These 8 Disney Movies Have Such Dark Origins, You Won’t Be Able To Believe Them

The character of Peter Pan always weirded me out, even as a kid. I’m not going to lie. His first appearance shows him tricking Wendy into kissing him, which is a big red flag. Furthermore, the charming, charismatic, and ruthless Peter runs a cultish colony where young, impressionable boys follow his every command, where he takes credit for others’ contributions, and generally acts like a despotic sociopath. Wendy, luckily, figures out that living under the thumb of a childish ruler might not be so great, and goes home. And ironically, pirates, the main enemies in Barrie’s tale, were known to run their ships democratically.

At the end of the Disney version, Herc ends up with heroine Megara, who is actually a figure in classical mythology. Unfortunately, they couple does not live happily ever after. At some point, Hercules goes mad and kills her and their children. To atone, he performs the 12 Labors of legend. Later, his second wife tricks him into putting on a poisoned cape, killing him, and later he becomes a god, so it’s okay. Also, his birth wasn’t quite so kid-friendly, either. The ever-philandering Zeus fathered him with a mortal woman, and Hera, Zeus’s jealous wife, constantly tormented him out of spite.

We all know the more gruesome aspects of the Grimms’ classic, but it gets better. For one thing, Snow White’s age in the original is sometimes described as ten or younger, making her a literal child. (In other versions she’s about 14.) If she’s 10, that makes the prince falling in love with her maybe a bit weird, depending on his age. And she wasn’t the kindhearted, house-cleaning gal she was in the Disney version, either. When she comes across the house of the seven dwarves, she trashes it. Maybe Stepmom was onto something.

Disney reimagined this tale, setting it in 1920s New Orleans. Tiana, as the princess here is named, is made out to be a very nice girl, but in the original, the (nameless) princess is a terrible brat, constantly trying to weasel her way out of responsibilities and breaking promises. The tale becomes one about being responsible, but it still ends weirdly. Instead of kissing the frog, she tries to kill him by smashing him against a wall, which somehow turns him back into human form. Then, even after suffering abuse at her hands, he marries her. Poor guy must have had Stockholm syndrome.

First of all, Pocahontas was aged about a decade for her Disney movie to make a love story possible. Actually, she and John Smith (who was red-haired and stood about five foot) barely new each other. She was later sold by her father to John Rolfe, and she was reportedly abused. She was taken to England to basically be gawked at by white people, and then died of their diseases at 22.

Mulan is known for being one of the more badass of the Disney girls, even if she’s not technically a princess. She wasn’t a princess in the original tale either. Interestingly, her tale has two alternate endings. In one, no one ever finds out she’s actually a woman and she continues to live life as a male soldier. That’s the happy ending. In the other ending, she’s found out and made a concubine, her feet bound (which involves breaking the foot and mushing it back together) so as to stunt her rebellious nature.

Yes, even the untouchable, pure-as-the-literal-driven-snow Frozen has a messed up backstory. It was based (very, very loosely) on “The Snow Queen” by Hans Christian Anderson, and if you remember anything about “The Little Mermaid” or “The Little Match Girl,” you know Anderson is a bummer. Frozen actually ended up with its own story, but it still tells the tale of a girl looking for her friend, kidnapped by the Snow Queen, and both the friend and the Snow Queen can control ice thanks to the involvement of a devil.

Robin Hood was one of the few earlier Disney movies to feature a human-free cast, instead opting for a cast of anthropomorphic woodland creatures. Robin Hood as a fox–sly, tricky, but still cute–makes sense. But there’s another reason. The movie is also a retelling of Reynard the Fox, a classic European trickster character. Both Reynard and Robin liked to challenge the status quo and stick it to the man, but that was dangerous ground in Cold War-era America, so the stories were combined to to make the movie less flagrantly anarchic. It was still a pretty good criticism of unfair government practices, though it was firmly established in the film that this was because the rightful ruler was not on the throne.