When Disney Characters Find Themselves In A Safe-Sex and Anti-Drug PSA...

So, I think this may be the most tasteless thing I've ever done, and considering my single most popular tumblr post suggests Gaston gets together with a 7-year-old girl, that's saying something:

When I mentioned the idea for this mashup to my loyal peanut gallery, Dad said

"If only Disney had explicitly explored the tobacco industry side of the colonization of the Americas."

...and my little sister said

"But instead of AIDS, it's smallpox?"

The snark is strong in my family. My father has it. I have it. And, my sister has it...

If you have that power too, I hope you'll like it!

I often think of these mashups as our beloved Disney characters "performing" a new bit. With this one, I think of the distinguished cast showing up like

"Wait, I thought we were preaching about environmentalism and racial tolerance?"

"No, that's sooo last week! Now we're preaching against drug dealing and unprotected sex."

"Okay, fine. Whatever."

On a somewhat related note, generally my mashups fall into one of two categories. Either the comedy comes from picking a bit where the content of the non-Disney component has eerily similar themes to the source material, like so:

...or it comes from the non-Disney component having such a radically different theme that the implications of the mashup veers into absurdity. For instance:

This one, on the surface of it, seems to fall into that second category (apart, of course, from the obvious fact that Pocahontas quite literally chases waterfalls!). I mean, we're implying here that Thomas is a drug dealer, John Smith gets HIV from Pocahontas, Kokoum falls in with a street gang, and Ratcliffe is a coke fiend. However, the more I worked on this I came to notice that "Waterfalls" really captures an inadvertent message of Pocahontas. I know they intended this to be a "follow your heart!" type of story, but since everyone in it ends up dead, critically injured, heartbroken, alone, and/or impoverished, in a twisted kind of way it actually vindicates Nakoma's pessimism and overabundance of caution, without really realizing it's doing it. But then again I could go on for ages about the things Disney didn't realize about the story it was telling in Pocahontas (oh, wait...I already have).

And, as another little bit of trivia, both the movie and the song came out in 1995, so they seem to be made for each other.

Tweet