So, my kids are 5 and 3, and with that age range, they've recently started to get really into various Disney movies... which means I've been re-watching some of these for the first time in 20-25 years, and I'm now watching them through the lens of someone who does worldbuilding and it makes things weird.

Last night the kids watched Beauty and the Beast, a wonderful classic Disney movie. Back in the late 90's, my sister used to get home from school and toss this movie into our VHS player quite literally every day for almost a year. It eventually got moved to a 'now-and-then' rotation, but I remember being so sick of it that I never wanted to see it again.

This changed when my own kids got to the age where at least one of them can pay attention to a movie for most of the length of the show. Now I'm excited to show off some of the old films I (and my sister) enjoyed back when we were kids.

Now, I'm sure I'm far from the only person to poke at the worldbuilding of early Disney films like this one, but as we sat there watching it I picked up on a few weird details.

Jumping right into it, the first thing that struck me is in the background story details.

We're told that the prince was cursed for not letting in a haggard old woman seeking shelter. The old woman changes into a beautiful enchantress and curses him to be a beast until he either finds shared love, or turns 21 years old and is stuck as a beast forever.

So, a few things from that opening scene give 'wait what?' reactions. First, it's not directly stated, but if we read between the lines, we can tell that the Prince is an orphan. Parents aren't mentioned anywhere, at any time, by anyone.

We also find out through a comment Lumiere makes that it's been "ten years" since the curse was cast and that this is the final year (the Prince's 21st birthday), so it's the last chance to break the curse.

Meaning, this old enchantress duped an orphaned eleven-year-old boy into being cursed because he... what? Wouldn't allow some shady old lady into his castle in the middle of the night?

Now, with that said, let's actually look at the curse itself. It turns the Prince into a beast, but it also curses everyone in the palace to become animate furniture, and then goes one step further to make the surrounding countryside a dangerous, gloomy place. This leaves us with a bit of a loose thread as the curse is only ten years old - folks in the nearby village must have known about the castle, but nobody bothers to investigate why their lush woods are all of a sudden creepy and full of wolves? Seems a bit suspicious to me, and make me wonder if there's not some 'TARDIS'-style shenanigans at play as well, making folks just not think about the Castle and thus not wonder about the peculiarity of the change.

Now that we have an understanding of the curse and it's effects, something that I wonder about as a half-decent person and a worldbuilder is: how that must have affected a child.

At 11, you're still firmly a kid, and being turned into a gigantic beast for a decade... well, it's no wonder the guy has a hell of a temper. It's no wonder Beast doesn't really get how spoons work anymore. That's a lot to deal with as a kid who's all alone.

Which brings us to the darkest part of the worldbuilding. Everyone in the castle was turned into furniture. Awesome, yeah, no worries... except... there's the whole West Wing.

Now, I'm not the kind of person to assume that the broken husks of furniture in the West Wing are all people. I think it's likely that most of this is just... normal every-day ordinary furniture.

But, what if not all of it is? What if, immediately after being transformed the Prince rushed to his bedroom and tore through everything he could get his hands on in a fit of rage even before he realized that all of the staff had been turned into furniture?

That would imply that his own personal staff are... you guessed it! Dead in the waste of the West Wing.

We see castle staff throughout the entire show, and that's normal and expected. But what Prince or Princess doesn't have their own personal staff? One or two people who just kind of are always around tending to the kid's needs. No-one fitting that description shows up in the show at all... and maybe that's because there was none assigned to him but it does leave a person wondering.

There's just a lot of not very well thought-out worldbuilding elements and plot threads that left me with a bunch of questions. It is likely that a lot of these come from adapting the show from source material that I haven't bothered to look up, and the fact that they're of course cutting corners because it's for kids and who in their right mind would even care, right?

ME, THATS WHO. 😂

Anyhow, that's what's been on my mind today. The weird details some shows leave us that as worldbuilders and writers we're able to pick at and ponder over.

What shows have done this for you recently?

^{Join the Worldbuilding Community!}