Walt Disney. What a name! We all know him, we grew up with him! Most of us ladies associate him with childhood and happy endings, the dream of finding true love and men who will fight dragons for us! Cross oceans for us! Rescue us from towers!

“Oh, Prince Charming will come for you!” Walt Disney assured us! “As long as you’re a good little princess, who’s pleasant to everyone! Turn the other cheek to your evil stepsisters and goodness will triumph! Help everyone, talk to the animals! You will be rewarded!”

Now how many of you have lived your life the way Mr. Disney told you? I’m talking high morals and selfless deeds up the wazoo! You keep giving stuff up for others, being all virtuous and righteous and crap! You pick blueberries for Grandma all the time and hell! You cleaned house for those damn midgets again just last Tuesday! But Prince Charming is still nowhere in sight! No one’s dancing with you in meadows and birds ain’t doing your laundry . . .

Ladies, I’ve got news for you: We have been dangerously misinformed.

In the original versions of these stories, there were no happy endings. On the contrary, my friends, most of these stories were gruesome, frightening and frankly not even remotely romantic. Let’s start with Sleeping Beauty, as she was always my favorite:

What a tale! Who wouldn’t love to sleep for a hundred years and then be woken up by the kiss of some hunky, hunky royal dude? Sounds great, right? But alas! Our princess is not woken up by a kiss, she’s woken up while giving birth to twins because old Princey Boy impregnated her in her sleep! I strongly suspect he slipped her some sort of medieval roofie! Not only does she wake up raped and violated, she’s now also the mother of two screaming, crapping babies! Our princess is going to need therapy.

Similarly Snow White is also not woken up by a kiss, Prince Charming just shows up on his white steed one day and falls in love with her dead body! Without giving the dwarves any rhyme or reason, he just rolls up to the cottage, loads up the corpse and then rides off into the sunset! With a damn decaying carcass! He’s probably in a rush because he knows he doesn’t have long before the remains start to turn and he accidentally drops the stiff, causing the poison apple to dislodge from her throat. Snow White unfortunately wakes up before our dashing necrophiliac can engage in any further sadistic fantasies and he probably just married the hag as not to arouse suspicion from the villagers. His dreams of getting jiggy with a dead body are never realized and he’s stuck with the Snow Bitch forever.

Now Cinderella. . . ahhh, Cinderella! Cinderella was just some chick with a dead mom and abnormally small feet. Her evil stepmother clearly had no regard for child labor laws and worked the bitch to the bone, but still! She was good and pious her whole life in spite of it! She wordlessly took the cruelty (like a good girl!) and of course it earned her help from a super groovy fairy godmother!  

The Walt Disney version is pretty truthful up to this point, what with the ball and lost slipper and all, but what he doesn’t tell us is that the sly, underhanded stepsisters had a plan! The sneaky skanks cut off huge chunks of their own smelly feet to try and fit in the misplaced slipper. Some crazy pigeons spotted the blood and pecked out both their eyes, which are later presented to Cinder Whatever as a wedding present. All due respect to sibling rivalry, but what on earth is our princess going to do with those? The now sightless stepsisters are stripped of their titles and possessions, then forced to live their lives out as blind tramps, with no chance of landing any husbands. In any case, I smell a law suit.

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As you can see, these stories were written with the intention of frightening children into good behavior, while this screwball DISNEY character was telling us we’d be rewarded for it, which we were definitely not. My point is that these stories were fine before Walt Disney got a hold of them! For real. If our mothers had read us this crap, things may not seem so bad! Instead my clearly disturbed and imbalanced mother (much like your deceitful, two faced mum) read me Disney Cinderella, told me I was a beautiful princess! Told me that Prince Charming would show up on his stupid white horse one day, carry me away to live happily ever after . . . what a load of horse manure! What freaking messed up lies to tell your child! There should be laws against this!

If my mother had told me Prince Charming was going to lock me in a tower and make me cut off my toes to fit in a stupid pair of heels before throwing me over for the princess of a neighboring kingdom, things may not seem so bad! I am hereby making the suggestion that cutesy versions of these stories be locked away forever in some dark, dank Disney vault and frozen with his remains!

Damn you, Walt Disney. Just damn you.