Without even having seen the movie, my first thought was “It’s a Disney movie. Of course they did.”
Around here the little kids got to wear their Halloween costumes to school last Friday. I could’ve been banjoed by 9am. About every third little girl was Elsa.
(snipped by me)
Nope, actually it’s worse.
This is still in the broadway version (I think, it’s been years since I’ve seen it) but it was actually written, storyboarded, and voice-acted out before finally deciding to cut it from the actual movie: the impetus for Nala coming to the jungle to find help wasn’t originally to find help. She had just been hit on by Scar in a super-creepy pedo song about how she’ll be the perfect queen for him to become the perfect king.
http://io9.com/someone-animated-the-creepy-scar-nala-song-from-the-lio-1642911004
Because, yannow, why not make it creepier! shudder
eta (got distracted) -
In my opinion, having gotten rid of that creepy Nala scene, it does make it seem like he’s if not married to Sarabi, at least heavily invested in showing off that he’s her boss now. That scene where Scar calls her out in front of everyone and yells at her for causing all his problems is very “abusive spouse-y” and I can’t believe that wasn’t intentional
It’s not just Disney parents - it’s fairy-tale parents in general. They’re usually either ineffective or downright evil. I vaguely remember from some college class that this has to do with kids’ psychological development. It feeds into the process of moving away from the stage where your parents are perfect and omnipotent and solve all your problems, towards the point where you see yourself as an independent person who’s the one in charge of (and capable of) solving the problems.
Since the last thread, I realized where I got my information – it’s in one of the several “making of” features on The Little Mermaid DVD, which I have a three year old so it’s on heavy rotation (ALL THE TIME. ALL THE TIME). They talk about how the first opening number was sketched out to be a song about the animosity/split between brother and sister, but then the creative team felt they wanted a more upbeat opening, and the whole brother/sister plot started to feel extraneous so it was dropped completely.
But it is the sort of thing I can almost intuit when watching the movie, you know? It explains why she wants the trident so much. Sure, anyone would want it, who wouldn’t want to be the lord of the seas, but having her be Triton’s sister makes it make even more sense, she feels that she’s entitled to this, that it really is her birthright.
Back to Frozen, there were 16 Elsas at my daughter’s dance class Halloween party this weekend. That was about half of the kids.
Exactly correct. Stepmothers would be scheming to replace the legitimate heir with her own offspring, whether fathered by a previous husband or by the legitimate heir’s father. Uncles would be scheming to displace the heir and inherit the title themselves.
Obviously, this wouldn’t be the case for every stepmother or uncle, but it happened often enough to become the default in tales. Much like how in modern dramas, the businessman’s partner is always scheming to kick him out and take over the company.
Genius 
You’re on 
Think for a second about when the classic fairy tales were taking shape. It was an era with no birth control, and nontrivial risk of the mother dying during or just after childbirth. You’d have a lot of children whose natural mothers died while they were young, and in a lot of cases the father would remarry: ergo, an abundance of stepmothers.
It would be no surprise if a nontrivial proportion of them were less than partial to the offspring of the previous wife. The ‘wicked stepmother’ of fairy tales would be an exaggeration of that sort of situation, but a lot of people would recognize the situation.
Dude, let it go.
This is also why the Victorian era produced so many orphan stories. In the real world, mothers were dying in childbirth and fathers were dying in industrial accidents or wars. It was so common that it was natural to write about.
I know, right?
I think it mostly has to do with storytelling. You want the main characters to have agency in the story. What they do has to matter, and they have to solve their own problems. A children’s story where Mom and Dad save the day isn’t a particularly interesting one.
The easiest way to do that is to make Mom and Dad dead, evil, or incompetent. You can do it other ways, but you have to spend some effort and time doing so. Effort and time that could be put to use on the central part of your story, which is about the kids, not the parents.
It’s like how in pretty much any thriller/horror movie there’s now a line/scene that explains why the characters don’t have working cell phones. You can certainly construct plots that function when characters can communicate with each other effortlessly, but lots of existing plot elements don’t work, and it takes away from the story you’re trying to tell. It’s easier to just set things up so your story doesn’t have to deal with it.
Actually, some of the most famous fairy-tale “stepmother” figures (e.g., in “Hansel and Gretel”, “Rapunzel”, “Snow White”) were the heroines’/heroes’ biological mothers in older forms of the tales.
Nineteenth-century editions made all the “bad mommies” into stepmothers or other caregivers (in addition to the various villainous stepmothers already present in other tales) because Victorian audiences had grown very squeamish about the idea of “real mothers” abusing or neglecting their children.
[QUOTE=WhyNot]
I thought “Fixer Upper” was a totally cringeworthy song. That one killed me. If there’s one thing I don’t want my daughter internalizing, it’s that it’s up to her to accept a broken man as her husband and fix him through the power of Twoo Wuv. (And swap the genders for my son.) I got out of a marriage like that because I didn’t like the example it was setting for the kids.
[/QUOTE]
To give this song the credit it deserves, it does contain the lyrics “We’re not sayin’ you can change him, 'Cause people don’t really change.” Which made me sooo happy, because I had the same reaction you did until that point.
I read the “message” of the song as a) Love can bring out the best in people, and b) You should be with someone who brings out the best in you.
IOW, romantic partners should be good for each other.
But the title and chorus is cringe-worthy!
I think the Grimms themselves changed their own tales in some cases. Their original recorded version of Snow White had the wicked queen be Snow White’s biological mother. In the later recorded version (the one we know best), she’s a stepmother.
I vote we do the drinking game first, then the movie. For maximum impact.
I wonder what it is about Elsa that makes all the kids gravitate towards her. My kid is all about Anna, on the grounds that she ‘has more boing’ - but on the school run Friday morning, I saw at least a dozen Elsas and *one *Anna. Today I went past the Disney shop in town and the entire window was a rack of Elsa costumes - no sign of Anna. Anna is the main POV character for most of the film, she’s considerably less fucked up than Elsa, she’s the one who gets to kick some ass, and she’s the one who gets the romance…so why is Elsa the one who draws little girls?
6-11 year old girls love the princess in the tower. Elsa puts herself in the tower, but she’s still the princess in the tower. I think it resonates with their growing awareness that there’s a big world out there that Mom and Dad are keeping them from. Anna is fun, but she’s pretty silly, she’s very young in spirit and she doesn’t have True Angst. Little girls almost always want to be the older girl.
And, “Let it Go” is very conducive to wild arm gestures. Elsa gets the best song, by a mile, sung by the better singer, by two thousand miles. Kristen Bell is perfectly good, but she’s no Adele Nazeem*.
*Poor Idina Menzel. That’s never going to stop being funny.
And, of course, Anna has the spunk but Elsa has the powers. Plus she has the sparkly icy dress complete with sweeping cape and real snowflakes in her hair. And she can create lovely ice chandeliers or scary ice spikes. Not only is hers the best song of the whole movie, she’s making a stunning ice palace while she’s singing – I think it’s not a stumper that little girls want a piece of that.
It happens a lot in Disney movies, that a character other than the supposed protagonist steals the show. Genie and Scar come to mind quickest. It’s not that I don’t like Ana, but Elsa was just so cool (no pun intended).