sleep, and she gives birth to twins while still in a coma.
ReplyTrue story bro.
Um, Lion King? From Hamlet, you know, where everyone dies...
ReplySo, this, and the related article "7 Classic Disney Movies that taught us terrible lessons" are about almost exactly the same movies.
ReplyI think this makes clear something which should have been obvious to the screenwriters from the start: when you change a sad ending to a happy ending, but don't change any of the character's actions leading up to it, you reverse the moral of the story.
A good lesson becomes bad because you have now rewarded a character for behavior which should - and in the original did - get them killed. Or worse.
You know what? Bambi.
ReplyI mean the original, the Felix Salten book. It's really bleak. Bambi goes through various abandonement situations, eventually falling into depression, growing cold and detaching himself from everyone he knows, and virtually everybody dies (horrible deaths, most of them. If they're not brutally murdered they at least have to die sad and alone). Even the disney version, at the time, was a little bit more crude than the rest of the disney films (featuring "the first death on a Disney movie" and all of that), and that's because all of that bleakness and sadness and stuff was part of the story's escence, they couldn't take it all away, even Disney knew that
...
and yet he filled it with jolly rabbits and skunks and all that crap, and he totally erased some of the most endearing characters. Dammit, Disney... Damn.
Wow...I didn't even know it WAS a book. O___O I'll have to check that out.
I remember being really sad when I picked up a little kid's book of The Little Mermaid and found out she dies in the end. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure no version I've read says that the prince found her bleeding amusing (or that she bled, period), or that she had to do an extra day for every kid's teardrop. That's even more depressing. On the other hand, it was good to learn that the original Sea Witch wasn't evil.
ReplyBecause Hans Christian Andersen apparently suffered from depression, I refuse to accept his ending as canon and instead dismiss it as Author On Board and Creative Breakdown. The Little Mermaid DOES end up with the Prince, dammit! :P
I'm glad I'm not the only person who has come to regard many classic Disney movies as "sugar-coated" and also kinda subtly racist. I thought maybe I was just weird. I still love those movies though.
I have a feeling your kid's book was heavily edited. Just google the original story (it's the first hit for "hans little mermaid"). While the prince may not have been amused by it, the mermaid does bleed with every step while hiking with him up tall mountains, and he doesn't particularly seem to care (or notice). The sea witch isn't power-hungry as in the movie, but she certainly isn't nice either. The "extra day per tear" clause is in the final line. Lots of rough stuff for such a short story.
Just to show different perspectives, try comparing "The Little Mermaid" with "Ponyo", supposedly based on the exact same source material but made in Japan with a whole different set of cultural values. The major differences are that there is no Ursula; what "Ponyo" has by way of a mother is Kannon, the Shinto Goddess of Compassion. When informed that her daughter Ponyo has staked her life on this romance between two five-year-olds and could turn into sea-foam if it fails, Kannon is cool with it, stating that sea-foam "is where all life originated." Goddesses can afford to take the long view.
I learned about half of these in my World Lit class...it certainly made "feel good family movie night" more awkward than it already was.
ReplyI would show my four-year-old brother both the Disney and original of these stories! Hell, if only these options were available to my eight-year-old self. (Dammit, 2000!)
ReplyNot to nit-pick but I'm pretty sure the "aliens" at the end of AI are supposed to be super advanced robots.
Reply>Spielberg
>not aliens
you aren't trolling nobody
Technically, Herc did become a god and reconciled with Hera after all the depressing s**t happened to him. So it was kind of a happy ending. Still, it'd be kind of awkward being around the woman who tried to kill your mother, tried to kill you as an infant, and made you kill your children.
Reply Hide All See All 5 RepliesThat awkward moment when you encounter your homocidal mom. . .
@Hockey Night
Hera was not his mother.
Indeed. The blanket killed him because his new wife got told by nessus (centaur who made it into the movie) to sprinkle his blood on the blanket if hercules ever lost passion for her. The fact that nessus had just tried to rape her and was dying from a poison-tipped arrow seemed not to biase her. When hercules kept going away on holiday she followed old nessus' instructions (there no record of how she got that blood out and kept it without hubby noticing, greek eh?). The poison inside the blood reacted when it came into contact with hercules' skin. He asked to be burned alive to put him out of his misery and ascended to Olympus to live as a god. So it was kind of a happy ending
Hera- because even the Greeks new step-moms were a whole new league of bitch.
your homicidal stepmom then.
All of these original stories had much improved endings. I always approve of a good tragedy.
ReplyThe happy ending bullshit grows tiresome and overdone, I want to see some real story telling with sadness and pain and such. If art is to imitate life, it would be a tragedy, because humanity is nothing but a string of tragedies and atrocities with a few bright points for comic relief.
That... That was so cliché.
...
Well said, though.
We were so innocent...>_>
ReplyWe? Not I.
;)
damn well i was at least thinking those will be little things that can be overlooked but nope child hood stories ruined
ReplyThe Hercules ending isn't a surprise. If you ever read about him, he murders his wife, children out of a fit of insanity and throws himself in his fireplace - in this case, a fire pit - after what he did.
Reply Hide All See All 4 RepliesThose Greeks sure loved writing about "protagonists" murdering their families in fits of insanity.
Did you read the stories or just repeat the article?
Or eating their sons. That one showed up a few times too.
Was it a problem back then I wonder? It just seems to pop a few many times to be a coincidence.
Kind of like Chris Benoit.
Awesome article, but maybe remember to read all the way through your link sources before writing. ;) It wasn't the kids who cried in "The Little Mermaid" original stories, but the "ladies of the air" whenever they found a naughty child. (A good child lessened the length of time they had to wait for a soul, but each tear shed over a bad kid added a year.)
ReplySo it's basically a hostage situation.
TyererArr: Yep, pretty much, only most children don't know what they need to do to release the hostage. Either way, it's really depressing.
ReplyChildren learn an important lesson in the actions of the celibate antagonist, Frollo: If you are sexually frustrated by a wayward gypsy, just set her on fire and everything will work itself out.
Thank you Cracked! I never knew what to do with the gypsy problem I had.
Jesus Christ, my whole childhood has been a lie!!!!
Reply