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 "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
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
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.
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.
