Friday, November 11, 2011

What Disney Taught Me

I'm watching Aladin cause my husband loves me and DVRed it for me when it came on abcFamily the other weekend :).  I LOVED Disney movies when I was a kid.  Okay, let's be honest, I Love Disney movies now.  Nothing has changed, except that I get more of the references they include to keep adults from being bored to tears.  A lot of parents are hesitant to let kids watch tv because some research says it will dull their minds (that is vastly paraphrased).  While I can't see that some tv shows do much good for kids (Teletubbies anyone?), I was thinking about what I learned from Disney movies.

-Vocabulary:  words like "urchin" and "mad" (as in crazy) as well as a few random words like that "poisson" means fish in French
-Themes:  liking to read is cool (Beauty and the Beast), marriages used to be arranged, and drugs make you crazy (Alice in Wonderland, okay so maybe that was a later learned lesson)
-Love of Showtunes:  the music in Little Mermaid and Aladin, ahhh, they had some good music.  Alan Menken was great at what he did.  Tim Rice wrote some of the music and he went on to write the music for Aida, the Broadway musical.
-Actors:  there were some quality voice actors at Disney!  Robin Williams as Genie, the guy who played Charles Winchester as Cogsworth, Angela Lansbury as Mrs. Potts, and later Anika Noni Rose as Tiana.
-References:  the stories referenced mythology, pop culture, and other Disney movies.  Now, I Love to see movies with hidden references like that (I don't know why and it is hard to explain)

Relieve your childhood.  Watch a Disney movie!
What was your favorite Disney Princess movie?  I'm gonna make a poll about it, cause I love polls!

2 comments:

  1. Ummmmm, WHERE is Beauty and the Beast?! -- Mom

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  2. Just for the record it should be Bell. Beauty and the Beast was the movie... yes, one of my kids at work very quickly pointed this out to me the other day at work. Haha! She's 2...

    -Bekah

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