When did Disney villains stop being so villainous? New show suggests they may just be misunderstood
ORLANDO, Fla. — Cruella de Vil wanted to turn Dalmatian puppies into fur coats, Captain Hook tried to bomb Peter Pan and Maleficent issued a curse of early death for Aurora.
But wait, maybe these Disney villains were just misunderstood? That's the premise of a new musical show at Walt Disney World that has some people wondering when did Disney's villains stop wanting to be so ... villainous?
The live show, 'Disney Villains: Unfairly Ever After,' debuts May 27 at the Disney's Hollywood Studios park at the Orlando, Florida resort. In the show, the three baddies of old-school Disney movies plead their cases before an audience that they are the most misunderstand villain of them all.
'We wanted to tell a story that's a little different than what's been told before: which one of them has been treated the most unfairly ever after,' Mark Renfrow, a creative director of the show, said in a promotional video .
That hook — the narrative kind, not the captain — is scratching some Disney observers the wrong way.
'I think it's wonderful when you still have stories where villains are purely villainous,' said Benjamin Murphy, a professor of philosophy and religious studies at Florida State University's campus in Panama. 'When you have villains reveling in their evil, it can be amusing and satisfying.'
Disney has some precedent for putting villains in a sympathetic light, or at least explaining how they got to be so evil. The 2021 film, 'Cruella,' for instance, presents a backstory for the dog-hater played by actress Emma Stone that blames her villainy on her mother never wanting her.
Other veins of pop culture have rethought villains too, perhaps none more famously than the book, theatrical musical and movie versions of 'Wicked,' the reinterpretation of the Wicked Witch of the West character from 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.'
The blockbuster success of 'Wicked," which was based on the 1995 novel 'Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West,' sparked the trend of rethinking villains in popular entertainment, Murphy said.
'With trends like that, the formula is repeated and repeated until it's very predictable: take a villain and make them sympathetic,' he said.
The centuries-old fairy tales upon which several Disney movies are based historically were meant to teach children a lesson, whether it was not to get close to wolves (Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Little Pigs) or trust strange, old women in the woods (Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel).
But they often made marginalized people into villains — older women, people of color or those on the lower socio-economic scale, said Rebecca Rowe, an assistant professor of children's literature at Texas A&M University-Commerce.
The trend toward making villains more sympathetic started in the late 1980s and 1990s as children's media took off. There was a desire to present villains in a manner that was more complicated and less black and white, as there was an overall cultural push toward emphasizing acceptance, she said.
'The problem is everyone has swung so hard into that message, that we have kind of lost the villainous villains,' Rowe said. 'There is value in the villainous villains. There are people who just do evil things. Sometimes there is a reason for it, but sometimes not. Just because there is a reason doesn't mean it negates the harm.'
Whether it's good for children to identify with villains is complicated. There is a chance they adopt the villains' traits if it's what they identify with, but then some scholars believe it's not a bad thing for children to empathize with characters who often are part of marginalized communities, Rowe said.
The Disney villains also tend to appeal to adults more than children, as well as members of the LGBTQ+ community who have felt marginalized in the past, with some 'Disney princesses' gladly graduating into 'evil queens.'
Erik Paul, an Orlando resident who has had a year-round pass to Disney World for the past decade, isn't particularly fond of the villains, but he understands why Disney would want to frame them in a more sympathetic light in a show dedicated just to them.
'I know friends who go to Hollywood Studios mainly to see the villain-related activities,' Paul said. 'Maybe that's why people like the villains because they feel misunderstood as well, and they feel a kinship to the villains.'
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Follow Mike Schneider, author of 'Mickey and the Teamsters,' on the social platform Bluesky: @mikeysid.bsky.social .
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Best Mary Poppins Behind The Scenes Facts
First, Walt Disney started going after the rights to adapt P.L. Travers' Mary Poppins in 1938, four years after the first book was published. However, Travers repeatedly refused to give over the rights. Over the next several years, Disney continued to send offer after offer to Travers in an attempt to adapt the book. In 1959 — 21 years after starting the pursuit — Travers finally agreed to have Mary Poppins adapted by Disney, but she would have "final say" on the script. According to the documentary, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious: The Making of Mary Poppins, Disney personally flew to London in 1959 and met with Travers to once again try to convince her to let him adapt Mary Poppins. Speaking of the meeting, Travers reportedly said that talking to Disney was "like talking to a friendly, charming uncle who took from his pocket a gold pocketwatch and dangled it enticingly before your eyes." After working on adapting the book for two years, P.L. Travers came to Disney Studios and apparently "didn't like anything" that was written. In recordings and sketches from a 1961 meeting, Travers said, "The book should be read very carefully for accuracy." Some of the things she had a problem with were that Mary should "never be impolite to anybody," and she didn't like that the parents would start out harsh and not pay attention to their children so they could eventually have a "change of heart." In the documentary, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious: The Making of Mary Poppins, composer Richard Sherman said the "key to the story" was the parents being so preoccupied with their own lives that there was a "need" for Mary Poppins to come, so it was essential that they start a little cold, especially the Travers signed off on the project and was billed as a consultant on the film. Mary Martin, Bette Davis, and Angela Lansbury were all considered for the role of Mary Poppins before Julie Andrews. When Disney did a sequel to the film in 2018, titled Mary Poppins Returns, Lansbury actually appeared as a woman selling balloons in the park. At the time, Martin was best known for her work on stage in South Pacific, Peter Pan, and The Sound of Music. Meanwhile, Davis was fresh off her renowned work in Now, Voyager and All About Eve, and Lansbury had just starred in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Julie Andrews caught the attention of the Sherman brothers and Walt Disney after they saw her in Camelot. After Andrews and Richard Burton performed "What Do The Simple Folk Do?" on The Ed Sullivan Show, Disney flew to NYC to see Camelot on Broadway. In an interview at the Mary Poppins premiere, Disney said, "I went backstage and I tried to convince her that I was capable of making a picture with live actors as well as cartoons. I didn't know what she thought of me." In an interview from 1973, Andrews recalled that Disney "started acting out the whole of the script of Mary Poppins" while visiting her backstage at Camelot. Then, Disney invited Andrews and her then-husband, Tony Walton, to Los Angeles to see the storyboards for the film. Walton, who was a costume and set designer, ultimately ended up working on Mary Poppins, too. Initially, it was unclear if Julie Andrews would be able to star in Mary Poppins because she was the logical choice to star in My Fair Lady, after she played Eliza Doolittle on the West End and Broadway. However, Jack Warner ultimately cast Audrey Hepburn, citing that they needed "a name" to carry the film. Ultimately, Andrews and Hepburn were pitted against each other all awards season, with Andrews winning both the Golden Globe and Oscar for Mary Poppins, and she even thanked Warner in her Golden Globes acceptance speech. In her speech, Andrews said, "Finally, my thanks to a man who made a wonderful movie and who made all of this possible in the first Jack Warner."Looking back on her career with the Hollywood Reporter in 2015, Andrews said the one thing she wished she had was a recorded version of her My Fair Lady to show her grandchildren. She also said that while she understood the decision, getting passed over for the film only reinforced the idea she had in her head that she wasn't "pretty enough" for movies. Dick Van Dyke "begged" Walt Disney to let him play Mr. Dawes Sr., according to Julie Andrews in her memoir Home Work. Van Dyke wanted the role of Dawes Sr. so badly that he reportedly offered to play it for free. Andrew wrote in her memoir, "[Disney] took Dick up on that offer, and also persuaded him to make a $4,000 donation to the California Institute of the Arts, which Walt had recently cofounded." Disney made Van Dyke screentest for the role, too, as a little joke. According to Andrews, "Word flew around the Studios that he had been hilarious, totally persuasive and completely unrecognizable." Dick Van Dyke calls his accent for Bert the "worst Cockney accent [he's] ever done." While filming Mary Poppins, he asked J. Pat O'Malley, an Irish actor who voiced some of the animated characters in the film, to help him with his accent. Van Dyke joked in 2012 that he "made up a story" that it wasn't a Cockney accent, but rather an accent from "a little obscure county in the north of England." He also said that to this day, British people will come up to him and tell him what a horrible accent he does as Bert in Mary Poppins. Artist Peter Ellenshaw hand-painted 100 matte paintings for the backdrops that are seen in Mary Poppins. For the cityscape of London at dusk, Ellenshaw purposefully put little holes in the painting so that lights could shine through the back to make it look like the lights in the city. He said, "The lights would all come on gradually all over the city, or appear to." He previously worked with Disney on Treasure Island and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The first scene they filmed for Mary Poppins was the "Jolly Holiday" sequence, which means it was also the first thing Julie Andrews ever shot for a film in her career. In her memoir, Andrews recalled, "My first filmed scene simply required that I strike a pose, hands on my umbrella, while Bert said, 'You look very pretty today, Mary Poppins!' I then had to walk past him and say, 'Do you really think so?' I was extremely nervous and fretted over how to say that one simple line. I had no idea what my voice would sound like or how to appear natural on film." Bert and Mary walking arm-in-arm during "Jolly Holiday" was also one of the first pieces of choreography Andrews and Dick Van Dyke learned during rehearsals. Andrews said in her memoir, "I performed Mary Poppins's demure, ladylike version of the step — but Dick flung his long legs up so high that I burst out laughing. To this day, he can still execute that step." Over the course of the development of Mary Poppins, the Sherman brothers wrote around 32 songs, with only 14 making the final version of the movie. When they started working on the songs, there wasn't a script yet, so instead they worked off of P.L. Travers' book and used chapters to figure out what a song could be. Walt Disney's favorite song was "Feed The Birds." In one of the stories in the book, Mary Poppins spins a compass, and the Sherman brothers actually wrote songs for each of the places the compass lands on, like "North Pole Polka," "The Land of Sand," and melody for "The Land of Sand" was later used in The Jungle Book for "Trust In Me." Since Mary Poppins flies a lot, most of her costumes had to be duplicated in a larger size to accommodate the harness Julie Andrews had to wear. In her memoir, Andrews revealed, "This was a thick elastic body stocking, which started at my knees and ended above my waist. The flying wires passed through holes in the costume and were attached to steel panels on either hip." She continued, writing, "I literally did a lot of 'hanging around' between takes, and when I was suspended, the steel panels pressed on my hip bones, which became very bruised. Sheepskin was added, which helped, although it was barely enough, since I couldn't look too bulky." Since the penguins, fox, and more animated characters weren't actually on stage with the actors, cardboard cutouts were used in between takes so the actors would know where they should look and have the proper sightline before the cutouts were taken away to film the scene. The merry go round horses were the only things on set most of the time. In her memoir, Home Work, Julie Andrews recalled, "For the tea party under the willows with the penguin waiters, a cardboard penguin was placed on the table in front of me. Once I'd established the sightline, the penguin was taken away, and when cameras rolled, I had to pretend it was still there." In order to add in the penguins that Bert dances with during "Jolly Holiday," it was just Dick Van Dyke alone on the stage, and the animators then had to figure out how to add in the penguins after the footage was shot. Frank Thomas was the lead animator on the penguins. He previously worked on countless Disney animated movies like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Bambi, Cinderella, and more. "When I get over on the stage, I'd say, 'Where am I going to put my penguins?'," Thomas recalled in the documentary, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious: The Making of Mary Poppins. He continued, saying, "Because I would get the film of Dick actually doing the dance, here's hit feet flying all around and stepping on my penguins. How are you going to know ahead of time where he's going to be and where Dick Van Dyke's going to be? So I was losing more penguins every day. I had them duck, and I had them jump, and I had them get out of the way anyway they could." The entire "Jolly Holiday" and "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" scenes were created using the sodium vapor process. Instead of having the actors on a blue or green screen, which is common today, the actors were filmed against a white screen that was lit with yellow-hued sodium vapor lights. This process made it easier to isolate Julie Andrews, Dick Van Dyke, and the other actors from the background so the animators could animate both behind and next to them. Since they didn't film the scene against a blue backdrop, it also didn't put a limit on the colors that could be used in costumes, like Bert's blue bowtie and socks. Since "Step In Time" was such a demanding musical number, it was one of the few that required an extensive rehearsals. Dick Van Dyke revealed that it was a six week rehearsal process because it was "so complicated." He added, "It was amazing, the six weeks of rehearsal kind of got me into shape, and once we started shooting, I was ready." Van Dyke wasn't a trained dancer prior to Mary Poppins. Van Dyke told Conan O'Brien in 2012 that he asked Gower Champion, who was the chroegpraher for Bye By Birdie, which he starred in on Broadway and in the film, to help him learn to dance. He's loved dancing ever since. Mary's magic carpet bag was created by combining footage of Julie Andrews on a soundstage getting fed items up through the bag by a crew member hiding below the table, and footage of Karen Dotrice and Matthew Garber reacting to a clear table as Jane and Michael. Dotrice recalled, "We didn't know she was going to pull all of this stuff out of it! We were told to react to what she was taking out of the carpet bag. All of the things she pulled out of that carpet bag were a complete shock." She added, "Our reactions were completely genuine ... It was very exciting." In order to film the moment when Mary, Bert, Jane, and Michael climb the staircase made out of smoke, the crew created what was called "the black sponge stairs." On set, it was a seemingly ordinary staircase, but the stair treads were made of a sponge-like material so the actors' feet would slightly sink in, as if they were walking on the smoke. In a documentary, Karen Dotrice recalled filming the moment, saying, "I don't know how many takes it took to walk up that smoke staircase because we're following Julie holding broomsticks, walking up this smoke screen staircase, but it was like sinking." For the tea party with Uncle Albert, played by Ed Wynn, the sets were recreated a few different ways to help film the moment when everyone is floating and spinning in the air while laughing. The set was tilted 90 degrees in various directions, so the roof would be in a different spot, even with the ceiling being upside down at one point. Depending on the camera angle, the actors were either suspended on wires or sitting on a seesaw on top of a ladder, if it was a close-up. In the documentary, Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious: The Making of Mary Poppins, Tony Walton recalled, "Walt [Disney] himself came up with the technical approach to achieve the fact that they are laughing, [and] they are all floating about in the air." "Practically Perfect" was a song that was initially going to introduce Mary Poppins; however, it was cut from the film. Instead, the melody was repurposed into "Sister Suffragette," which Mrs. Banks sings. When Glynis Johns was brought in to play Mrs. Banks, she actually requested she have her own musical number, which is how "Sister Suffragette" was born. In a documentary about Mary Poppins, Johns revealed, "I said to Walt [Disney], it might give me incentive, if I could have my own little number." Richard Sherman said that after that, Disney leaned over to her and said they just finished a number for Mrs. Banks, and she'll love it. At the time, Richard and Robert hadn't even written the musical number yet. "The Chimpanzoo" was a song that was originally going to follow "I Love to Laugh" and was going to be sung by Julie Andrews while Mary, Bert, and the children were floating in the air at Uncle Albert's. The whole scene was developed but the number was scrapped the day recording on the song was going to take place. Richard Sherman revealed that Walt Disney felt the sequence wasn't necessary, and instead, after "I Love to Laugh," they all joke while drinking tea and then float down to the floor. And finally, costume designer Tony Walton hid little Easter eggs and details into the lining of Mary Poppins' outfits. In an interview with Vanity Fair in 2022, Julie Andrews revealed, "He said, 'You know, you're very prim and proper on the outside, but I think Mary Poppins has a kind of secret life, maybe, and I'm gonna give her, when you open your coat or when you turn and dance, you'll see marvelously-colored petticoats and wonderful linings of your clothes.'" Andrews said Walton's approach to the costumes helped her discover who Mary really was. She told Vanity Fair, "He said, 'Because I think that's what gives her pleasure. 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