Surely you’ve come across some older versions of familiar fairy tales that end a little differently than you remembered as a kid. I remember “Little Red Riding Hood”, for example, ending with the girl being saved by a woodsman, Grandma coming out from hiding in a closet, and the wolf being taken out and released safely into the wild under a reintroduction program launched by Steve Irwin. But in an earlier version, the wolf eats the girl and then…well…nothing. That’s pretty much the end. “Stranger, Danger”, indeed. This story isn’t as popular today, and the only lasting imprint on popular culture seems to be the slutty Halloween costumes.
There’s no one better at this sanitizing than Walt Disney. Let’s take a look at “Sleeping Beauty”: In the well-known Disney version, a king and queen have a beautiful daughter, and there’s a big party. Some crazy chick who claims to have been getting text messages of “NIGHTS WITH U R PURE MAGIC” from the king crashes the party and puts a spell on the young girl that will make the princess die. Now, I’m no etiquette expert, but I feel that is a terribly inappropriate gift for a small child. But some good fairies weaken the spell to make it only that she will fall asleep if her finger is pricked by a spinning wheel. What goes up, must come down. So the king banishes all spinning wheels from the kingdom. And while that keeps the princess safe, it’s tough on the kingdom’s well known reputation for fashion. Long story short, the girl rides a painted pony and pricks her finger, Wilford Brimley tests her blood sugar, and she lapses into a diabetic coma. The prince that she met in the woods earlier comes to the rescue with Liberty medical supplies, and they live happily ever after. Or something like that. It’s been a while.
Well, in an earlier version, the heroine falls into a sleep which is only broken when a traveling king rapes her. She bears two children, and one of them sucks out the thing stuck in her finger, which wakes her up. Is that all it took? Sounds like someone should have fired the castle doctor a long time ago. Great, happy ending, you say? Well, except for the raping part. Not entirely, because once Joey Greco shows up with the king’s wife, she then tries to eat the girl and her kids. I mean, she was pretty mad, and this was all before golf clubs were invented. This spawned the time-honored and beloved classic “Someday, My Prince Will Come (And Rape Me, And His Wife Will Try To Eat Me And My Kids)”. It’s the B-side of “Once Upon A Dream”.
So it turns out that her Prince Charming actually raped her. Which is why, when women say about me that I’m “no Prince Charming”, I take it as a compliment.
