Troperville
Editing Help
Tools
Toys
|
...it was much earlier even than that when most people forgot that that very oldest stories are, sooner or later, about blood. Later on they took the blood out to make the stories more acceptable to children, or at least to the people who had to read them to children rather than children themselves (who, on the whole, are quite keen on blood provided it's being shed by the deserving), and then wondered where the stories went.
I, like most of the world, am an American. And what's more American than sanitizing your own history to the point that it's no longer recognizeable? PUPPIES!! (yaaaay!) But sanitizing your own history is a close second, and no-one is better equipped to do just that than the Walt Disney Company.
A particularly infamous form of editing, known for falling into Adaptation Decay, that renders a story "safe" for juvenile audiences (or the parents thereof) by removing undesirable plot elements or unpleasant historical facts, adding Broadway-style production numbers, and reworking whatever else is necessary for a Lighter And Softer Happily Ever After Ending. Talking Animal sidekicks tend to be tacked on somehow.
This isn't always a bad thing, mind. Done properly (i.e. not too cute or dumbed-down), the Disneyfied property can be just as entertaining as the original (possibly more so if you're not a fan of Downer Endings, or if they've managed to pull off Adaptation Distillation). But all too often, it's not done properly (thank you, Sturgeon's Law). Just don't expect it to look anything like its alleged source.
Named for its most notorious practitioner, Walt Disney. Yet it actually started in the Victorian Era, if not earlier. A form of Bowdlerization, and the opposite of Grimmification.
Examples
open/close all folders
Disney
- Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs, but not as much as the other examples. It follows the Grimm version almost to the letter, with only a few scenes altered to tone down the squick factor (the evil stepmother's death in particular. I mean, being forced to dance to death in red-hot iron shoes? WTF?!)
- There were a few more cuts made. Originally the seven dwarfs were all alike but Disney changed them to each have different personalities and named each dwarf after the trait that defined his character. Also, in the original tale the Queen tries to kill Snow White three different times: suffocating her by tight-lacing her bodice, a poison comb, and eventually the poison apple. Apparently all three attempts were going to be in the movie, according to early storyboard drafts.
- Actually, a scene where Snow White was killed with a magic comb ws scripted. Considering it was made in the Depression, they probably could not afford to make that scene. Also, the original opening had Snow White's real mother in it, and it was implied the wicked witch had murdered her. There was also a scene where the skeleton the witch taunts was shown alive. Both were cut by the cenosors, not Disney.
- In the original Fairy Tale, her enchanted sleep lasted a hundred years. She not only hadn't already met the prince before she fell asleep, but his grandparents probably hadn't even been born yet.
- You're thinking of Sleeping Beauty. The original Snow White wasn't cursed with a spell — it was literal poisoning from an apple. Her revival in the original is caused by coughing the bit of apple she swallowed back up, not from the prince's kiss.
- The Hunchback Of Notre Dame. You wouldn't think Victor Hugo's original novel would be suitable fare for a children's movie. Despite the removal of the more grim elements, it still ended up being one of Disney's darkest animated films.
- This was influenced by the 1940 version with Charles Laughton. On the Sliding Scale Of Idealism Versus Cynicism, this version was already considerably less cynical than the novel. Indeed, you would be hard-pressed to come across a film version of this that doesn't soften the ending of Hugo's novel, where Esmeralda is hung for witchcraft, and her skeleton is found years later held by the remains of Quasimodo.
- Song Of The South. This movie's idyllic depiction of a black sharecropper's life on a Reconstruction-era Southern plantation has kept it off home video in the United States for decades.
- Nowadays, Disney pretends this movie doesn't exist. The modern Disney is deeply ashamed to have such a racist movie in their Canon. John Lasseter even issued a public apology for the movie.
- However, I think that the point is just that. An old sharecropper, helps a boy come to terms with life. The boy who is obviously the grandson of his former owner. Song of the South isn't racist (with the possible exception of the black servant boy who is charged with keeping said grandson out of trouble), but the background of the story makes race important. Indeed, Uncle Remus's position makes it rather anti-racist, as he cares more for the boy than the boy's own family does.
- There's no way depicting an elderly ex-slave, now-sharecropper during Reconstruction as a perfectly content Magical Negro without a care in the world isn't racist. It serves to make a black man less human and his second-class status unimportant so we can enjoy a story about a little white boy.
- The Other Wiki talks about this. The film mostly does its best to pretend its characters aren't racist, but in order to avoid alienating racist customers, some scenes were written in ways that have Unfortunate Implications. For example, although the white grandson and aforementioned black servant boy seem to be friends, the black servant boy is not present at the white grandson's birthday party. It could have been a lot worse, but it's still fairly awkward.
- Hercules not only has a Hijacked By Jesus style, but also implies that the Greek gods had wholesome family values! (Remember, in the original myths, Zeus alone impregnates nearly every woman mentioned by name. His main wife is also his sister, and he has sex with another sister of his as well.)
- The Disneyification of Hades from Dark Is Not Evil to Big Bad is pretty amazing. They took the Greek concept of the Underworld and Hades (which was more or less pretty much a neutral judging point) and spun it to better resemble Hell and the Devil. Complete with imp minions. Luckily, James Woods is awesome beyond awesome. They also made him quite cynical (and possibly the Only Sane Man), which was awesome.
- Disney's
 ◊ The Little Mermaid gets a happy ending, unlike the mermaid in the original version by Hans Christian Andersen. An excerpt:
- Proof that Tropes Are Not Bad, as many see the changes made in Disney's version an improvement.
- In DS 9 when Dax relates the story to a Low G alien who is undergoing treatments to make her able to function fully in a High G environment and she asks if the mermaid lived happily ever after, Jaddzi gives her a sad look.
- Another Hans Christian Andersen story, "The Steadfast Tin Soldier", was given a happy ending by Disney in Fantasia 2000. (Yes, Andersen had issues.)
- Though that's partly from the Soundtrack Dissonance that would occur if they did keep the original ending.
- On the other hand, Disney surprised many people with its animated short of Andersen's The Little Match Girl. While it removes some of the grimmer elements of the plot (for example her abusive father), it retains the ending where the little girl's grandmother appears and takes her to a place where there is no more cold or hunger... and leaves her body behind, frozen in the snow. Despite this, they did reset it in Russia (a nod to the music, by Russian Alexander Borodin; it was intended for a third Fantasia that was killed while in production).
- Even more surprisingly, Disney's very first pass at The Little Mermaid in the 1940s also retained the Downer Ending, but it was only intended as a short film. (In fact, the original Disney ending was even more depressing than Andersen's, as it removed the bit about the mermaid gaining a soul in return for her sacrifice. Which was a stupid Deus Ex Machina anyway.)
- Fun fact: In the context of the time, the Little Mermaid was all about mixed marriages, and becoming a member of one's spouse's people and religion (read: Christianity); thus "gaining a soul".
- Another interpretation also has something to do with the concept of Christianity (which played a huge role in many of Andersen's stories). The mermaid is longing for a soul and misplaces this longing by turning it into (impure, bound-by-flesh) love for the prince — therefore, it sadly ruins the whole moral of the story if the ending is happy.
- The '80s movie was also heavily based off an anime series, Mahou no Mako-chan, which also had a redhaired mermaid, a purple witch, and a happy ending.
- Quite common with Disney — See also: Kimba The White Lion (The Lion King), Nadia The Secret Of Blue Water (Atlantis The Lost Empire).
- Don't know about the Atlantis one, but I fail to see any real connection between Kimba and Lion King, which has a plot based on Hamlet, and includes no mention of humans whatsoever (Humans play a big roll in Kimba).
- How about some of the premise, the characters (sans humans), and some of the plot-crucial scenery being basically the same?
- Doesn't wash, those characters are mapped nearly as easily into Star Wars as between the two programmes (never mind the fact that the humans and the human world in Kimba are hugely influential), and as for a few scenes, the original Kimba series was over 20 hours long collectively, of course you're going to have a few similar scenes. Face it, with generic characters, a different plot and style, and a few momentary scenes, the 'Lion King is a Kimba ripoff' has really nothing to go on.
- Coincidental, inspired by or maybe it was supposed to originally be a remake?
- Pinocchio actually underwent this process by the original author: Pinocchio is killed (still a puppet) by hanging in the original tale, and the author, Carlo Collodi, added extra chapters in which Pinocchio not only is restored to life, but also becomes a real boy (after a lot of hard and cruel life lessons, that is). Guess which version Disney went with, and what they left out.
- When Roberto Benigni did his adaptation, it was closer to the second Collodi take plotwise. Alas, the film was so flawed already — Benigni playing Pinocchio despite being middle-aged was just the start of the trouble — that the restoration of the darker elements only made things worse (especially for American critics).
- Don't forget that in the original novel he killed that annoying cricket.
- Also, in the book Pinocchio actually turned into a donkey, was sold to the circus, broke his leg while performing, and was thrown into the river and drowned. He only survived because his wooden body remained intact inside the donkey body and thus climbed out of the water after fish ate the donkey skin away.
- Disney's adaptation of Mary Norton's Bedknob and Broomstick dropped the original book's entire plot, and instead created a new one from whole cloth involving Eglantine Price's attempt to learn magic solely in order to help the British effort in World War Two. Along the way, a medieval sorcerer became a modern con-man, an island of Talking Animals was added apparently just to give Disney's animation division something to do that year, and a climactic battle scene of magically powered suits of plate armor versus a Nazi invasion force replaced the book's much more low-key conclusion. Oh, and they made it a musical. A major plot element complete with its own musical number, critical to the climax of the film, was conjured up out of a random two-word phrase ("substitutiary locomotion") that appears only in a minor conversation on which the children eavesdrop in the book. And on top of all that, they pluralized both nouns in the title for no obvious reason.
- In the movie's defense, the armor-vs-Nazis sequence is totally freaking awesome.
- Pocahontas pretty much shredded everything we know about the historical woman. For one thing she was between 10 and 12 years old when she first met John Smith making a romantic relationship unlikely at best. Her father had fifty wives and numerous children. She was taken to Jamestown as a hostage and married before her trip to London, and no Armada was threatening to annihilate her people. Just about the only bit they got right was her saving Smith from execution, and even that is considered by some historians to be the enactment of a ritual (and thus Smith wasn't in any real danger).
- It wasn't even accurate to John Smith's accounts, which is rather sad considering how accurate he was.
- One thing that the movie did get right, surprisingly, was Smith getting wounded and having to go back to England for treatment — in real life, it was due to a gunpowder explosion.
- And she didn't actually marry John Smith. She married John Rolfe.
- The sequel does address this, albeit in an inaccurate way, playing with drama between the two Johns.
- This troper was always amused that they actually killed off one of the few characters that actually was supposed to be a real person — Pocahontas' husband Kocoum.
- It didn't even just ignore American history — this troper would love to know where they found 500 foot cliffs in coastal Virginia
- The New World is more historically accurate, but still takes liberties with Smith's life and his relationship with Pocahontas. Paradoxically, it also features Christian Bale and Irene Bedard.
- Haven't seen either Pocahontas film; does she die in Gravesend at the age of fifty?
- She does indeed die, but the son lives!
- The prince charming appearance John Smith has in the film amuses this troper. If my memory is correct, he was a classically unattractive, short man with a giant woolly beard. He was also a redhead, which could have actually worked if they had kept it that way.
- Surprisingly, this troper went to a field trip in Jamestown, where the tour guide said there was actual evidence of there being a pet raccoon! She said the body was either too young or too old to be wild and the teeth showed evidence of eating human food.
- And the "ritual saving" also makes that verse of the jazz standard "Fever" Disneyfied as well.
- You people fail to realize that in this case Disney was using existing names to get a point across. You are Completely Missing The Point. The history was never the point of that film.
- The Black Cauldron mishmashed plot elements from Lloyd Alexander's book of the same name with his earlier The Book of Three, gave the amalgamated villain an annoying sidekick, turned the truculent dwarves into cute little pixies, and made beast-man Gurgi the very definition of Sickeningly Sweet. Luckily, no songs.
- Let's be realistic. Gurgi was, if anything, even more annoying in the original books.
- Once again, Disney itself acknowledges the failure of this movie nowadays, and wishes they could give their fans a more book-accurate version.
- In T. H. White's The Sword in the Stone, young Wart's education by the wizard Merlin contains powerful moral lessons that will help the young man face his future role as King Arthur. The Disney version throws away all of the moral messages and replaces them with (admittedly sometimes very good) visual gags.
- ... and Disney's version still comes off as less over-the-top and saccharine.
- Given that Disneyfication often implies shoehorning Aesops where there originally were none, shouldn't this count as a subversion of sort?
- Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Books (yes, two of them) depict the orphaned Mowgli growing into a strong and intelligent young man whose jungle upbringing will make him something of a Noble Savage. There is quite a lot of violence in the books. At one point Kaa the python hypnotizes a troupe of monkeys into becoming his helpless (ahem) dinner guests; later on Mowgli singes the tiger Shere Khan's fur with a burning branch, and when that fails to get rid of him Mowgli and the wolves stampede a herd of water-buffalo over him. As if that wasn't enough, in the story "Red Dog" Mowgli causes the marauding dogs of the title to be attacked by millions of angry bees; those who survive this by jumping into the river are attacked by Mowgli with a knife; and any that are left must then face Mowgli and his enraged wolf pack. And incidentally, Mowgli does most of this while he's naked. It should come as no surprise that none of the violence or nudity makes it into the Disney version, but Disney not only censors the story but effectively throws out every last original plot thread. A documentary on the DVD explains how Disney's writers "improved" on the original, but in fact it becomes clear that what they really did was to whittle away at the original storyline until there was almost nothing left except for a few almost coincidental similarities. They can't even pronounce Mowgli's name right. ("Mow rhymes with cow", says Kipling.)
- It should also be noted that, in the book, Kaa, while large, intimidating, and alien, is one of Mowgli's allies. The illustrated Kipling this troper had as a child included a memorable, full-color, full-page image of Mowgli sprawled comfortably in the constrictor's coils as if the serpent were a papasan chair, Something like this one.◊
The King's Ankus: That afternoon Mowgli was sitting in the circle of Kaa's great coils, fingering the flaked and broken old skin that lay all looped and twisted among the rocks just as Kaa had left it. Kaa had very courteously packed himself under Mowgli's broad, bare shoulders, so that the boy was really resting in a living arm-chair.
- Let's not forget how the wolves are essentially removed from the story, particularly Akela, who is pretty much one of the many animals that helped Mowgli!
- All this can be easily explained by the fact that Walt Disney specifically told the production crew not to read the book. He gave an outline on the characters and plot ideas he wanted and didn't want the book itself to be used as a reference. In spite of these directions, the composer did, in fact, read the book and as such, the soundtrack gained a bit more darkness than is usual in a Disney film.
- The Soviet animated Mowgli was much closer to the original — in having fierce fights, Akela, evil Kaa ("clossser, Bandarlogsss, closssssser...") and not toony-comedically-dumb characters, anyway. Mwahaha, take zat, Amerika! You can see a few stills with some commentary here: [1] (Warning: quite bad English.)
- Bambi. (Yes, it was based on a novel). True, Bambi's mother dies in the film, but its tone still is significantly lighter than the novel's, which was much darker and more brutal, including graphic death scenes.
- They also never included Gobo's (Bambi's cousin) death. And they failed to meantion Faline was his cousin!
- The story of the Three Little Pigs originally had the first two pigs eaten by the wolf after their houses were blown down. The Disney cartoon of the story allowed them to run to the next house before the wolf could get his meal. Then again, would anyone really want to explain to their toddler where the wolf got the ham and bacon?
- Aladdin, as well done as it is, is another example of alteration for alteration's sake. In the original story as presented in the Arabian Nights, Aladdin had two genies — a weaker one in a ring, and the stronger one in the lamp — and had no limit on the number of tasks he could set them to. Yes, he won the hand of a princess, but that was barely the midpoint of the story; the evil wizard who had first used Aladdin to try to retrieve the lamp (and who had no connection to the princess in any way) was not quickly disposed of but instead discovered Aladdin's success, and successfully stole the lamp (and the princess, and Aladdin's palace, and almost everything else) with a clever ruse. (Does anyone remember "New lamps for old"?) Aladdin had to win everything back from the wizard using his wits and the lesser genie he still had in his ring. And even then he still had problems...
- On top of this, wasn't Aladdin supposed to be from China (albeit an Islamic version of it)?
- Mulan fought the Mongols, not the Huns. There were women in the military in that era, just not women generals. (She was a general, not a lieutenant.) And in the Mulan legends I'm familiar with, she fell on her sword rather than marry the Emperor.
- A Chinese friend of mine heard the story from her mother, and in it, she did fall in love with her commander. However, I read a different legend where a woman goes on a long journey to see her husband when he was sent to the great wall, finds him dead, splits the wall with a random lightning bolt when she cries out in pain, and she commits suicide rather then marry the emperor. My friend and I believe that over the years, the two ancient feminist legends got mixed up.
- The Lion King is pretty much Hamlet minus humans and themes about whether life is really worth living. The character of Hamlet/Simba is turned from a psychotic but intelligent man bent on revenge to an angsty lion who thinks he killed his father. The love interest Ophelia/Nala is turned from an egocentric bitch who blames everything on herself to a strong female role model who's willing to tell our main character what's what. Let's also not forget that Simba lives and becomes king while Hamlet dies and makes Fortinbras the king. Many changes have been made that the only thing both movies/plays really resemble is the basic plotline.
- In other words, it changes so much stuff that one has to wonder whether it really was supposed to be based on Hamlet at all to begin with?
- It was: the directors and writers of the movie said so themselves.
- Oh really? [2]
- Sour grapes. The original Kimba series was over 20 hours long, so of course some images are going to be similar to those in the movie. Anyone who claim Lion King is based on Kimba is carefully ignoring the total differences in plot (the only similarities being the death of the father, and spending some time in a distant land), and the fact that the characters are standard heroic fare that can be equated as easily to Star Wars as between the two productions in question.
- It was revealed in the Kimba DVDs that quite a few of the writers were fans of Kimba (one even still had a Kimba costume!) and were more than a little influenced by the series. It was intended as an homage more than anything else and chances are that Disney higher-ups weren't aware of this until people started to point this out. Because Disney didn't want to get sued their official stance became "Kimba? lol never heard of it." Even Tezuka's animation studio said this was okay since "The (late) Osamu Tezuka would have been honored to have inspired one of their movies," Tezuka having always been a fan of Disney. So much so that the idea for Kimba came from Disney's Bambi. So yeah, it was just an homage that got out of hand.
- Oddly enough, Newsies is not a particularly egregious example of Disneyfication. It's safe to say that the New York newsboys of 1899 didn't burst into spontaneous well-choreographed musical numbers as they walked the streets, and the violence occurring as a result of the strike is a bit sanitised (no blood); but we do see newsboys sleeping on the streets, smoking cigars, betting on races, beating up strikebreakers, et cetera.
- The Fox And The Hound. In the original book, Tod and Copper were never friends to begin with, Tod loses his mate to a trap, Chief doesn't survive his encounter with that train, and at the end Tod dies of exhaustion while being relentlessly chased by Copper and Slade. And then Copper is literally shot in the head by his owner to avoid having to abandon him.
Not Disney:
- Charles Perrault's Sleeping Beauty was based on the 17th-century tale Sun, Moon and Talia by Giambattista Basile, in which the princess was woken not by a kiss, but by being raped, giving birth — both while unconscious — and her child sucking the sleep-inducing splinter out of her finger.
- The Dreamworks movie The Prince of Egypt was relatively faithfully adapted from the book of Exodus. However, it still Disneyfied the potential drowning of Pharaoh.
- Kind of odd, since they included the deaths of his soldiers and two separate genocides (one by the Egyptians against the Hebrews and one by God against the Egyptians).
- And small, vaguely defined cartoon baby penises.
- Speaking of baby penis, very few depictions of the Bible for children seem to mention...what Jews do to baby penis.
- Not to be an apologist, but the killing of the firstborn potentially goes far beyond just a simplistic "judgment-genocide." See Christianity for a more well-informed study.
- Not to state the obvious, but Genocide Plus is still genocide.
- Then again, what with the relationship between the Pharaoh and Moses in the movie (and the movie's efforts to humanize him), killing Rameses off would have been a pretty bad dramaturgical choice. (The last time we see him he's roaring Moses' name to the heavens in despair, while on the other side of the Red Sea Moses whispers "good-bye, brother.")
- Don't forget the spontaneous chariot racing for whatever reason.
- The original text reveals Moses as actively deciding to kill the Egyptian taskmaster, the equivalent of killing a southern one before the American Civil War. And then he (unsuccessfully) tried to cover it up to avoid blame.
- Moses was much older when he came to see the Pharaoh and had two sons. He also was "slow of tongue" and so Aaron did the talking.
- Anastasia manages to show the Russian Revolution without mentioning communism. Instead, Rasputin is plucked out his historical context for use as a pure Evil Sorcerer (ignoring his complex relationship with the Romanovs), and given an annoying talking bat as a Non Human Sidekick. They didn't even mention Lenin, the Soviets and the Bolsheviks when they attacked the Czar's palace!
- The happy ending of the movie version of The Witches is pretty Disneyfied. Which is a bit odd, as the original novel didn't have anything near a Downer Ending... it just wasn't a perfect Happily Ever After, but much more bittersweet in flavor.
- This actually happened to Tom And Jerry, of all characters, in The Movie, where they ditched most of the slapstick, started to talk and sing, became best friends, and helped an annoying little girl reunite with her father.
- Nowadays, they are back to their usual characterization, but they were also portrayed in a more pleasant light in the 1970s TV show too, thanks to Moral Guardians trying to crack down on slapstick.
- In addition to changing its heroine from a quiet, thoughtful girl into Shirley Temple's usual brassy, vivacious smart-aleck, the 1939 film of Frances Hodgson Burnett's book A Little Princess softens the hardships Sara undergoes, changes the villain's weak and complicit sister into a heroic brother, and imposes a Disney Death on Sara's father, while ladling generous quantities of Tastes Like Diabetes over the entire story.
- Then watch the Alfonso Cuaron version instead.
- Even the Alfonso Cuaron version still has her father survive.
- The Warner Bros animated feature Quest For Camelot, supposedly based on Vera Chapman's novella The King's Damosel, itself a feminist retelling of the Arthurian tale of Linette and Gareth. Similarities between the book and the film are, in total, that the lead character is an Action Girl with a falcon, she's accompanied by a blind man, and it's set in Arthurian England. Change all the lead characters names, add three Non Human Sidekicks, dump the Bittersweet Ending in favour of "Kayley" living Happily Ever After with "Garrett" (an amalgamation of Lucius [the blind man] and Gareth) and you're done.
- Then there is the horrendously awful Titanic The Legend Goes On where they alter history so that (almost) everyone survives and also shoehorn some really bad singing and dancing in. That and it's pretty much a rip off of a bunch of more famous movies like James Cameron's Titanic with comic scenes practically lifted wholesale from Disney movies.
- One Big Lipped Alligator Moment involves rapping dogs and Mexican rats...
- It's even worse in The Legend Of The Titanic, released at the same time as the former in Italy, where the ship is rescued from sinking by a giant octopus atoning for having chucked the iceberg in the ship's way in the first place. And in this one, everyone survives, even captain and the band.
- In-world example: In Escape From Monkey Island, the legacy of the dread pirate Tiny LaFeet is Disneyfied by real estate kingpin Ozzy Mandrill to better appeal to local tourists. According to Ozzy's marketers, the actually quite mean Tiny LaFeet "always said 'please' and 'thank you', twice!"
- The Film Of The Book The Golden Compass noticeably ends the story a bit early — before the bit where Lord Asriel murders the little boy Lyra thought she was saving in cold blood. Supposedly this was saved as an opener for the second movie, if it ever gets made.
- The film also toned down a lot of the original anti-religious themes, to try to stave off complaints from religious viewers. It didn't work.
- This was, apparently, much to get Nicole Kidman to take the job and play Mrs. Coulter. She's so perfect in the role that this troper almost understands it. Almost.
- The Swan Princess for the most part stays true to the original Swan Lake fairy tale, but makes the classic set of changes: talking animal sidekicks, a healthy dash of women's lib, and a happy ending in which the swan and the prince marry instead of drowning themselves in the lake. Of course, they went on to star in direct-to-video sequels (two of them!), so perhaps their fates are in fact more gruesome.
- Stagings of the ballet are divided on this: some have the lovers die (or parted forever as Odette is condemned to remain a swan), while others have them live happily ever after. Mercedes Lackey's retelling The Black Swan splits the difference: Odette and Siegfried throw themselves in the lake but are restored to life by a turned-good Odile.
- Definitely averted in the Oscar winning Richard Williams version of ''A Christmas Carol'', which stuck true to the haunting spirit and gruesome imagery of the original book. (Its artwork and character designs were based on contemporary Victorian illustrations of the novel.)
- Gulliver's Travels is often victim of this trope because it has giant Brobdingnagians and small Lilliputians which make for easy kid appeal, but the original is satirical and includes a scene where Gulliver upsets the Lilliputians by pissing on a fire to put it out. This scene, needless to say, is nearly always changed.
- Most modern renditions leave out vast amounts of Gulliver's Travels, starting with scenes like the one in which a Brobdingnagian woman uses Gulliver as a dildo, and moving on to excise entire sections of the book, like Laputa and the Houyhnhyms, which can in no way be made kid-friendly.
- The closest interpretation was one TV movie featuring Ted Danson, and even that one told the story differently, with Gulliver being treated as a mental patient raving about his adventures, while Grimmifying many elements of the tale and toning down the various elements involved in the story's ending, whether they contributed to its Downer Ending or not. At the end, he's proved sane when his daughter finally manages to live-trap a Lilliputian sheep (which he'd brought back from that journey) and present it to the judge.
- It was actually his son, but not a hard mistake to make.
- One has to wonder what goes through the minds of most adapters when they decide to take a work whose apparent moral is that man is nothing more than a hairless ape and that horses are the true rightful rulers of the earth and turn it into a children's movie.
- The original intent of Gulliver's Travels was to shamelessly mock the class-based society of the time — Swift also wrote several other satirical works (and one at least one occasion, pulled a massive prank on the readers of a popular newspaper), but with the possible exception of "A Modest Proposal", they're much less well-known.
- "Horses being the true rightful rulers of the earth" is a bit of an overstatement — while Gulliver's Travels considers the Houyhnhyms to be superior, Swift intended them to come off as yet another unpleasant extreme, just like all the other cultures Gulliver encounters — we're not supposed to end up sympathetic to any of the civilizations of the book, including Gulliver's own.
- Notably, the Brothers Grimm made many of their fairy tales less scary than their original versions.
- Partly because of complaints that their first edition was not suitable for children. They had, after all, titled it Household and Children's Tales. They chiefly cut down the sex and converted evil mothers to wicked stepmothers. Later writers toned down the violence.
- Folktales were being softened as far back as Charles Perrault's version of the Pentameron in 1696, making this Older Than Steam.
- And then there's the Rankin-Bass movie adaptation of The Hobbit... which makes a few questionable changes (all death is represented by the screen spinning), but is actually less destructive than you would expect.
- Really, I don't think this qualifies. Far from toning down the violence and bigotry from the books, the adaptation actually increases it slightly. The removal of the Arkenstone of Thrain made Thorin's attitude much less understandable, and the reasons for both the Elves and the Men of Lake-Town marching toward the Mountain armed for war were glossed over. Besides that, while only two of the Companions of Thorin (Fili and Kili) plus Thorin himself fell in the book, seven died in the movie. Most notably, when Bilbo comes to after the battle, he sees Bombour crawling. When asked about the battle, the dwarf grunts out "we... won..." and dies.
- But for a sequel, Rankin-Bass got to make a mawkish version of Return of the King. (The other two books were covered by the sentence "Frodo and his gallant companion, Samwise, had many brave adventures until they finally reached the rocky borders of Mordor". Yeah. In fairness, the previous two books had just been adapted by Ralph Bakshi two years prior, though they weren't so much Disneyfied as simply hacked apart limb from limb.)
- Poor, poor Legolas and Gimli . . .
- I'd say Disneyfication definitely counts for ROTK. Seven words: "Where There's A Whip, There's A Way".
- Arthur And The Minimoys was an international hit with two sequels planned. The American release, Arthur And The Invisibles, failed miserably at the box office. This might be because the American release completely removed the romantic subplot between Arthur and Selenia.
- The PBS show SuperWHY has adaptations of fairy tales; one is of Hansel and Gretel. The titular characters go and nibble on the witch's house. The witch comes out and yells at them for ruining their roof. After a brief break for literary education from Our Heroes, Hansel and Gretel apologize to the witch; she accepts their apology and delivers the moral, then gives them cookies shaped like houses. This troper was freaking creeped out, as was her uncle.
- And "The Twelve Dancing Princesses"? Turns out they were sneaking out to plan a surprise party for their father, the king. What this has to do with the original tale is...um...there's twelve princesses. And there might have been some dancing. "The Little Mermaid"? The titular character is afraid to play with the kids on the island because she has a tail. Combine with an especially Anvilicious frame story about "being different" and it's arguably the worst of the lot.
- We can save time by saying that every single story on Super Why is horribly Disneyfied, to the point of barely resembling their original stories. The main characters edit the story to get the result they want every episode, after all.
- Occurs in story in Sid Meiers Alpha Centauri, when the tale of a war hero is repackaged as a story for kids:
Richard Baxton piloted his Recon Rover into a fungal vortex and held off four waves of mind worms, saving an entire colony. We immediately purchased his identity manifests and repackaged him into the Recon Rover Rick character with a multi-tiered media campaign: televids, touchbooks, holos, psi-tours, the works. People need heroes. They don't need to know how he died clawing his eyes out, screaming for mercy. The real story would just hurt sales, and dampen the spirits of our customers.
- The anti-religious theme of The Film Of The Book Chocolat was softened by replacing the bitter churchman of the book with a town representative. Also, the town itself was made to look drab and ugly in the opening acts, when the very first scene in the book describes the heroine and her daughter watching a bright parade through the streets of the same town. The most egregious change is the ending — the novel contained a brief, drunken hookup between the heroine and a male supporting character, leaving her pregnant as she left the village to continue drifting. In the movie, the relationship between her and the man is developed into a full romantic subplot, he returns at the end, and the heroine decides she doesn't need to leave the village, breaking the cycle.
- The book The Tales Of Beedle The Bard discusses this, with the tales of a Bluenose Bowdlerizer who'd rewritten the primal and admittedly occasionally horrific Tales to be filled with obnoxious Glurge. Dumbledore sourly comments that hearing her versions of the Tales causes children to be filled with "an intense urge to vomit". However, the book takes a sympathetic stance on her, attributing her attitude as being caused by sneaking downstairs as a child and hearing her sisters talk about what she claims was the most bloody of the Tales, but what is implied to be details of a sexual affair.
- Stephen Foster — The Musical was originally the story of Stephen Foster's life, called, appropriately, The Stephen Foster Story. It was later revised to give the story a happy ending and omit references to slavery.
- The Secret Of Nimh is based on a book called Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh. There were a number of small changes between the books, notably, Mrs. Frisby of the novel became Mrs. Brisby in the film (mainly to avoid trademark issues with the Wham-O! company). However, the biggest and most Disneyfied change is the random inclusion of magic and mysticism, which plays an important role in the movie, but was not present in the book whatsoever. Many fans prefer the movie to the books — enough that a large schism is present in the NIMH fandom.
- The 1995 film version of The Scarlet Letter starring Demi Moore not only has Hester, Dimmesdale, and Pearl riding off into the sunset, but also Dimmesdale is saved from hanging by a convenient tribe of Native Americans. Do filmmakers do this just to prank lazy students who didn't read the book?
- Subverted in the Danish comic book series Valhalla. Most of the stories from the Nordic Mythology are both severely simplified and kidified. For example, two kids who has little to do with the original mythology are upgraded into main protagonists for most of the earlier books. Another example is Freyja, who sold her body to receive the Brisinga-necklace in the myths, but in the comics she just gave up a small part of her blood. Cue gore, boobies and full frontal nudity!
- Wicked. Can't have the heroine of a musical (at least, not a Stephen Schwartz one) be a homicidal terrorist!
- This troper hopes one day Elona takes off and finds one fan in a broadway producer, who distills the sandbox plot into a musical about Noel the Bomber. Swag.
- Asatte No Houkou, for instance, in the original manga Hiro is probally Karada's father. Her mother is Hiro's aunt.
- Probably every anime that 4kids ever got their hands on.
- This troper remembers Star Wars merchandise from when Episode I came out. The advertising portrayed Anakin as a role model. You know, the boy who grows up to be Darth Vader?
- Speaking of Star Wars, none of the children's books in the OT era seem to be willing to touch Luke and Leia with a ten-foot pole.
|
|
