So recently we watched “Maleficent“, in which the titular villain from “Sleeping Beauty” gets the Wicked treatment:
Now I didn’t tell my wife much about the movie; I just popped in the disc and started it playing, so she didn’t really know what to expect. She immediately noticed various, shall we say, similarities to other films to which I’ve subjected her over the years:
Wife: “Who’s that?”
Me: “That’s Maleficent.”
Wife: “Does she live in Pandora?”
Wife: “Those tree things remind me of that other movie? Where the tree things attacked the thing?”
Me: “Ents?”
Wife: “Yes! Ents!”
And my favorite, when (spoiler alert!) a certain princess pricked her finger on the spinning wheel:
Wife: “What, now this is ‘Sleeping Beauty’?”
I got into the act, too:
Me: “These three incompetent fairies remind me of the witches from ‘Hocus Pocus‘”.
And:
Me: “The way Maleficent uses her wings to fight reminds me of how the angels used their wings in ‘Legion‘.”
Wife: “Oh no no no no no. That movie freaked me out!”
Me: “Okay, well, she doesn’t need wings anyway. She can cut down an entire army with her cheekbones.”
“Maleficent” put my wife to sleep in about 20 minutes the first time, but she was pretty tired. The second time, we finished it off in one sitting. As it turned out, she quite liked it, despite her feeling she had seen much of the imagery before.
Wife: “That was good, but have you ever seen another movie that looked like so many other movies stitched together?”
Me: “Oh yeah. ‘The Mummy Returns‘. That one ripped off ‘Jurassic Park 3’, ‘Gremlins’, ‘Congo’, ‘Stargate’, ‘Young Indiana Jones Chronicles’ …”*
And since I seem to be on a video kick lately, here’s another recent pop media item that references “Sleeping Beauty”. Take it away, Pierces!
* “The Mummy Returns” ripped off waaaaay too many movies for me to link them all. If I did, it would probably break the Internet.
Viscosity 