Speaker 1: Pushkin. In his best known work The Uses of Enchantment,
Speaker 1: the late Austrian psychoanalyst Bruno Bedelheim asks us to consider
Speaker 1: the genius of the children's tail. Three little pigs. You remember,
Speaker 1: three little pigs. The first little pig was very lazy.
Speaker 1: He didn't want to work at all, and he built
Speaker 1: his house out of straw. The second little pig worked
Speaker 1: a little bit harder, but he was somewhat lazy too,
Speaker 1: and he built his house out of sticks. Then they
Speaker 1: sang and danced and played together the rest of the day.
Speaker 1: The third little pig worked hard all day and built
Speaker 1: his house with bricks. It was a sturdy house, complete
Speaker 1: with a fine fireplace and chimney. It looked like it
Speaker 1: could withstand the strongest winds. The wicked wolf visits the
Speaker 1: first pig with the straw house and says he's going
Speaker 1: to eat him. Not by the air, and my jinny
Speaker 1: gin chin, the little pig says. The wolf replies, I'll
Speaker 1: huff and i'll puff, and I'll blow your house down,
Speaker 1: And so he does easily. The little pig escapes to
Speaker 1: his brother's house, the house built of sticks. The wolf
Speaker 1: gives chase blows that one down too. Then the two
Speaker 1: little pigs escape to their big brother's house, the one
Speaker 1: made of bricks and the stam the wicked wolf can't
Speaker 1: blow it down. The wolf danced about with rage and
Speaker 1: swore he would come down the chimney and eat up
Speaker 1: the little pig for his supper. But while he was
Speaker 1: climbing onto the roof, the little pig made up a
Speaker 1: blazing fire and put on a big pot full of
Speaker 1: water to boil. Then, just as the wolf was coming
Speaker 1: down the chimney the little pig, he pulled off the
Speaker 1: lid and PLoP in fell the wolf into the scolding water.
Speaker 1: Oh yes, the three little pigs. I'll huff and I'll puff.
Speaker 1: Everyone knows the story of the three Little Pigs. Bruno
Speaker 1: Bedelheim's question was what works in a fairy tale The
Speaker 1: three little pigs works, and what doesn't work? The fable
Speaker 1: of the Ants and the Grasshopper. Do you even remember it?
Speaker 1: I don't think you do. Here's the story. The ants
Speaker 1: spend the summer working NonStop preparing for winter. Meanwhile, the
Speaker 1: grasshopper fretters away his summer entertaining himself, and now he's hungry.
Speaker 1: What cried the ants in surprise. Haven't you stored anything
Speaker 1: away for the winter. What in the world were you
Speaker 1: doing all last summer? I didn't have time to store
Speaker 1: up any food, wine, the grasshopper. I was so busy
Speaker 1: making music, But before I knew it, the summer was gone.
Speaker 1: The ants shrug their shoulders in disgust. Making music? Were you?
Speaker 1: They cried very well, Now dance and they turned their
Speaker 1: backs on the grasshopper and went on with their work.
Speaker 1: That's it. That's the end of the story. Now, this
Speaker 1: one has the same basic lesson as three Little Pigs.
Speaker 1: Life favors the hard working and the prepared. Both stories
Speaker 1: have cute animals who just want to have fun. Little
Speaker 1: pigs grasshoppers playing music. And the story of the Ants
Speaker 1: and the Grasshopper should be lodged in our memories because
Speaker 1: it was written by Aesop of Aesop's Fables, the same
Speaker 1: legend who brought us the Tortoise and the hair pedigreed storytelling.
Speaker 1: But we don't remember it. Why because we love the
Speaker 1: grasshopper ASoP just throws him to the ants. Deep into
Speaker 1: my investigation of the Little Mermaid, I realized that we
Speaker 1: make Aesop's mistake all the time. We don't understand how
Speaker 1: seriously children take their fairy tales. We think we can
Speaker 1: satisfy them with a few sternly worded lessons. Oh but
Speaker 1: we can't. Think of the three little pigs. There's a
Speaker 1: chase scene, some trash talking, not by the hair of
Speaker 1: my chinny chin chin, no fewer than three home invasions,
Speaker 1: and a brilliant plot twist with the vat of boiling
Speaker 1: water at the bottom of the chimney, just waiting for
Speaker 1: the impetuous wolf. So the little Piggie puts on the
Speaker 1: cover again, boiled the wolf up, and the three little
Speaker 1: piggies ate him for supper. You swing at the pigs,
Speaker 1: you best not miss. My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're
Speaker 1: listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood.
Speaker 1: This is part two of my three part forensic analysis
Speaker 1: of the blockbuster princess movie The Little Mermaid. In part one,
Speaker 1: we heard from a law professor who argues that the
Speaker 1: Disney company fumbled the tale of the young mermaid who
Speaker 1: wanted to trade her fins her feet. In this episode,
Speaker 1: I want to talk about the theory of fairy tales,
Speaker 1: why they matter, why they work, and why sometimes they
Speaker 1: don't work at all. The closest modern equivalent we have
Speaker 1: to Bruno Bedelheim is a literary scholar named Angus Fletcher.
Speaker 1: Letcher is not a psychoanalyst like Bedelheim was. He trained
Speaker 1: as a neuroscientist. Are you the first person in history
Speaker 1: to leave neuroscience to get a PhD in English? Yes?
Speaker 1: Tragically I went in exactly the opposite direction from everybody else.
Speaker 1: And this is why I am bankrupts. Everyone's saying, went
Speaker 1: from English to neuroscience, And yes, I like that. I
Speaker 1: am somewhere. Your parents are just like crying. This is
Speaker 1: like definiliated. It's even worse because I'm you can't tell
Speaker 1: because I've lost my accent. But I'm an immigrant and
Speaker 1: so you know, like all immigrant families, my parents are
Speaker 1: just obsessed with science, and they wanted me to be
Speaker 1: a doctor, and you know, they were disappointed when I
Speaker 1: only went into science. But they're like, well, I guess
Speaker 1: that's okay. And then you know, poetry. It's humiliating for them.
Speaker 1: You know, they've disowned me. I wanted to talk to
Speaker 1: Fletcher because of a book he wrote called wonder Works,
Speaker 1: the twenty five most powerful inventions in the history of literature,
Speaker 1: which is this strange and captivating work, full of twists
Speaker 1: and turns and fascinating asides. It's the kind of book
Speaker 1: that makes you want to talk to the author just
Speaker 1: to make sure there aren't more bits of wisdom out
Speaker 1: there to be had. Anyway, I'm on the phone with
Speaker 1: Angus struggling to understand what went wrong with a little mermaid,
Speaker 1: and Angus, since he's Angus, says, oh, the thing you
Speaker 1: have to understand is that there's actually two categories of
Speaker 1: fairy tales, the original kind and the modern kind. And
Speaker 1: then Anger starts talking about some of the earliest recorded
Speaker 1: fairy tales, like the stories collected by the sixteenth century
Speaker 1: Italian writer Giovanni Straparolla. Straparolla published a two volume set
Speaker 1: known as The Facetious Nights. Puss in Boots is a
Speaker 1: Straparola story. So yeah, So there are these two amazing
Speaker 1: things that we start to see in Straparolla's fairy tales,
Speaker 1: which again are the kind of most ancient ones we
Speaker 1: have written down. The first is that good luck happens
Speaker 1: to people who are fools, so a fool might find
Speaker 1: a lucky fish, and by a fool, I mean an
Speaker 1: actual fool. I mean somebody who is so dense in
Speaker 1: the story that he says terrible, rude things to everybody
Speaker 1: he meets. Is an inept fisher person has no apparent
Speaker 1: positive qualities whatsoever, and then ends up a prince. And
Speaker 1: it can go even further than that. It can happen
Speaker 1: to people who are who are bad. A classic example
Speaker 1: of this kind of story is an ancient fairy tale
Speaker 1: about a girl named Adamantina. Adamantina's family is starving and
Speaker 1: she's sent by her older sister to buy food at
Speaker 1: the market. Adamantina goes to the market with the family's
Speaker 1: last money, and does she buy food. No, she makes
Speaker 1: a whimsical purchase of a doll that she sees because
Speaker 1: she happens to like this doll, and she takes this
Speaker 1: doll home with her, and her older sister is so
Speaker 1: distraught that she has this breakdown as, oh my goodness,
Speaker 1: this is the end of the family. You have ruined
Speaker 1: the family. It's all over, and lo and behold, the
Speaker 1: doll turns out to be a magic doll, and it
Speaker 1: spits forth money, and this is the beginning of a
Speaker 1: series of just bizarre, improbable happenings that occur in the story,
Speaker 1: and Adamantina does not deserve them at all. She's not virtuous,
Speaker 1: she's not smart, she's not nice, she's not kind. The
Speaker 1: dollar is a lottery ticket, the doll is a lottery ticket.
Speaker 1: That's exactly right. Yes, Fletcher calls these kinds of stories
Speaker 1: fairy tale twist stories. If you look at all the
Speaker 1: stories collected by Straparola, they almost always end with fairy
Speaker 1: tale twists. For thousands of years, people sat around the
Speaker 1: fire and listen to storytellers. What are the narratives that
Speaker 1: survived the evolution of centuries? Stories in which heroes did
Speaker 1: not deserve their fate. Audiences wanted to believe that life
Speaker 1: could suddenly go from bad to good. It's not simply
Speaker 1: that life could suddenly go from there could be a
Speaker 1: sudden twist. Is that the twist would be unrelated to
Speaker 1: the disposition and character of the protagonist. That I didn't
Speaker 1: have to meet a certain qualification to be eligible for
Speaker 1: this good fortune. It was bestowed on anyone. Yeah. But
Speaker 1: then in the seventeenth century, fairy tales took a dramatic turn.
Speaker 1: The key figure was the French writer Charles Perrot. He
Speaker 1: read the fairy tales that had been collected by earlier
Speaker 1: writers and loved them wanted to share them with the world.
Speaker 1: But Perrot thought they needed a little tweaking. He said,
Speaker 1: you know what, these tales are so primitive. They were
Speaker 1: written before the age of reason. They were written before
Speaker 1: the enlightenments. And reason tells us that all these instances
Speaker 1: in which good things are coming from bad it can't
Speaker 1: happen because life follows this logic that's been created by God.
Speaker 1: And I want these stories to instill that. So I'm
Speaker 1: just going to make these changes. I'm going to change
Speaker 1: it so that good things only happen to good people,
Speaker 1: and bad things happen to bad people, and so there's
Speaker 1: no more good happening to bad. There's only good happening
Speaker 1: to good. Fletcher calls these kinds of fairy tales poetic
Speaker 1: justice stories. The classic example of this second type of
Speaker 1: story is Cinderella, an ancient tale which Charles Perrault revised. Later,
Speaker 1: the brothers Grimm did their own version of the tale
Speaker 1: in Germany. Here's how it begins, with our introduction to Cinderella,
Speaker 1: the wife of a rich man fell sick, and when
Speaker 1: she felt that her end drew nigh, she called her
Speaker 1: only daughter to her bad side and said, always be
Speaker 1: a good girl, and I will look down from heaven
Speaker 1: and watch over you. Soon afterwards she shut her eyes
Speaker 1: and died, and was buried in the garden. And the
Speaker 1: little girl went every day to her grave and wept,
Speaker 1: and was always good and kind to honor her mother.
Speaker 1: Cinderella's father remarries. Cinderella gets an evil stepmother and two
Speaker 1: evil stepsisters, but no matter what they do to her,
Speaker 1: Cinderella remains pious and good. It happened once that her
Speaker 1: father was going to the fair and asked his wife's
Speaker 1: daughters what he should bring to them. Fine clothes, said
Speaker 1: the first. Pearls and diamonds, said the second. Now child,
Speaker 1: said he to his own daughter, what will you have?
Speaker 1: The first break, dear father, that rubs against your hat
Speaker 1: on your way home, said she. So the father brings
Speaker 1: the evil stepdaughters all manner of finery, and Cinderella gets
Speaker 1: as requested wig. He gave it to his daughter. Then
Speaker 1: she took it and went to her mother's grave and
Speaker 1: planted it there and cried so much that it was
Speaker 1: watered with her tears, and there it grew and became
Speaker 1: a fine tree. Oh, come on, Cinderella is an angel,
Speaker 1: And what happens to this angel? You know the story?
Speaker 1: A magic bird gives her a beautiful dress, and off
Speaker 1: she goes to the ball. The handsome prince falls in
Speaker 1: love with its mysterious, unknown beauty. She leaves behind her slipper.
Speaker 1: The prince says, whosoever fits into the slipper will be
Speaker 1: his queen. Her evil stepsisters try to fit and fail.
Speaker 1: Cinderella tries it on, and it fits perfectly, and she
Speaker 1: lives happily ever after virtue is rewarded. Meanwhile, what happens
Speaker 1: to her evil stepsisters? When the wedding with the prince
Speaker 1: was to be held, the two false sisters came, wanting
Speaker 1: to gain favor with Cinderella and share her good fortune.
Speaker 1: But they get attacked by pigeons that peck out arise,
Speaker 1: and thus for their wickedness and falsehood, they were punished
Speaker 1: with blindness all their days. That's poetic justice. Thus for
Speaker 1: their wickedness they were punished. The Cinderella story gets adapted
Speaker 1: for the screen by Walt Disney, and maybe the most
Speaker 1: famous of all of his animated movies. The dream that
Speaker 1: wish will true, but it's only the dreams and wishes
Speaker 1: of the beautiful, angelic Cinderella that come true. With Cinderella,
Speaker 1: Disney went all in on poetic justice, the famous movie
Speaker 1: that Dominy of Us saw as children, Cinderella that rescued
Speaker 1: the Magic Kingdom from bankruptcy and became the logo of Disney,
Speaker 1: and ever since then, all of Disney's fairy tales have
Speaker 1: had that same story model of good coming from good,
Speaker 1: or virtue rewarded or poetic justice. It's this inheritance of
Speaker 1: the Enlightenment. A few years ago, Angus Fletcher was approached
Speaker 1: to do a project on measuring children's emotional reactions to
Speaker 1: the stories they heard. We actually have a technology here
Speaker 1: which can track how interested kids as young as four
Speaker 1: are in things. You know, if we have ten or
Speaker 1: twelve or fourteen kids enough of a range, we can
Speaker 1: actually tell you very specifically whether kids like the ending
Speaker 1: or not and how much they like it. But the
Speaker 1: overall thing is is this eye tracking? Is this eye
Speaker 1: tracking stuff? What are you? How are you doing that?
Speaker 1: It's secret and I'm not kidding. So Fletcher does his
Speaker 1: top secret analysis of little kids watching Disney movies, and
Speaker 1: he thinks he knows what he's going to find. The
Speaker 1: kids prefer Cinderella. They don't want the moral anarchy of
Speaker 1: the fairy tale twist. And sure enough the kids squeal
Speaker 1: with delight. They love the songs. But then it all
Speaker 1: falls apart. There's a kind of post Disney hangover. There's
Speaker 1: been this whole history of condemning Disney fairy tales because
Speaker 1: they're not realistic, or because they advance kind of stereotypes
Speaker 1: or kind of unrealistic expectations about what princesses should be,
Speaker 1: and so on and so forth. But it turned out
Speaker 1: it really wasn't any of those things that was going on.
Speaker 1: It was the narrative structure. The kids like the characters,
Speaker 1: the adventure, the humor, the idea that mice and other
Speaker 1: animals could do all manner of cool things. But they
Speaker 1: struggled with the idea that good always comes from good
Speaker 1: and bad from bad. Why because your child is perfectly
Speaker 1: capable of extrapolating what all this means. What your brain
Speaker 1: processes is, well, bad things are happening to me. Why
Speaker 1: are bad things happening to me? They're happened to me
Speaker 1: clearly because I'm bad and if bad things happen to
Speaker 1: bad people and I'm bad, then worst things are going
Speaker 1: to start to happen because there's no way for me
Speaker 1: to turn this train around. And what we see is
Speaker 1: that these stories generate what's called catastrophizing, and catastrophizing is
Speaker 1: when you become convinced that there's no way to break
Speaker 1: the cycle of bad feeling. And this is masked in
Speaker 1: Disney fairy tales because the immediate emotional effect of watching
Speaker 1: a Disney story is to feel good, is to feel
Speaker 1: happy because the ending is so sentimental and so positive,
Speaker 1: but over time it has this corrosive negative effect. Now,
Speaker 1: by contrast, what happens when a child hears a fairy
Speaker 1: tale twist story. Those kinds of stories defeat catastrophizing. They
Speaker 1: short circuit that, and they say, no, no, no, no, no.
Speaker 1: Bad doesn't always come from bad, Good can come from bad.
Speaker 1: Just relax. Life is not logical. Kids for fairy tale
Speaker 1: twists to poetic justice. They prefer Adam and Tina to Cinderella. Now,
Speaker 1: why does this matter to our discussion of the Little
Speaker 1: Mermaid film? Because the Little Mermaid is poetic justice on
Speaker 1: steroids good things happen not just to good people, but
Speaker 1: to rich and powerful and beautiful people, and bad things
Speaker 1: happen not just to bad people, but ugly bad people.
Speaker 1: When Prince Eric wanted to claim his beautiful bride, he
Speaker 1: got to take the law into his own hands, become
Speaker 1: a vigilante kill Ursula in cold blood with no legal
Speaker 1: consequences whatsoever, because he's a handsome prince, no other reason.
Speaker 1: Handsome entitled Eric gets away with murder, and Ariel, our beautiful,
Speaker 1: spirited mermaid who wants to marry a prince. She gets
Speaker 1: to marry a prince without really having to lift a finger.
Speaker 1: By the way, in the end, Daddy does everything. Oh
Speaker 1: then I guess there's just one problem left. And what's that,
Speaker 1: your majesty? How much I'm going to miss her? Daddy
Speaker 1: gets at as Golden Trieden and turns Ariel into a
Speaker 1: female human in a sparkly dress. This is unearned poetic justice.
Speaker 1: It's one percent poetic justice. I'm still waiting for the
Speaker 1: Disney sequel where Ariel gets into Stanford as a legacy
Speaker 1: admission after her dad endows the King Triton Institute of
Speaker 1: Aquatic Governance. One of the things I realized in talking
Speaker 1: to Angus Fletcher was how difficult it was to make
Speaker 1: the transition from poetic justice thinking back to fairytale twists,
Speaker 1: thinking it doesn't feel right. Bad must be met with
Speaker 1: bad so that good can be met with good. It
Speaker 1: feels awfully wrote When you watch the movie, you just
Speaker 1: feel from the beginning like you know what's going to happen.
Speaker 1: So Ursula has great power under the sea and decides
Speaker 1: at the end of the movie that what she wants
Speaker 1: to do is to disguise herself as Ariel and or
Speaker 1: A as a beautiful princess and mary Eric right the prince.
Speaker 1: But what if Eric is revealed to be actually kind
Speaker 1: of dull and nasty, and so Ariel realizes, Oh, let
Speaker 1: her marry him, you know, if that's what you want.
Speaker 1: It turns out the guy's a bit of a jerk.
Speaker 1: I wanted to give Angus my ideas for fixing the
Speaker 1: Little Mermaid, but I was struggling. Or what if the
Speaker 1: idea of outside of the water. She loses her power,
Speaker 1: so she becomes Eric's bride, but she is now just
Speaker 1: a normal person who's stripped of all of the because
Speaker 1: she's chosen the terrestrial world over the underwater world. She's
Speaker 1: now just an ordinary, hapless citizen. Now, I suppose what
Speaker 1: we're doing there is we are we're giving a bad
Speaker 1: ending to a bad person. But at least it's it's
Speaker 1: a more interesting bad ending. I suppose, yes, it's more creative.
Speaker 1: I hear a distinct lack of enthusiasm in Angus's voice.
Speaker 1: I don't know if there's any way not. We do
Speaker 1: have to kind of put Ursula in her place. No,
Speaker 1: you do not. I still couldn't get it out of
Speaker 1: my head that bad had to come from bad. It
Speaker 1: was as if everything Fletcher had tried to tell me
Speaker 1: had sailed right over my head. That's how deeply embedded
Speaker 1: poetic justice is. It's in our bones. I mean, we
Speaker 1: have this obsession in the monor world to somehow if
Speaker 1: you do something bad, you have to be punished for it. No,
Speaker 1: if you do something bad, we just have to make
Speaker 1: sure you don't do that bad again. It's rehabilitation, it's medicine.
Speaker 1: I mean, you know, we don't. We don't punish diseases.
Speaker 1: We don't. You know, once we've removed cancer from the body,
Speaker 1: we don't then send it to jail and punish it.
Speaker 1: You know, it's just like we So you think we
Speaker 1: should be able to we should fix hersela Well, I
Speaker 1: think we should just stop her from doing whatever she's doing.
Speaker 1: We should have a conversation with her about maybe why
Speaker 1: this isn't helpful. Fletcher's point was that making Ursula bad
Speaker 1: and then punishing her for her badness is what you
Speaker 1: do if you don't care about the story you're telling.
Speaker 1: You don't think about the audience, the little girl who's
Speaker 1: trying to understand the way life really works. No, you've
Speaker 1: turned into ASoP who says there's a boring ant out
Speaker 1: there and a grasshopper who wants to make music. And
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, but that means the grasshopper has to starve
Speaker 1: to death. If he were alive today, ASoP would have
Speaker 1: a bungalow on the Disney lot. He'd be their rewrite. Man.
Speaker 1: It's not just that I think the Disney has sent
Speaker 1: a lot of fairy tales in the world which have
Speaker 1: overall made us less happy. I think it's also that
Speaker 1: they are a force against innovation and change and growth
Speaker 1: in storytelling as a whole, and they are destroying our
Speaker 1: capacity as a people to think of new directions and
Speaker 1: new paths and new plots. I mean, my kids love
Speaker 1: Disney pluts. I'm not going to pretend like I've managed
Speaker 1: to keep it out of my own house, but you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, I really think that we have reached a
Speaker 1: point in our society where we're repeating the error of
Speaker 1: the Enlightenments, and we're allowing this one institution that thinks
Speaker 1: it knows the right way to do things to crush
Speaker 1: out the basis of our nature, which is creativity, change, spontaneity,
Speaker 1: and like you said, possibility. So I went back and
Speaker 1: watched The Little Mermaid again, only this time with Angus
Speaker 1: Fletcher's words ringing in my ears, and I began to realize,
Speaker 1: I think we can rescue this movie. How old were
Speaker 1: you when you first saw Little Mermaid? You saw this
Speaker 1: as a kid? Oh yeah, I saw it as a kid,
Speaker 1: and it was my favorite of all the princess Oh yeah.
Speaker 1: I needed a screenwriter, a good one, to try their
Speaker 1: hand at fixing the dumpster fire that was Disney's The
Speaker 1: Little Mermaid, And I thought, why not Brit Marling, the
Speaker 1: co creator with Zolbut Moonglage of one of my favorite
Speaker 1: TV shows ever, The Oa on Netflix. Brit Marling struck
Speaker 1: me as the kind of person who could live inside
Speaker 1: the imagination of young Ariel, our little mermaid who longs
Speaker 1: for a better life. I remember as a little girl,
Speaker 1: I used to not only with the only song I
Speaker 1: still to this day no on the piano is under
Speaker 1: the Sea really so I can play that. I used
Speaker 1: to play that and sing that and charge people money
Speaker 1: to watch it. But also, Malcolm, I used to tie
Speaker 1: my ankles with like sweat socks and then jump into
Speaker 1: the pool so that I could, you know, swim with
Speaker 1: my feet tied together like the Little Mermaid, where you
Speaker 1: you would give performer, you could sing a song, get performances.
Speaker 1: But it was even to the point where you thought
Speaker 1: there was something particularly alluring about the idea of being
Speaker 1: limited in a way that the Little Mermaid was being legless. Yeah,
Speaker 1: being legless, But I think it was what I was
Speaker 1: attracted to was what how they positioned her in the
Speaker 1: first fourth of the film, which is like she was
Speaker 1: bold and fearless the first fourth of the film. Let's
Speaker 1: be clear, none of us have any issues with the
Speaker 1: first fourth of the film. There was a shipwreck and
Speaker 1: she's just like jumping amongst the flaming, falling logs. It
Speaker 1: was like there was no other little prince being portrayed
Speaker 1: like that, Like snow White, you know, and Sleeping Beauty
Speaker 1: weren't performing those kinds of acts of heroism. But then
Speaker 1: it's interesting that, like when I would play Ariel as
Speaker 1: a little girl, in my mind, it was only the
Speaker 1: phase in which she was a fish, because the moment
Speaker 1: she got legs, she loses all her agency. She's just
Speaker 1: sitting around waiting to be kissed. Yeah, so you're absolutely right,
Speaker 1: that's what's so. I mean, I never saw it as
Speaker 1: a kid. I only saw it two weeks ago as
Speaker 1: an adult, and you know, I was, I have to say,
Speaker 1: mortified by what happened. I just like I flabbergasted. She disappears,
Speaker 1: she disappears, she stopped, She just disappears, and all she
Speaker 1: does is bat her eyelashes at this dumb prince. Disney
Speaker 1: entranced the young rip Marling. They owned her imagination. She
Speaker 1: was in love with Ariel. She was tying her legs
Speaker 1: together with tube socks and singing under the sea at
Speaker 1: the piano. And then what did Disney do? They gave
Speaker 1: up on her, They lost her. They abandoned her with
Speaker 1: a plot that doesn't even do poetic justice. Justice we
Speaker 1: are supposed to believe this is a girl who is
Speaker 1: a young girl who is openly defying her father's wishes.
Speaker 1: And what is the nature of her defiance pursuing and
Speaker 1: marrying a prince, which is was exactly what her father,
Speaker 1: a king what and for his daughter. It's like it's
Speaker 1: as if one of the Kardashian's daughters was so angry
Speaker 1: at her parents that she went out and started a
Speaker 1: reality show. No, it's not teenage defiance. That is joining
Speaker 1: the family business, joining the family business, because you know,
Speaker 1: Triton would be down in his palace under the seat,
Speaker 1: rubbing his hands together and be like, hmm, and now
Speaker 1: I can broke her a deal with the men on
Speaker 1: land that we can consolidate our resources and extract even
Speaker 1: more and take over more of the world together. You know,
Speaker 1: come on, we went back and forth, Britain, I up
Speaker 1: and down. The movie just felt so slap dash, as
Speaker 1: if it's creators thought that six year old girls just
Speaker 1: wouldn't care about whether the narrative made any sense. What
Speaker 1: has Triton done about the hundreds of souls in Trapped
Speaker 1: by Ursula. Nothing, nothing, until his daughter gets captured, and
Speaker 1: then all of a sudden he's like that's all. He's like, Oh,
Speaker 1: this can't stand. Oh I'm i gotta go do battle.
Speaker 1: Like wait, what kind of model of leadership is this?
Speaker 1: That's wait, that's good, because there you're bringing the classism
Speaker 1: in again, right totally, because he doesn't care about everybody
Speaker 1: else who perished in Ursula's guard. He's the most. He
Speaker 1: only cares if his princess ends up there. I mean,
Speaker 1: this is this is the most appalling king behavior that
Speaker 1: I've ever seen. There is no aspect of him in
Speaker 1: any way fulfilling the functions of his office. Here. You
Speaker 1: could also ask yourself this too, Malcolm. Why are so
Speaker 1: many people leaving Triton's kingdom and going to Ursula in
Speaker 1: the first place? Why are there so many dissatisfied citizens
Speaker 1: who are seeking out the help of the old wise
Speaker 1: woman you know in yeah, traditionally in the woods, but
Speaker 1: here deeper within the sea, like yeah, oh yeah, no, Actually,
Speaker 1: what's rotten at the center of Tritan's kingdom that he
Speaker 1: has so many unsatisfied mr people? A thousand of his
Speaker 1: subjects are enslaved, like half a mile away, like living
Speaker 1: as ghost algae, stuck to the forest floor, scrambling for
Speaker 1: like you know, bits of human flesh. It's that the
Speaker 1: man is appalling. Yeah. I could talk to brit Marling forever,
Speaker 1: but I had to find out would she join me?
Speaker 1: Would she lend her magic to fixing the Little Mermaid?
Speaker 1: With the promise of nothing except the kind of random
Speaker 1: minor celebrity that comes from being a participant in a
Speaker 1: revisionist history episode. No money, no swag, not even legal
Speaker 1: indemnification if the Walt Disney Company comes after us. So
Speaker 1: let's talk about your homework. Hope it's not too owners.
Speaker 1: I have sent you, emailed you a copy of the script.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, nice. And all I want is not even
Speaker 1: a scene, a piece of a scene. You don't have
Speaker 1: to resolve all these issues. I just want you to
Speaker 1: take a moment in the script where there is an
Speaker 1: opportunity to do something different. Do you know that this
Speaker 1: is literally my favorite thing. I can't honestly, I can't
Speaker 1: even accept this as a homework assignment because this is
Speaker 1: just like pure pleasure, unbridled pleasure for me. She was
Speaker 1: all in. I would not walk a loan on this journey,
Speaker 1: this road of trials. We're trying to give the feeling
Speaker 1: of what is possible and then, well, you know, I'd
Speaker 1: like to see whether we can create a ground swell,
Speaker 1: public ground swell among nine year old girls in this
Speaker 1: country for a better, better version of Little Mermaid? Are
Speaker 1: we telling the real one? Yes? Yes, yes, yes. Next
Speaker 1: time on Revisionist History, the Little Mermaid done right, Ariel,
Speaker 1: it was you, It was you all along. Duh. Revision's
Speaker 1: History is produced by Meila Belle, Leahman Gistu and Jacob Smith,
Speaker 1: with Eloise Lindon and on a nine. Our editor is
Speaker 1: Julia Barton. Original scoring by Luis Gara, mastering by Flawn Williams,
Speaker 1: and engineering by Martin gunsal Us. Fact checking by Amy Gaines.
Speaker 1: Our voice actors are Paris Glasgow and Melina Rose. Special
Speaker 1: thanks to the Pushkin crew had a fine Carlie Megliori,
Speaker 1: Maya Kanig, Daniello Lakhan, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, Nicole Morano,
Speaker 1: Jason Gambrel and of course Jacob Weisberg. I'm Maltain Gloma.
Speaker 1: If you love this show and others from Pushkin Industries,
Speaker 1: consider becoming a Pushnik Pushnik is a podcast subscription that
Speaker 1: offers bonus content and uninterrupted listening for four dollars and
Speaker 1: ninety nine cents a month. Look for Pushnik exclusively on
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts subscriptions