Holy Shit! This is a Children's Movie?

The world is a different place in the human larval stage of development. People like to say that it's a time of innocence and purity, before the world corrupts and jades each of us. Buuuulllllshit. Why do I say this? Because anyone who spends a decent amount of time with a child will realize that it isn't that they're innocent and pure, it's that they simply have not been ingrained with the societal teachings to feel guilt and reservation about things. To realize that things are off or dark. I mean come on, little boys are violent as hell, and little girls rarely even question the materialism that is just accepted as part of being a little girl. It takes age and exposure to society to realize that some things are bad.
Now this brings me to the greater point of this entire post. Children's movies. Specifically musicals. We all watched them when we were little and absorbed their simple black and white messages like happy little sheep, rarely questioning or thinking about the implications of the movies, and just enjoying the songs. Sometimes this was ok! I'll admit most of Disney's early stuff that really made them famous was pretty tame and happy. However, when you go back and really watch some of the more recent disney stuff, things look different as an adult. Remember teh songs and characters who gave you nightmares or who you hated because they were evil? Those songs were often seriously disturbing or mature in nature. They were the sort of songs that make you say "Fuck! This is a children's movie?"
I have gone through the trouble of dredging through the thick pasty lake of useless trivia mud in the back of my head and pulling out the ten songs from my youth that really seem alot darker when I look back at them. I won't lie, alot of these songs are awesome. But when you really think about what they're saying and what they're about, it just makes you realize how little you queston as a child.

1 Fantasia - Night on Bald Mountain

I was a little conflicted as to wether to list this as a song in a children's movie, because arguably Fantasia is not a children't movie as much as an exercise in putting animation to music for anyone to watch. Still, this was a movie I watched when I was little that left me twitching and sweating and completely unable to sleep for the rest of the week so I put it in. I mean come on, basically the entire thing is full of demons and skeletons erupting from the ground to cause havoc and bask in the unholy light of the moon, while the greatest and most powerful demon of all oversees them like a sick and twisted conductor of darkness. It's a truly beautiful and scary scene when you're little, and frankly it surprises me that they put it in the movie with all the other relatively tame sequences. Still, I'm sure as hell glad they did, because I fucking loved this movie as a kid.

2 Anastasia - In The Dark of the Night

I really regret the fact that I couldn't find an actual video of this song, and instead have to provide you with this. I don't really regret it for your sake, since there are probably two or three of my bored friends reading this at the very most and I don't give a shit wether this entertains them or not. No, I simply regret that I can't remember exactually what's going on visually in this little sequence, and it's hard to judge the overall darkness of a scene without the visuals that go with it. Still, from the lyrics alone and from what I can remember, this song deals with some pretty heavy stuff.
I mean basically this is a song about a guy who has sold his soul to kill a woman, and now he is preparing to literally reattach the peices of his rotting corpse and rip her from the world of the living with dark magic. Shit man. Sucks to be her.

3 The Great Mouse Detective - Ratigan

"WORSE THAN THE WIDOWS AND ORPHANS YOU'VE DROWNED"

Need I say more?

Yes.

For a song so upbeat and celebratory, this is one of the most gruesome and dark songs in disney history. Hell, Ratigan stops the song mid chorus to KILL A FUCKING MINION. He does it in a calm and collected manner, and then beckons the others to CONTINUE THE FUCKING SONG. When I watch this today I am just astounded by how evil Disney was willing to make their villains. This is really just a precursor to what was, in my opinion, the scariest scene in any disney movie, where Ratigan basically goes full-on rat and rips his clothes off to tear the life out of Basil of Bakerstreet. Seriously scary shit.

4 Quest for Camelot - Ruber

What makes this particular song interesting to me is the fact that it's really just a completely unbalanced and dangerous pwrson talking about how much he likes people dying and killing each other. He doesn't want people to sleep peacefully because he thrives on war and destruction, so he is willing to rip the humanity from his horde of warriors and turn them into walking death machines who basically will never again serve a purpose in life other than to kill and maim fellow human beings. That's a pretty radical life choice there if I do say so myself.

5 Beauty and the Beast - Kill The Beast

Everyone in Belle's town, the mothers, fathers, sons and daughters, want this creature dead. They want to stab him to death and burn the body. What makes the entire concept of this song chilling is the fact that these people really think they are protecting themselves, they are truly motivated against something that someone they trust has told them is a threat, and yet they are entirely and undeniably the bad guys in this movie. Many of them die in the assult on the castle. DIE! They were trying to protect their families! They listened to Gaston because he's charismatic and forceful, and he made a good case for the danger of the situation. these are the people that the main heroine has grown up with and lived around her whole life, and they are turned into a slavering mob, thirsty for furry blood. Also there's a Shakespeare reference, and there's no way they expected kids to pick that up.

6 Dumbo - Pink Elephants on Parade

There's not much I can say about this that will emphasize how disturbing and twisted this segment in Dumbo is better than just watching the video. Dumbo and his friend basically get drunk and go on the weirdest trip ever set down in a Disney movie. I think the animators must have been on some seriously expensice acid when they made this segment. It would take me this entire post if I went through and listed every specific moment in this video that is somehow disturbing or scary. Even Dumbo's eyes-half-closed stoned-out-of-his-mind stare should have parents asking "what the fuck are they showing my children"

7 Fern Gully - Toxic Love

I don't think anyone but Tim Curry could make this song as sleazy and sultry as he could. The man's got a way with song. Still though, from the first image of a sludge-covered skeleton erupting from a mass of grime, to the final moments of the grime cloud monster locking himself in the boiler, this is a song with some great mature images and themes. I mean yeah, the entirely movie is ham-fistedly and unabashedly environmental, but the bad guy also manages to be genuinely creepy in this little bit. I know I thought it was scary. No way I was fucking around with tree cutting machines after that. Fern Gully taught nature preservation by traumatization. Hell, we should try that more often.

8 The Lion King - Be Prepared

Props to the people who wrote the lyrics to this song, because there is some sophistocated verse and terminology in this song that is just plain awesome. It follows the pattern of the "Kill the Beast" song mentioned earlier in that it's basically a song about how the bad guys are going to kill a protagonist, but it differs in a way that in my mind makes the whole thing alot more chilling.

Instead of a mindless crazy mob, an organized force of fascists is formed around the rallying call. Seriously, the fascism is all throughout the imagry in the song and noone with basic knowledge of Nazis can deny it. Holy shit man, holy shit. What I really wonder is how much of the power of the idea got through to me when I saw this at age 7 or whenever, because that's an image that should make people a little uncomfortable in my opinion.

9 The Prince of Egypt - The Plagues

This is what you get when you take a source material that's not meant at all to be for children and make a children's movie out of it. Awesome awesome awesome scenes with very dark and mature concepts. Under the command of god, Moses is killing and maiming and starving the people of Egypt until they bow down to his demands. The Pharoah on the other hand looks cruelly and coldly upon the death and destruction around his people and sees only the potential for personal shame, and so he lets them suffer and die for his pride. Not to mention the tone of the entire song is dark and confrontational, with chanting and verse being read in the background as the two main characters sing in counter point for their respective perspective. Powerful stuff indeed, and in no way "for children." Anyone who can't appreciate the power of this sequence is deaf and blind. Or maybe blind and non-english-speaking, which would amount to a similar level of non-comprehension, but then we're getting into technicalities.

10 The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Hellfire

Summed up: "You arouse me. I cannot have you. I will take you and rape you or I will kill you painfully." I know for sure that I didn't pick up any of the depth and subtlty in this song when I saw it in theaters, because I barely remembered it coming out. Looking back it's by far the best song in the movie. Even the visual mix of the demonic imagry and the holy symbolism is fantastically well set up. The shadows and flames writing in the different shakes on the walls just give a great impression of the raw passion and uncontrollable lust behind Frollo's actions. If only the entire movie had maintained such a dark tone. It would have been truly epic.

Basically those were the best ones I could remember, and they all fit the bill quite nicely. Those of you reading who were ticking off mental lists of your own (no doubt inferior to my list, which is definitive by nature of being on the internet) might comment that I left out any mention of any of the songs from Nightmare before Christmas. This is because I almost felt that putting that in there would be too obvious. I mean basically that whole movie is a children's movie that is way too dark for children. Why parents let kids watch that movie is beyond me.

At least scenes like these give the movies some rewatching value right? Any excuse to waste time on YouTube.

God'sLonelyMan out

10 Great Movies About People With Shitty Jobs

10. Fight Club - I can easily imagine wanting to kick the stuffing out of some hot young Jared Leto bod if I had Ed Norton's job. Oh, wait. I do. Be wary, attractive male celebrities everywhere.

9. The Music Man- I am of the school of thought that says that it would suck greatly to be a librarian in River City, Iowa (the town where Chaucer is the raciest one can read. Oohh, lord, I'm gettin' my Anglo-Saxon jollies as we speak.I've been a naughty, naughty serf, Jeff...) or a traveling salesman in....anywhere. You wear that uniform, and then everyone in a small town wants to run you out on a rail. Except for the virginal librarian (ibid.) who wants to do something else involving you, running, and a rail.

8. To Sir, With Love- Sidney Poitier, as well as being top-five material on my upcoming list of old-timey silver-screen manbait, has an incredible array of (muscles? sub-zero vocal chords?) patience with the chavviest Brit Kids that I've ever heard drop their H's on-screen since Audrey Hepburn's ever-so-fair turn as a certain guttersnipe. Props, Sid. You really taught those boys something about R-E-S-P-E-C-T.

7. Psycho -Running a creepy motel would be enough to drive anyone crazy. The end.

6. Secretary- Put aside the spanking and the starving and the tree scene and all other sorts of guilty-BDSM-fantasy fodder for a minute there (and zip up your pants. I see what you did there!) and just think about this. You've gotta be a masochist to take a job that requires you to use a typewriter, in this day and age.

5. Almost Famous - I can't imagine you get to be that picky about which drug-addled member of Stillwater uses your body on any given night. It's not always gonna be Russell. Sometimes, it's going to be that muppety drummer, who later confesses that he's gay. What? He has to prove something to the guys until then.

4. Double Indemnity -The deep nuances of insurance selling and housewifery hold little appeal. Suppose I said that I only really start to like this movie when they start bantering?

3. Bleak House -Want to be a Jarndice lawyer? You can argue for generations, until your progeny's progeny are bored and headachy, and still not get anywhere, much less paid.

2. Boondock Saints -I know this is kind of obscure, but you know the part at the beginning, with the cute Irish brothers working in the Boston meat-packing plant? Do you know what kind of diseases you can get from manhandling old meat? Good, you don't want to .

1. American Psycho - Shitty, boring job by day. Inventive slashing by night. Sounds a little like another Bale role. Or five, now that I think about it. But yes, Bale, office politics. I was going to make a water cooler joke, but then realized that it wouldn't be as effective of a come-on as I'd hoped. Sorry.

DG, out.

Ten Things I Would Do if I Didn't Start Federal Work Monday

So after a month of brain-numbing entropy, I have very little (save a short-lived-but-surely-wonderful visit to the southern end of Virginia) to show for it. However, on the 9th of May, when I moved from my lovely room in college to my less-lovely room in a city nearby, I promised myself that I would do something worthwhile, and now, I hope that writing about what I could have done will count as doing something. After all, if recent studies show that people on placebo diet pills can lose weight merely by thinking really, really hard (I think the study's referenced in this episode!), then how hard can it be for me to do something just by being extra, extra meta about it?


10. I would sharpen my vast array of Dixon Ticonderoga #2 pencils to a very sharp point, which always inspires me to write. I don't know why, but it's only this brand, and it's only when they're very sharp, on certain kinds of paper (I'm really picky) but I just get really inspired to pull out my sketchbook and finish that graphic novelita I started so many years ago...


9. I would categorize my iTunes just the way I like it, so that all my Jangly Indiepop is in its appropriate playlist, and if that happens to overlap with my Covers and Remixes playlist, I would make a separate Jangly Indie Covers playlist to accommodate it. Yes, I am that anal about music. I have 30,00 songs of almost every genre, and counting. I like knowing what I listen to. More importantly, I would clear out that damn "'90's music" folder that iTunes gives me automatically, since the so-called "Smart Playlist" never really puts real 90's music on there- just terrible covers of songs that may have once been played in the 90's. Or songs from the 90's that I don't much care for, like anything by Lenny Kravitz. You're a very pretty man, but I'd prefer not to.

8. I would become well-versed (who am I kidding, plain old versed would work, too) in teh interwebs. I would get a profile, or whatever it is you get, on 4chan, and be super awesomezor5, and make up memes, and all my friends who like computers would be in awe, and my boyfriend would genuflect before my supreme computer prowess.

7. I would buy more candles. My room smells like apple pie, currently, but there appears to be a secret cache of socks somewhere, and I am only just finding out socks' power to be the potpourri of stank. So when I run out of pie-candles, my room may be stuck smelling like just-washed Haneses.

6. I would throw one of those totally awesome high-school parties that I never really had in high school, because I hated everyone I went to high school with. Wait. I still do. Never mind. I would probably just buy a hookah, and some of that hookah-tobacco goop, and play some old tantric records, and amuse my own damn self.

5. I would play dress-up with my mom's old clothes from the 70's. I found some serious peasant-shirtage going down in a box when I was cleaning my basement last week, and have been itching to get into full Sonny-and-Cher disguise and try these babies out with my big platform go-go boots.

4. Read all the books sitting by my bed. Let me tell you something about me. I love books. I always have at least 5 by my bed, and am capable of starting a book while still reading another. Therefore, I go through a lot of books, since I cycle through about three in an average week, and hate re-reading a book I don't love. So I just put a bunch of new books by my bed. A memoir by the ex-curator of the Met, "The Name of the Rose" which I've always wanted to read and never have, "The Baron in the Trees" by Italo Calvino, and "Exit the King" by Ionesco, to name a few. And I really want to read these. But now that I'm employed, I won't have the time, chances are, or the brain energy.

3. Become one of those super-hip blogger girls. Yes, this is meta. But I want to be one of those girls who can sit in a cafe, and wonder insouciently: "how the hell can I drink my venti-not-large mocha-toffee-chino-latte-with-cinnaNut-spriklinis while still blogging about how hot my shoes are, and also about politics?" I am just not that cool (for evidence, look at previous lists.) I did read this really cool book about Robert Rauschenberg,in a cafe, though.

2. I would find a way to register for this.

1. I would pick up my guitar, for the first time in a month, and play something.

Entropically, employedly, elegiacally, and beating-self-over-the-head-ingly yours.
DG, out.