Tuesday, September 2, 2014

Grace Nelson Blog Post 2

For my genealogy project I plan to write about the genealogy of Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Many people do not know that The Little Mermaid, and many other Disney fairytales are based on old folktales. Often these folktales are dark and have endings not as PG as Disney has re written them to be. In my genealogy essay I will compare the modern Disney film with the 19th century folktale. Disney’s The Little Mermaid also pulls from ancient Greek religion, for example Ariel’s dad is Triton, Messenger of the sea. The image or creature of a merman/mermaid itself can be dated back to ancient Greek mythology.

Other ideas I have for the genealogy project are to write about how Disney’s The Lion King is based off of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In The Lion King Simba is the character of Hamlet Jr, Scar is Claudius, and Pumbaa and Timon are Rosencratz and Guildenstern. I feel like this genealogy is one that is better known and obvious. The Lion King also has allusions to bible stories, then again so do most modern stories.

My last resort for this genealogy project is to look at modern pop music that has sampled from previous songs. There are hundreds of examples of this phenomena, it would probably be difficult to find a pop song that is NOT sampled. Another take on this concept I may take if I go this route is songs like Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” and Queen’s “Under Pressure”. The beginnings of these songs are exactly the same. Is that considered sampling or flat-out copying?


The Little Mermaid track is the one that I have thought out the most and am most invested in. I plan on digging even further into this genealogy so that I can complete my genealogy essay.

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