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DID YOU KNOW…
I think we all know that pretty much all of Walt Disney’s films are based on popular fairy tales, like Snow White, Cinderella and so on.
But we might not know that the stories were changed because Disney didn’t like sad endings; he was unhappy in life and wanted the characters in his movies to experience paradise in their little worlds. Take Pinocchio: the original story included Pinocchio stomping Jiminy Cricket to death with his foot, and the story ends with Pinocchio being hung – I don’t remember that in the Disney film!
When you think about it, every Disney film follows the same basic storyline: the main character has a dream, and it comes true…and this has now been replicated throughout Hollywood, and even into our minds. We’ve had a couple of generations brought up on Disney films now, but we have more depression, debt and addiction than ever before in history.
Ideas like Disney’s have affected our attitudes to the point that we think the purpose of existing must be to achieve our little dreams of money, sex and power – and when God doesn’t provide on them we’re disappointed. But God always knows better than we do, and always wants better than we do. I’ve quoted this before but it bears repeating – here’s C.S. Lewis, with perhaps one of my favourite quotes of all time:
If we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered to us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
