The Matt Walsh Show - Matt Walsh Explains Why These Movie Villains Were Right

Episode Date: December 28, 2023

These movie villains were actually right, and I will explain why.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

So we all know that Disney movies these days are hopelessly woke and basically awful in every way. I'm a narcissist. Weird. Weird. And that's why most people think back fondly to, like, the old days at Disney. They pine for the classics. I understand that mentality, but... The truth is that even older Disney movies have issues.

The problem is that in those films, in many cases, the alleged villains are treated, I think, very unfairly. They get a bad rap. In many cases, they are misunderstood, misconstrued. I only want it to help. And look, maybe it's just my overabundance of empathy and compassion. You know, it gets me into a lot of trouble sometimes. And maybe that's what allows me to see it this way.

But either way, today in this very important video, we're going to talk about Disney villains who were actually right all along. So we'll go through five movies. Number one is Bambi. Wake up. We have company. Now, first of all, I've never met a child who actually likes this movie. I don't know anyone my age who liked Bambi growing up. Bambi is one of the weakest films in the Disney Canon,

and yet it's viewed as a classic doesn't happen to be released in the 40s, although it could have been released last year based on the fact that the villains in this movie are the hunters who shot Bambi's mom. No hasty-caller shooting. There you are, far away. Oh, good shot, boy, good shot. But they were obviously entirely justified in doing so. First of all, because venison is delicious.

Those hunters, I'm guessing, made some great venison steaks, maybe some deer jerky out of Bambi's mom, which is a fact that could have brought Bambi some comfort and solace if anyone had explained it to them, but they never did. Second, deer populations are out of control in this country. Like, they wreak havoc in ecosystems. They cause 1.5 million car crashes a year. including hundreds of fatalities.

So deer hunters are performing a service, and yet they've been villainized in a movie that generations of bored children have been forced to watch. Think about this. If Bambi's mom had not been shot and killed, she may have gone on to, like, run into the road one night, causing a family returning home from dinner to veer off into a tree and die.

Whole family. Dead. Think about that. Number two is Lion King. Now, I'm not saying that Scar is the good guy in that film. I'm not justifying what he did. Like killing your brother, trying to kill your nephew, is inappropriate. I don't condone it.

But all I'm saying is that, you know, I think the character deserves a bit more sympathy than he gets. For one thing, his name is Scar. Okay? I don't want to get into the nature versus nerve. or debate, but when you name your child's scar, you can't complain when it becomes a villain. Especially if we have one kid that you name Mufasa, you know, that's strong name...

Mufasa. Ooh. The other one you named Scar. What'll that make you? A monkey's uncle. So what did you expect? Also, I'm not saying that Mufasa deserves to be thrown off a cliff,

but there's a fundamental, like, moral dishonesty to Mufasa that I've, that I always found deeply troubling, even as a child, the first time I saw it. I even said to my parents, there's a fundamental moral dishonesty this film, Mom and Dad. I said that to them. And here's what? He eats his own subjects. Okay, one minute, they're all celebrating the birth of his son. You know, they're bringing gifts or

whatever. They're cheering. And the next, they don't show this in the film, but Mufasa is hunting them down and consuming them. And by the way, lions eat their prey alive. That's how lions eat. That's how Mufasa treated his subjects. And then he has the audacity to get all high and mighty towards Scar? Like, you can understand Scar's resentment. And to make matters worse, they acknowledge it in the movie. So Simba asks his dad...

Dad, don't we eat the antelope? They were just at our baby shower, and now, like, we eat them. And that's kind of not cool. And Mufasa says, well, son, that's okay, because it's part of the circle of life. When we die, our bodies become the grass, and the antelope eat the grass. Okay, but that is not the same thing at all.

That is not an even trait. So give me a break. And also, your body doesn't even become grass. So that's bullshit to begin with. And I'm not holding it against the lion for being a lying. I'm just saying that there's arguably a certain intellectual integrity in scars outlook and behavior that you don't find with Mufasa. That's my point.

Number three is Pocahontas. This is an obvious one. The villains in this movie are the evil white Europeans who are portrayed as brutal, greedy, barbarians, oppressing the innocent Native Americans who are all kind and generous and so in touch with nature, they can literally talk to the trees. Morning child. Somehow everybody speaks perfect English, including the trees. This is like the noble savage myth put the film.

It's also really, we talk about wokeness and Disney films. This was the beginning of Disney's long march into wokeness. But you could argue that that march began with the vegetarian propaganda of Bambi. But in any case, the white settlers in reality were courageous and intrepid pioneers, not villains. We'll build roads and decent howlough. Our houses are fine. You think that, only because you don't know any better. So that's an easy one.

Number four is Snow White. Now, this is another case where I'm not so much claiming that the evil queen was wholly justified in her actions. I'm simply suggesting that the situation is a bit more nuanced. There's some nuance. There's some complexity. Okay? Did Snow White deserve to be poisoned with an apple? No.

But does she also bear some responsibility for eating. an apple offered to her by a random old woman who showed up at her window laughing maniacally. Yes, absolutely. All right. She never even asks like who the woman is. Yes, I am. Just the woman shows up at the window and says, hey, do you want an apple? And she never says, who are you?

What are you? Why? Excuse me, what the actual fuck are you doing in my house? This woman's walking around the forest, randomly handing out apples. There's no question. She just takes it and eats it. Doesn't bother washing it in the sink. So it's hard for me to feel sorry for her.

And for the record, you should never eat anything if the person offering it is laughing while they hand it to you. Never mind if it's an evil laugh. I don't care if it's any kind of laugh. And never mind that they're at your window in the middle of the day for no reason. Not to mention the fact that the whole Snow White fairy tale is really about home invasion and burglary. This woman barges into the home of these clearly mentally disabled old men. Jiminy crickets. who aren't even half her size, makes herself at home.

Put a new little chair. Now, eventually the doors grow attached to her, so you might say, oh, they're friends. No, they were terrified when they first got away. Like, anybody would be, you get home and there's this giant, like, sleeping on all of your beds, that she's helped herself too. Of course, anyone would be scared. And they were scared, but eventually this kind of Stockholm syndrome takes effect, and they become friends.

And then when she dies, they put her in a glass coffin because they somehow had a full-sized glass coffin lying around, which makes you question their motives, frankly. And they display her body for several days until a prince who has never met her before, shows up out of nowhere, kisses this woman who, for all he knows, has been dead for days. This is back when they didn't have, like, the preservation of the body.

Nothing was done to preserve the body. It could be some, you know, decomposing. I mean, you know. And he starts just kissing this dead woman. It's very dark. It's a very morbid story when you think about it like an insane person, which means the evil queen is maybe still evil, but her action should at least be understood in proper context.

And maybe you could argue that she even was an advocate for private property rights. And that's why she was so upset at Snow White. That's one interpretation. Number five, finally, is Beauty and the Beast. Now, we've talked about this before. I consider it to be one of the most important issues that I discuss. it probably deserves to be the subject of its own documentary. Gaston is the quintessential villain,

who was actually the hero of the story. Hello, Bill. Bonjour, Gaston. And I will insist on this until my dying breath. We're supposed to hate Gaston from the beginning, because why? He's manly and in good shape. He eats a lot of eggs?

Is that his crime? What has he done wrong? It's not right for a woman to read. Soon she starts getting ideas and thinking. They never explain it. And the anti-Gaston propaganda is laid on thick from the very beginning. But even in spite of that, it's clear who the real protagonist is. We see Gaston early in the film.

What a pleasant surprise. Right? He's dressed to the nines. He visits Bell to propose marriage. Say you'll marry me. And he's obviously an advocate of traditional marriage and a nuclear family. He even says that. He makes a pitch for the nuclear family, traditional marriage to Bell.

He's explaining. have six or seven. Dogs? No, Bell. Strapping boys like me. You know, he wants to have children, he wants to have a family. It's a very lovely thing. Bell turns him down and pushes him into a mud pit. Total humiliation. And yet by the end, Gaston is still willing to risk his life to rescue this woman, this woman who humiliated him from the clutches of a beast. And how did beauty end up in that situation? Yeah, she initially went to the Beast Castle to save her dad or whatever, I think. How did you find me? But she had many opportunities to escape after that point.

Like, she could have just walked out. I mean, she was in the prison cell, and then she's invited to dinner. And from that point on, she doesn't go back to the prison cell. So she could have left any time, anytime. But she stays because she ends up falling in love with a non-human creature who looks kind of like an evil water buffalo. Keep something in mind. Bell didn't know that the beast was really a human prince. She had no idea about that.

Okay? That's true. Look up on the, that you can go back and watch the movie. She never is aware of that fact. That was just luck of the draw. So as far as she knew, she was entering into a romantic relationship with a member of another species. That's a simple fact. Now, of course, poor Gaston, he didn't know about any of this.

He didn't know that the beast was really a prince. He didn't know that the woman of his dreams had fallen. falling in love with a giant mutant mountain goat. All he knew from his perspective was that beauty had been imprisoned by a monster. Her own dad told Gaston that, Who's got bell locked in a dungeon? A beast! A horrible monstrous beast!

And so he rallies the troops. He marches off to fight for her and save her. This is the villain of the story. The man who ultimately gave his very life for the woman he loved. And the monster who kidnapped a young woman is supposed to be the one we're rooting for, that's just wrong. And I won't stand for it.

So, thank you for spending 10 minutes watching this piece of content. It was obviously very important and well worth your time. And mine. How many discounts does USAA auto insurance offer? Too many to say here. Multi-vehicle discount. Safe driver discount.

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