The Original Version Of Snow White Has Parents Shocked

Well, back in 1937, the company debuted a film that was undeniably groundbreaking. Parents and children paid their 25 cents and filed into the movie theaters to experience the very first full-length animated musical feature: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

The fairy tale gave life to a booming franchise — theme park rides, cartoons, TV shows, and even Broadway musicals — and it remains a go-to movie for any parent looking to entertain kids on a rainy day. But the beloved Disney version is based on a story that's not so wholesome.

In the film version, a young, innocent beauty spends her days washing pans and sweeping filthy floors. Even stuck as a scullery maid, Snow White's positive vibes can't be squashed. She trills with her songbird pals happy as ever, to her evil stepmother's chagrin.

Disney's version of the tale is an epic throwdown of good versus evil, pitting pure defenseless Snow White against the conniving, wart-faced wickedness of the Queen. But while there are moments of terror, it is a kids' film, meaning Walt kept the details fairly PG.

In fact, many of the darker moments from the original tale had to be pruned away. At the story's core, free of sugarcoating, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is much grittier. You could even say that it's too scary for the kids.

The real credit should go to brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. They compiled the collections of what the Western world considers the big fairy tales. Not authors in the strictest sense, Jacob and Wilhelm were respected historians and academics who rooted through European folklore to identify the best stories.

Then, after years of curating folktales, the brothers released their masterpiece, Children's and Household Tales, in 1812. In total, the first edition included 86 stories, and it marked the first written publication of a few little-known fables. We're talking the now-famous Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, and Rumpelstiltskin.

"Children" may have been part of the title, but the book was totally barbaric as far as kids' literature goes. Jacob and Wilhelm made sure to pack each story to the brim with gory details. Most of these original versions contain twists and turns that would make even adult readers wince.

For example, there's a bit in Cinderella where the stepsisters resort to mutilation to make their feet fit the famous glass slipper. What's the big deal about shaving off a couple of toes and a heel or two? And in Snow White, the differences were even more pronounced.

In the original Brothers Grimm story, Snow White is just seven years old. The cartoon version, by contrast, is 14. Either way, she was too young to entertain marriage. And it only gets bleaker from there...

Similar to the movie, the fairy tale begins with the jealous Evil Queen ordering the Huntsman to lure Snow White into the woods. That way, she can be eliminated. But Disney left out the Queen's graphic instructions: "Kill her, and as proof that she is dead, bring her lungs and liver back to me."

Not keen on the idea of slaughtering an innocent, the Huntsman doesn't follow through. Instead, he takes down a boar. Then he retrieves the organs on the Queen's grocery list and presents them to her as if they belonged to Snow White.

Acting as if Thanksgiving has come early, the Queen doesn't hesitate to prepare the boar parts she believes to be human. The story says, "The cook had to boil them with salt, and the wicked woman ate them, supposing that she has eaten Snow White's lung and liver."

Another major difference from the Disney version? There are two other schemes the Queen concocts to fool Snow White. Her first crack at taking the girl down involves fitting her into a corset. The Queen pulls the strings so tight, however, that the child falls unconscious. Then the dwarfs show up.

And the dwarfs come to the rescue. They cut Snow White out of the corset, saving her life. Yep, in the original version, the dwarfs aren't singing. They have their hands full thwarting all of the Queen's murderous plans.

Next, the Queen attempts to take Snow White's life with an accessory. She slips a poison-laced comb into little Snow's lustrous hair, causing her to pass out again. Once more, though, the dwarfs swoop in. They remove the comb to save the girl.

But the third time's the charm for the Queen. In both the original and Disney version of the tale, she successfully tricks Snow White into eating a poisoned apple. And with the girl presumed dead, the Queen's men place her body inside a glass coffin. That's when things get stranger — if that's even possible...

The Prince makes his first appearance in the Brothers Grimm version as the dwarfs are mourning Snow White. And though the two have never crossed paths, the charmer requests to take Snow, glass coffin and all, away with him. Reluctantly, the dwarfs move to the coffin — before one well-timed stumble erupts in chaos.

One of the pallbearers trips, causing the coffin to quickly lurch. And as Snow White's unconscious body jerks, this dislodges the poison apple from her throat. Suddenly, the girl revives and spits the fruit out of her mouth on her own — without the intervention of a kiss.

From there, the movie and the Brothers Grimm text realign. Snow falls in love with the Prince, and they immediately get married. For the Queen's tragic end, however, Disney had to make some edits. There was no happy ever after for her in the original!

The — albeit far from cutesy animated ending — has the dwarfs chase the Queen to the edge of a cliff. And thanks to a convenient lightning strike, she falls with only nature to blame. Walt needed to include a death after all. But the folktale execution was rather more creative and drawn out.

In the Brothers Grimm version, the Queen was invited to the wedding and served as the entertainment, "They put a pair of iron shoes into burning coals," the story reads. "They were brought forth with tongs and placed before her. She was forced to step into the red-hot shoes and dance until she fell down dead." But while Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs seems pretty bleak now, it's far from the only Disney tale to have a darker side.

Take Beauty and the Beast, a 'tale as old as time' that was darker than any kid could handle in its original version. Penned by Gabrielle Suzanne de Villeneuve in 1740, the story La Belle et La Bête was published in La Jeune Américaine, et Les Contes Marins and has made waves in the literary universe ever since then.

Gabrielle-Suzanne's version was over 100 pages long and had underlying themes that were considered rather controversial for the times. The book delved into the darkness of women's marital rights, as women weren't legally allowed to choose their spouses in the mid-eighteenth century.

Her tale featured a barbaric, "stupid" Beast whose emotional suffering ran deep, therefore affecting how he portrayed himself to the world. See, it wasn't just his ghastly appearance that tormented him.

The Beast was a youthful prince whose father passed, and whose mother had to carry on with war to defend her late husband's kingdom. The prince's mother, the Queen, instructed a fairy to care for him, but what a selfish, downright nasty fairy she was.

This evil, fantastical creature preyed on the prince, waiting for him to become an adult before attempting to seduce him. Her plan of seduction went all wrong, however, as the prince denied her advances, which made her quite angry. The furious fairy then turned him into a gnarly beast.

The Beast's backstory was undoubtedly tragic, but Belle's backstory wasn't exactly a walk in the park either. In Gabrielle-Suzanne's version, Belle wasn't actually the daughter of a merchant, but rather the child of a king and a good fairy, which proved to be dangerous for the beautiful girl.

Sadly, she was forced to pose as a merchant's late daughter for her own safety, as the evil fairy desperately tried to murder Belle so she could get to her father, the King, and marry him. This wicked fairy was really a piece of work.

We are very familiar with Disney's animated adaptation, which sees Belle dance and sing with a plethora of talkative inanimate objects, such as Lumiere the candlestick and Mrs. Potts the teapot, who were once human servants before being cursed. But this isn't exactly how the original version went...

Gabrielle-Suzanne wrote that the people of the palace were all cursed, turned into lifeless statues with no ability to talk. Sadly, there was no dancing or singing. The imprisoned Belle could only interact with birds and monkeys, who donned costumes for some reason.

But this isn't the version common folk are most familiar with, as it was a shortened 1756 adaptation by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont that really made the tale skyrocket to fame. Though she kept the original title, she described it as "a tale for the entertainment of juvenile readers."

Not only did Jeanne-Marie simplify Gabrielle-Suzanne's original version (Belle not being related to a king or a good fairy), but she modernized it, incorporating social and political changes to France that were happening at the time.

But none of these versions would have existed without the true tale as old as time, as some scholars believe that La Belle et La Bête may have been inspired by the tale of "Cupid and Psyche," which was written in the Latin novel Metamorphoses.

The ancient Roman fable was written by Apuleius in the 2nd Century C.E. The story begins when a jealous Venus banishes the beautiful Psyche to the tippy top of a mountain, where Venus' son, Cupid, would force her to marry a murderous beast. It doesn't start off promising.

Cupid didn't exactly complete his mission, as he himself fell in love with Psyche and whisked her away to his castle. Every night Cupid would visit her dark room as her "unseen husband," directing her to never look at his face... but curiosity soon got the best of Psyche.

She disobeyed her "husband," shining a candlestick in his face and accidentally burning him. By doing so, she lost him. When she offered herself as a slave to Venus in order to atone for the mistake she made, the masochistic Venus made her perform grueling, impossible challenges.

Psyche would've done anything to win her husband back, and she did. Upon going to complete her last horrific task, which entailed pursuing beauty from the Queen of the Underworld, she wound up in a coma.

This flooded Cupid with guilt, as he couldn't watch his true love suffer any longer. He then begged the god Jupiter to save Psyche and make her immortal, so they could wed and forever be together. It's a tragically beautiful story.

Considering the French Beauty and the Beast may have derived from Apuleius' tale of gods and immortal love, it makes sense that other countries have made their own alterations to La Belle et La Bête. Oral tellings of stories could explain regional variations.

In the Russian fable The Enchanted Tsarévich, as well as in the Chinese story The Fairy Serpent, the "beast" isn't described as a large, animalistic monster, but rather as a scaly snake. In the Italian tale of Zelinda and the Monster, however, the "beast" presents itself as a fire-breathing dragon. The list goes on.

All iterations of Beauty and the Beast, however, all boast the same morals: envy will never be rewarded, and true love is unconditional, as a "beast" at first glance may have a beautiful, lovable soul. But the road to learning these morals was a dark one, and it's not the only fairy tale that's sinister at its core.

In large part due to the beloved Disney animated classic, Pinocchio is a cultural icon. Kids all over the world instantly relate to the puppet who only wants to be a real boy. But, as it turns out, there's a lot more to this story than Disney fans realize.

For one thing, Pinocchio is not a Disney original character. Instead, his earliest appearance dates back to 1881, in a tale that sees the living marionette endure a much darker and more twisted series of adventures.

Italian author Carlo Collodi detailed the puppet boy's adventures throughout issues of children's magazines. In contrast to Disney's warm and fuzzy adaption, Carlo seemed more interested in really using the story to teach a lesson.

Not only does Carlo eventually reward characters for doing good, but he also goes out of his way to punish any immoral act in the story. All in all, his fairy tale resembles the sinister tone of the writings of the Brothers Grimm.

For starters, Collodi's Geppetto doesn't explicitly wish for Pinocchio to come to life. He's just a poor beggar carving a marionette, which gains consciousness on its own. From the moment the lonely man starts carving, Pinocchio's nose begins to take shape and grow.

Though Collodi doesn't have the Blue Fairy endow Pinocchio with life, she does appear — in a way. Called the Fairy with Turquoise Hair, she pops up sporadically to guide him. And, to add a layer of creepiness, she describes herself as a dead girl who was never buried.

Disney's Pinocchio makes his fair share of mistakes, which endanger himself and his loved ones. But the original goes out of his way to be rude and selfish. For everyone around Pinocchio, there are a lot of strings attached.

The puppet does more than just lie to Geppetto. He exploits him financially, selling off his meager possessions for a theater ticket and other frivolities. When the police witness Pinocchio's antics, they accuse Geppetto of negligence and toss the adoptive father in jail.

Jiminy Cricket serves as Pinocchio's conscience and famously sings about wishing upon stars. The Collodi novel, however, doesn't even name him. That's probably a wise choice since the talking cricket doesn't have much of a role in the story.

The cricket does appear, spouting advice to the misbehaving Pinocchio, but he is having none of it. Channeling his inner Thor, the puppet nonchalantly grabs one of Geppetto's hammers and hurls it at the wall. It pulverizes the poor insect.

Collodi likely devised these unlikeable moments to set up Pinocchio's eventual redemption, though that's not all. They also help readers feel less guilty for Pinocchio when terrible things happen to him.

The Disney adaptation sees the puppet trapped on Pleasure Island, where misbehaving boys turn into donkeys and get sold into slavery. Luckily, Pinocchio's transformation halts after he receives a donkey tail and ears.

Collodi, however, has the protagonist fully morph into a donkey. When an old man tries to drown Pinocchio so he can skin him, the puppet gets out of danger through disturbing means: fish devour all the donkey flesh around him, leaving the puppet unharmed.

Just like in the animated movie, the novel introduces a conniving Fox and Cat who try to con Pinocchio. For family audiences, Walt Disney and company left out their most bloodthirsty plots.

The book includes a scene — which Collodi planned as the original ending — where the Fox and Cat attempt to murder Pinocchio. Disguised as bandits, they ambush him in the forest and hang him from a tree. Fortunately, the Fairy later shows up to rescue him.

Despite their very different paths, both the novel and Disney film reach the same destination. The Fairy uses her magic to fulfill Pinocchio's wish by turning him into a real boy.

Moreover, the variations in these stories of Pinocchio only enrich his legend. They give writers and filmmakers more space to project their own visions, which explain the many other film adaptations released over the years.

No matter which version is your favorite, there's no denying that the puppet is one of the most enduring pop-culture icons ever. If you claim you haven't heard of Pinocchio, there's a good chance your nose will start growing.