Snow White - Revisited

The Peter Pan Saga I posted here a while back had a not entirely unexpected after-effect on me, which is that now all the weird things in kids stories are harder and harder to ignore.  I'll try not to belabor the point as much as I did with Peter Pan with this one... I know, I do that... anyway here goes.

Snow White

Originally by the Brothers Grimm - Revisited by Me, Zach

Long ago in a faraway kingdom there was a princess named Snow White.  Her father the king had wanted to name her Snow Yellow, but his lovely wife the queen had talked him out of it at the last minute.  Then she promptly kicked the bucket.  The king remarried, and picked the hottest woman in the kingdom as a wife. This proved to be a terrible idea because he promptly kicked the bucket too, leaving Snow White with an evil narcissistic biotch of a stepmother.

The new queen, who had no qualifications whatsoever for ruling a kingdom as far as anybody knows, was a beautiful rotten bastard of a woman.  As Snow White entered into adolescence, growing prettier every day, the queen got jealous of her to the point of obsessive insanity.  She made Snow White dress in rags and toil endlessly, day and night, much like every other person in the kingdom except for her.  Snow White didn't even bitch about it.  She kept it real, because she knew how to handle situations like that since she'd read Cinderella already and recognized that her story was exactly the same sans the ugly stepsisters.

She knew that all she had to do was wait, and a rich handsome guy would pop by and abscond with her to a better place.  Little did she know that the queen was also somehow a sorceress with a mirror that talked and whatnot.  Every day the queen stood before it and asked it if she was still the choicest piece of tail in the kingdom.  The mirror, which had been hanging in that same room for a ridiculously long time and hadn't seen any other women besides her and Snow White, had no friggin idea.  It was a talking mirror, not some omniscient being that could see everybody and somehow understand beauty on an expert level, so it just said "Yep, you still got it sister".

Time passed, and one day the queen was standing there asking the mirror the same stupid question, but the mirror was a little bit hung over from partying the night before and wasn't in any kind of mood to have to keep up a crazy woman's ego.  The queen asked "Mirror mirror on the wall, do I have the most devastatingly gorgeous butt-cheeks of all?"  And the mirror, in an irritated voice, said "Are you kidding me, with that saggy butt?  It looks like a shovel, so no.  No you don't.  The other chick who walks around here in rags though, lemme tell you there's some junk in that trunk baby, that booty pops!"

And the queen was furious, because she'd been doing yoga and eating spinach salads for lunch every day and it wasn't paying off, so she picked up a vase to throw at the mirror and the mirror was like "What are you gonna do lady, break me?  That's seven years bad luck, and ain't nobody got time for that"  The queen was like "Dammit!" and instead decided to take out her rage on the princess.

Naturally, if someone is better looking than you, the only logical thing to do is to kill them violently, so the queen called for the huntsman.  There was only one huntsman, evidently.  He showed up thinking the queen had worn out her squirrel-skin thong again and wanted a new one or something, and was surprised when she ordered him to kill the princess, cut out her heart, and bring it back in a little jeweled box.  That seemed odd, but orders is orders so off he went to talk her into going on a trip out into the woods.  She went with him, which was a terribly irresponsible decision on her part if you think about it.

Once out in the woods, Snow White was dancing around in a field of flowers and butterflies and stuff, and she looked all innocent and beautiful so the huntsman decided that he'd rather not murder her just then.  Instead, he told her to run aimlessly around in the forest with no supplies or survival skills at all, and never to go home.  She took off into the trees in a panic.  The huntsman needed a heart, so he slaughtered a pig, cut out its heart and put that in the little box for the queen. She was pretty stoked about it, and sent the huntsman on his way.

The mirror had no idea that Snow White was supposed to be dead, it just figured she was down in the kitchen still looking all fine, so when the queen approached it with that same old nonsense it said "What?  No!  It's been like a day, you haven't had time to whip that ass into shape yet.  Snow White's booty is still better, why don't you get on a stair-master and leave me the hell alone!"  The queen was mad, and hungry, so she quickly fried an egg on her forehead and went down into her meth lab to cook up some sorcery.

Meanwhile, Snow White rampaged around in the woods until she exhausted herself and passed out in a heap on the ground.  Woodland creatures like rabbits and deer and chipmunks and such came over to see if she was edible, but she woke up suddenly and then they were all friends.  The animals led her to a cottage, which was small and quaint and had a thatched roof and a chimney, which seems unsafe.  She knocked, but nobody answered, so she took a page from Goldilocks's playbook and went in anyway.

The inside of the house was wrecked.  Dust and dirty dishes and flies and moldy, child-sized boxer shorts were strewn around everywhere.  It was obvious that some horrible squalid little children lived there, unsupervised and feral like in Lord of the Flies.  Snow White, being desperate and having no real other skill set, decided that she'd clean the place and see if she could live there as the maid.  The animals helped her clean, because that makes no sense whatsoever.

When she finished with the downstairs, she went upstairs and saw seven little beds, each with a name carved in the headboard.  The names were:  Giddy, Tired, Pissed-off, Sickly, Introverted, PhD, and Dumb-ass.  "What funny names!" she said, and immediately passed out in a random bed, inadvertently inventing a new version of drunken hooker roulette that doesn't involve getting the clap.  She didn't know it, but they weren't children at all who lived there, they were dwarfs.  Miners, rather than minors, as it were.

The dwarfs had toiled all day in the mines, presumably for some harsh overlord.  When they got home and found the place clean, they flipped out.  Then they noticed that there was soup in the cauldron over the fire, and ascertained that somebody might be upstairs.  Nobody wanted to go investigate, despite the fact that they were all armed with pick-axes, so they sent Dumb-ass because he was mentally challenged and the others considered him expendable.  He poked his head up to see what was going on, and found the hottest girl in the kingdom passed out in his bed.

Soon the room was full of dirty little men with digging utensils staring at Snow White.  She woke up suddenly, sat up in the bed, and somehow wasn't terrified at all.  Because each of the dwarfs had only one characteristic by which they were named, she knew who they all were.  Like any group of seven dudes in a house in the middle of the woods who come home and find a beautiful woman who wants to move in with them, they said "Fuck yeah you can live here!"

Snow White made them all bathe, and they then proceeded to bust out accordions and penny-whistles.  Then there was some dancing, laughing and general merriment, and Snow White went to bed after writing "Interesting day - more dwarf-bathing than usual" in her journal.  The next morning, the dwarfs went off to work and she kissed them all on the way out.  They told her to be careful and not to talk to strangers as if she were six years old and random passers-by were a regular sort of thing out in the middle of the woods.

Back at the palace, the queen had been hard at work coming up with an overly elaborate plan that didn't make any sense.  She knew where Snow White was, so it probably would have been pretty easy just to roll out there and stick a pitchfork in her head, but instead she concocted a potion that once taken would transform her into an old hag so Snow White wouldn't recognize her.  The potion also turned her robes into rags, so that was some pretty powerful stuff.  Then she dipped an apple into some poison that she'd brewed, and talked to herself the whole time saying things like "When she bites into this apple, she'll fall into a deep sleep and can only be woken by loves first kiss" as if she knew that there was a hidden camera in the room.

The queen failed to realize that putting Snow White to sleep isn't the same as killing her, and technically she'd still be rockin' the bumpinest booty around, so the problem wouldn't be solved at all.  Oblivious to that obvious fact, the queen hobbled her raggedy ass out to the cottage, rolled up to the window and offered Snow White an apple.  Snow White ignored the dwarfs advice, took the apple, took a bite, and crumpled to the floor like a pair of silk panties.  The queen buggered off, and the forest animals went to get the dwarfs for help.

The dwarfs rushed back to the cottage and found what they thought was Snow White's lifeless corpse on the kitchen floor.  This pissed them off, and they chased after the queen.  A thunderstorm rolled in, lightning cracked across the sky, rain pelted them, and still they chased.  The queen chose a mountain path for her escape, and tried to kill the dwarfs by crushing the life from their wee bodies with a boulder, but that didn't work.  Instead, she slipped on some schmutz and plummeted to her splattery death on the rocks below, and nobody felt bad for her at all because two wrongs DO make a right and we've all been trained that revenge killings are okay, especially in Texas.

Back at the cottage, the dwarfs decided that Snow White was too beautiful to bury, so they put her on a slab and put a glass dome over her so that they could watch her slowly rot.  Despite the fact that they only knew her a single day, the dwarfs are debilitated with grief, and sit in a circle around the corpse-display case with their heads bowed day and night.

After a while, for no discernible reason, a prince happened to pop by.  Not just some regular Joe-bag-o-donuts asshole on a donkey.  A prince.  He spotted the circle of sad little bald and bearded men through the trees, and noticed that there was a dead chick in a glass bubble there.  Naturally, he does what any self-respecting necrophiliac would do in that situation.  He opens up the glass dome, probably letting out all kinds of body funk that would have been trapped in there like little farts and bad breath and whatnot, leans in, and plants a juicy smucker right on her lifeless lips.  That seems pretty normal.

The prince didn't know about the convenient caveat in the evil queen's apple spell about love's first kiss.  He's about to make a clean getaway when up she pops, all fresh and alive and smiling despite the fact that she hasn't moved or eaten or peed in who knows how long.  He doesn't even freak out.  Neither do the dwarfs, they're just relieved.  She gets on the horse, thanks the dwarfs for not embalming her and putting her under the lettuce patch, and rides off with the prince proving once and for all that as long as you're pretty enough, all you have to do is wait and some rich guy will take care of you for the rest of your life, even if he thinks you're dead.

Nobody thanks the forest creatures for anything, even though they facilitated a lot of what went on.

The seven suddenly-unberieved and friend-zoned dwarfs are left standing in the woods with an empty above-ground coffin, proving once and for all that if you let a girl move in with you, play music for her, give her food, worry about her, become a vigilante killer for her, and devote your life to mourning her if she dies, she'll leave and ride off with the first rich necrophiliac who happens to pop by on a horse.

We're led to believe that everyone lived happily ever after.

The end.

Peter Pan - Part VII

Part VII 

"Son of a bitch!" says Hook, hardly able to believe that his pre-adolescent arch-enemy is not currently a layer of charred, steaming goop clinging to the inside of a tree. 

"This time you've gone too far!" says Peter, as if this were any worse than any of the other murder attempts of which Hook is guilty, and pulls out his knife.   He cuts a hole in the sail and flies through it, even though he could have easily gone around.  

"Son of a bitch!" says the pirate whose job is to repair sails.  He goes below decks to look for a thimble as Peter slices effortlessly through ten loops of thick rope to free the lost boys and the Darling brothers.  

"Son of a bitch!" says the pirate whose job it is to repair ropes.   

"You wouldn't dare fight old Hook man to man!" challenges Hook, somehow oblivious to the fact that such a challenge sounds pretty dumb coming from a guy who has already been beaten countless times in similar situations. 

"I'll fight you with one hand behind my back!" says Peter, because handicapping himself unnecessarily while in a fight for the lives of other children is apparently a risk worth taking for the sake of his ego.   

They square off and start smacking blades together with much ringing of steel.  Dodge, parry, spin, thrust and all that.  The rest of the pirates battle the gaggle of ragamuffin children.  The pirates are grown, tough, and armed with guns and knives and swords.  The children are small, untrained, and armed with slingshots and sticks.  John fights with an umbrella.  Michael puts a cannon ball inside his teddy bear and drags it around.  In a dazzling display of ineptitude, the pirates are beaten back one by one and wind up in the drink.  

Michael clobbers one pirate in the head with his cannon-ball-bear.  The pirate spends two days in agony and dies, but this story is over by then so nobody knows about it.  Michael goes his entire life not even realizing that he killed a guy with a teddy bear when he was a toddler.

Now it’s just Hook vs Pan in an epic battle that takes them out onto the yardarm where they show off how nimble and coordinated they are.  After much posing and swordplay, Pan disarms Hook and holds him at sword point.  Hook grovels.  Pan decides to be the better man and lowers the sword.  Hook tries to take a cheap shot at Peter, but loses his balance and plummets into the sea, where the crocodile is waiting.  He’s been lingering around the whole time; I just haven’t mentioned him in a while.  

When we last see Hook, he is swimming for his life with a flesh eating monster snapping at his heels.  He is either a fantastically good swimmer (despite the fact that one of his hands is a hook) or the crocodile is not, because they appear to be fairly evenly matched.  Hook’s crew rows out to save him in a little lifeboat, and that’s the last we see of them, too.  

There is much cheering and yelling and dancing about on the deck.  The cheering only intensifies when who should show up but Tinkerbell, cheese-grater in hand, alive and well after all.  Somehow her tiny, fragile body and delicate wings are immune to balls of fire and the concussive blasts caused by close-proximity explosions.  She also must regenerate skin like Wolverine, because she somehow grates enough of it off to coat the entire ship in a layer of the stuff, and it lifts out of the water.  Nobody is mad at her.  

“Where are we going?” asks Wendy, who has every right to be apprehensive after nearly being killed every ten minutes since she arrived.  

Peter tells them they’re going to London and they’re all mighty relieved, especially Michael who has been in the same diaper for days.  The ship floats away into the night, finally arriving in London where they step back through their nursery window.  They say their goodbyes, and the ship sails away with the appropriate amount of handkerchief waving and wringing of hands. 

Mr. and Mrs. Darling get home and stroll in.  Assuming parallel time lines, and given that the directions to Neverland include “straight on till morning” each way, they’ve been gone for three days and are still wearing the same clothes.  The whole time they were gone Nana was chained up in the yard and as far as they know, their three children were alone in the house, which is pretty damn irresponsible.  Still, somehow everything seems to be in order.  Wendy tells them that she’s ready to grow up and Mr. Darling puts his arm around her as they gaze out the window.  Then the pirate ship sails in front of the moon, bigger’n shit.  

 “You know, I have the strangest feeling that I’ve seen that ship before, when I was very young” he muses out loud, possibly to cover up the sound of him farting tremendously.  One gets the impression that everything that just happened was a rite of passage of childhood or something, and that it happens all the time.  

Apparently Peter Pan is some sort of childhood-to-adulthood transitional tool, who kidnaps children and endangers their lives repeatedly in order to prepare them for adulthood.  That explains why he didn’t originally invite John or Michael, they were too young.  Now Michael is a toddler who’s seen too much.  

But Peter doesn’t seem to remember that all of it has already happened.  He’s clueless.  They all are.  He and everybody in Neverland are caught in some kind of hellish infinite loop; they repeat their cycle of adventures forever, always with different children.   

That’s why nobody ever grows up.  The lost boys really are lost.  Lost in time.  Forgotten.  Hook is tormented by the crocodile.  Tiger Lily is kidnapped and tortured.  The pirates are humiliated (and slain) by children.  Tinkerbell attempts multiple homicides and betrayals.  It all happens over and over and over again.  Forever.  

And they live happily ever after.  

The End    

Previous (Part VI): http://extremenoob.blogspot.com/2014/06/peter-pan-part-vi.html

Peter Pan - Part VI

Part VI

While Tinkerbell is busy plotting another betrayal of Peter and pre-meditating some Wendy-related killings, the lost boys have let themselves be convinced by Wendy that they need a mother.  They live in a hole under a tree, and they're all wearing the skins of dead animals and don't seem old enough to have ever been apprenticed to a tanner, so the skins probably haven't been cured at all.  They're just wearing dead animal skin.  That's nasty, and Wendy is probably right, but Peter doesn't buy it and tells her she and the rest of them can go suck an egg.

Wendy, her brothers, and the lost boys decide to leave immediately, and exit the tree through a little hole, intent on returning to London.  None of them takes into account the fact that they need a healthy dusting of Tinkerbell's dandruff in order to fly, and she (as far as they know) won't be back for a week because she's been banished for attempted murder.  In actuality, of course, she's alone on a pirate ship locked in a lantern.  The pirates are all waiting outside the tree with a stack of burlap sacks and a good bit of rope.

As the children exit the tree one at a time the pirates gag, bag, and hogtie them.  They're hauled off to the ship.  Hook waits for Peter to come out, but Peter is down in the hole feeling sorry for himself so Hook lowers a box into the hole that's neatly wrapped to look like a gift from Wendy.  It has a big fancy pink bow on it and everything, although nobody knows which of the pirates had that handy.  The box is not a gift so much as it is an improvised explosive device set to detonate very soon.  

There must be some sort of tear in the fabric of the space time continuum, because somehow Wendy and the boys are already on the ship with Captain Hook just as Peter gets the box.  Perhaps the ship was parked right there and was just a few swarthy steps away.  He reads the little note that says "To Peter, From Wendy" and has no problem with the fact that she hasn't had nearly enough time to fashion a gift for him.  He's so used to being fawned-over by all the Neverlandian women that it doesn't even register as strange that he should recieve a gift from a woman who was moments ago giving him the almighty stink-eye and walking out the door on him.  

Many things happen at once.  For some reason, Hook offers Wendy and the boys positions on his crew.  He must have been short-handed (ba-dum, tssshhh).  Wendy refuses to become a pirate and tells Hook he's welcome to apply his piratey pursed lips to her wee British ass.  Hook declines this offer like a gentleman and instead orders her to walk the plank at sword-point.  Her hands are tied behind her back, which guarantees her a nasty bit of drowning.  She takes these orders like a champ and heads toward her death with her chin up, telling the boys to be brave as they watch her die.

Peter slowly begins to open the box.  Tinkerbell rocks her glass prison until it tips and breaks, and buggers off at top speed to warn Peter about the bomb that she couldn't have known about because Hooks plan was originally to capture Peter, not blow him up.  Wendy takes a step towards her death.  Peter is almost finished opening the box.  Tinkerbell fireballs in so fast that particles in the atmosphere exfoliate her entire body, leaving skin-flakes trailing behind her like a meteorite.  Wendy takes another step.  Tink zips into the tree, grabs the box and flies out of there just as it explodes in a cataclysm that makes nuclear weapons tests look like Cub Scout marshmallow-roasting campfires in comparison.

With Tinkerbell most likely reduced to a sparkly cloud of ashes and a tiny jealous poltergeist, Peter is pretty bummed but realizes he needs to go help the children even though he doesn't know they're in trouble since Tink never had a chance to tell him.  He flies off at top speed.  Wendy takes one last step and disappears off the end of the plank.  She makes a whistling sound as she goes down, presumably for dramatic effect.  The pirates lean towards the edge with horrible smiles on their faces and their hands cupped behind their ears in anticipation of the splash... but there isn't one.

Mr. Smee assumes there's witchcraft afoot because Wendy never hit the water, and there is some gnashing of what few teeth remain among the crew as they cast fearfully about for ghosts and the like.  Instead, they see the silhouette of Peter Pan against the mainsail and quickly figure out that he's caught Wendy, that she's not dead and neither is he, and that they've failed yet again to accomplish one simple friggin task without screwing it up.  

Previous (Part V):  http://extremenoob.blogspot.com/2014/06/peter-pan-part-v.html
Next (Part VII): http://extremenoob.blogspot.com/2014/06/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none.html

Peter Pan - Part V

Part V

The Indian girl is Tiger Lily, and she’s the daughter of the local chief, which apparently qualifies her as a princess.  She is a feisty sort, and in response to her interrogation tells Hook he can go piss up a rope even though she’s about to die.  This helps to demonstrate just how beloved Peter is among the womenfolk on the island of Neverland.  Hook leaves her to drown, because he’s a mean guy.  Right as she’s about to choke to death on a mouthful of seawater, Peter Pan shows up, quickly beats Hook in a sword/knife fight (again… the guy just never gets better) and saves her.  He’s now saved two women from certain death in a matter of an hour or so, and gets lots of props from the locals even though both of them were only ever in danger because of him.  

In the meanwhiles, during all the mermaid fawning and pirately torture/attempted murder of indigenous Neverlandians, the lost boys and the Darling brothers gear up to go and hunt Indians.  This is something the lost boys do fairly regularly in good fun, and the Indians play along, so it’s not as horrible as it sounds.  Little do they know that the Indians are pissed off because somebody stole their princess and they can’t seem to figure out who it was despite the fact that there’s a shipload of pirates parked a stone’s throw away.  They've deduced that it was probably this ragtag group of filthy yard-apes that did it.  So rather than a fun game of “hunt the Indians”, the boys all get captured and tied up in the middle of the Indian village.  There are teepees all around, despite the fact that teepees were more of a Great Plains thing and this tribe lives in the middle of a forest on an island.  

There is a lot of war paint, whooping, hollering, and any number of stereotypical (if not blatantly racist) things going on as the Indians prepare to execute the lost boys and the Darling brothers in a bloodbath of death and violence and the usual mosaic of innocent children being slaughtered by Indians.  Just as it’s getting particularly ugly, Peter Pan shows up with Wendy and Tiger Lily in tow, and everything is forgiven in favor of everybody dancing around the bonfire in loincloths singing impossibly racist songs.  Except for Wendy.  Wendy gets to enjoy a glaring example of racism and sexual discrimination simultaneously as a large Indian woman tells her “Squaw no dance.  Squaw gettum firewood”.

At long last, everybody retires to hangman’s tree, which is the secret location of Peter Pan’s hideout.  Wendy becomes very motherly and convinces everyone except Peter that they’d rather tidy up and go to bed early than party around a bonfire.  She does this by reminding them via song that they are all motherless vagrants and that nobody loves them.  This seems unnecessarily passive aggressive until one considers that her entire trip to Neverland has thus far been fraught with peril, disappointment, and emotionally traumatizing near-death experiences.  

On a parallel timeline to all of this, Mr. Smee somehow manages to capture Tinkerbell, who apparently doesn’t understand the concept of being banished from Neverland and was sulking around the island feeling sorry for herself.  Smee takes her to Captain Hook, who finds it ridiculously easy to manipulate her into acts of treachery.  Just by playing on Tinkerbell’s jealousy of Wendy, Hook convinces the duplicitous little shit to give up the location of Peter Pan’s hideout.  She makes Hook pinky swear that he won’t hurt Peter Pan and believes him when he says he won’t, which leads us to believe that she is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the crunchiest peanut in the turd.  

Tinkerbell goes to the big map of Neverland on Hooks desk and points to one of three features that actually appear on the map:  Hangman’s tree.  Hook never thought to look there, even though Neverland is only about the size of a city block and there are only a few possible places Peter Pan could be hiding, a fact which serves to brilliantly illustrate the fact that Captain Hook is a raging dumbass.    

He's also a registered bastard, and immediately locks Tinkerbells psychotic pixie ass in a lantern where she gnashes her teeth and beats her tiny fists against the glass, somehow surprised and outraged that a dastardly pirate would betray her.   

Next (Part VI): http://extremenoob.blogspot.com/2014/06/peter-pan-part-vi.html
Previous (Part IV): http://extremenoob.blogspot.com/2014/06/peter-pan-part-iv.html