I was reading an article someone linked from a previous post that said that Walt Disney did not want the Nymphs (which looked more like Centaurs to me) to have nipples, in some attempt to de-sexualize the cartoon or somesuch silliness to make it more ‘family’ oriented. Well, if that was such a concern, why not do the same with the Harpies? Why give the Harpies nipples and not the nymphs? Was this something that slipped through the cracks?
Granted, there was more footage of topless nymphs than there were of harpies in the movie, but it still seems rather inconsistent to me.
This was (briefly) discussed in some of the extra material on the Fantasia Legacy DVD. IIRC, the main objection was the screen time the nymphs were getting, and it was a last-minute change. The harpies just slipped through the cracks; they weren’t mentioned at all.
And I think “nipple hypocrisy” is my phrase for the day.
Kids back then would be all excited to see the naked Nymphs, but not the Harpies. Walt unfortunately did not predict the Goth trend, which brought up kids who would start flogging the dolphin to the naked Harpies.
I posted a thread about this exact thing a couple of years ago. It seems you can’t have nipples in a Disney film unless you’re EVIL! A real letdown for those good little centauresses.
Cite? Go see the film.
My WAG would be that while nymphs can be considered “sexy”, there is no way in God’s green earth that a harpy ever will be, so it doesn’t matter if the harpy has nipples because no one is gonna notice in “that way”…
According to Richard Shickel’s “The Disney Version,” the centaurs were supposed to be nude, and there were nipples.
It wasn’t Disney that had them removed, however; it was the Hays Office. There was absolutely no way a film in 1941 was going to get away with showing bare breasts. (Though evidently showing buttocks were OK – see the last shot of the sequence )
The harpies were probably missed. I hadn’t heard of it before.
You can’t trust this. He make an glaring error in the first paragraph. Chip 'n Dale couldn’t have been incinerated in Bambi (1942); they first appeared five years later.
You’re right and you’re wrong. They couldn’t have been in Bambi, but their first appearance was the following year (1943) in the short “Private Pluto.”
It always bothered me that the nymphs/centaurs paired off according to color. The thing with the nipples was just the icing on the cake. I’ve never liked the Pastorale section… I bet Beethoven would have hated it.
