We all grew up with them : we idolized them, we mused about their lives, heck, we even had bedding adorned with their faces. Fairytales have been around since in the earliest times when the Brothers Grimm from Sweden started collecting stories and telling them to little bugg…erm…. kiddies. Ever since Disney came onto the scene this form of storytelling really soared. Suddenly Cinderella was no longer the caricature barely recognisable on paper and who looked suspiciously like your mother –in-law, but a 20-something nymph with flowing blonde hair and a waist that could only be achieved by putting on a gut-wrenching bustier and stringing it so tight it makes your eyeballs turn blue.

Personally I think fairytales are singularly responsible for society’s below par morals. The frog in the pond is now a drunken man hit by the ugly stick; the prince charming is a sexual maniac who , in the act of sweeping her off her feet directly swept her onto the bed and then did not call the next day. Likewise, Ariel is sans the fin, but plus the horrific cellulite and her voice has turned down a few bars to a smoke-damaged growl. On some superficial level we all hope that from the worst will grow the best. From fertilizer, a beautiful flower will emerge. Also a house with two driveways, a picket fence and a Labrador.

What would happen if we pressed Fairytales through the reality mill? Let’s take a look at Disney’s hits, had things turned out like in reality (well at least closer to reality than it currently is) :

1. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Nowadays we think it’s hard work picking up a pair of socks up and cleaning the basin of shaved beard remnants. Try picking up 14 socks from the floor and eyeing the basin for a few minutes trying to make out whether the big ball of hair is 7 men’s beards or a large cat. There is an upside though : you can use one peg for three knickers (yes they’re that tiny). You can also make dwarf jokes at their expense. From the kitchen you will hear : “We have a small problem, Wednesday.” And “ Just wait a short while for dinner, Tuesday.” These jokes may continue until you run out of dwarfs’ names.

Thereafter it will not be funny anymore.
Then you can also put things on their heads. Like your elbow. Which will of course piss them off because it makes their vertebrae go skew and they DON’T need to be bloody shorter than they are. Honestly. But , in any event, she died of exhaustion, not from the evil apple as Disney put it across. She was put in a glass coffin. Upon arrival the prince gave the coffin one look and mumbled something about him not being a bloody necrofiliac. Needless to say he rode off into the sunset alone.

2. The Little Mermaid.
Ariel’s incessant “collecting” things grew worse gradually until she was admitted to a psychiatric ward for Compulsive Kleptomania. There she gained at least 20 pounds as she only lived on roast potatoes because she was absolutely convinced that it looked like treasure. Eric on the other hand, being a prince and all, bought himself Satelite T.V and sat glued to the Discovery channel because he missed his dear wife. He also hired a slew of escorts and had affairs with several Ariel-lookalikes. This, he maintains, was also because he misses his wife. As for Ursula, the sea witch – after being rejected by Eric, she decided to improve her appeareance.She went on to star in many BioSlim commercials and was later instated as spokesperson for the brand.

3. Lion King
The fight for the Pride got even more involved , due to Scar hiring the same attorney that got O.J out of his mess. Of course he sued Mufasa and not only got custody of the pride, but also a Beverly Hills address. In the story Simba gets told by Zazu that he won’t make a good king. Zazu was slapped with charges of defamation and he got the crap sued out of him. As in many moral-of-the-story idealistic movies, Simba vows to get revenge and does so by going to Law School for 7 grudgingly long years only to find that when he finished, Scar was already on the verge of death (paw cancer) ; and that he could subsequently not sue the crap out of him.

4. Beauty and the Beast
Belle and Beast got married happily. After a while things started to niggle in their marriage though. When Belle was lying in bed thinking about the previous year (the one when the Prince was the Beast) she thought about how much fun they had. She continued to fill in a “Is your marriage in a rut” quiz in Cosmopolitan magazine and shoved the results under the prince’s nose following a row. She whined about him not being the man she fell in love with and that he wasn’t romantic anymore. He reminded her that she was right, he wasn’t the man she fell in love with; in fact, he wasn’t a man at all at the time. And he accused her of not leaving his stuff alone, the roots of this problem stemming back to the “Belle touched the sacred rose in the glass belljar” moment in the movie. A huge row ensued , resulting in them moving to opposite sides of the huge castle and only speaking at dinner time.