10: KING FARGUS BRAVE
Here's a man who truly enjoys being king, and also enjoys being a dad. His problem? He only likes the fun parts of each job. When it comes to actually ruling the kingdom or making difficult decisions? He passes it off to his wife. The long standing tradition of marrying off their daughter but she's gone rebel base on us for having the gall to do so? Her mom can worry about it. He can't even keep the damn dogs tied up while they're trying to have dinner! He's known as the Great Bear King and hunts the animals for fun. A bear is exactly what his daughter Merida accidentally transforms the queen into. She tried to explain this to him but all he can do is try to kill it. I agree its a little far-fetched for a man to believe his daughter when she says mom's a bear now, but come on! They're living in Medieval Scotland! They blamed magic for colds and sore feet.
Worst yet, when Merida and her mom run away and his own triplet sons have turned into bears themselves and have hidden in the castle he doesn't seem to notice. He'd rather row with the boys in the main hall. Clearly Fargus has earned the throne by his strength and tenacity. He's played the game of thrones and won, but when it comes to being an attentive parent who keeps his children safe? Fail.
9: THE GREAT KING OF THE FOREST BAMBI
Do bucks hang around to raise their young with the doe they knock up? I have no idea, I failed animal husbandry in high school. I do know that this particular doe was sexed up by the King of the Forest. A great king I'm sure he must be, but from this dude's perspective he more a deadbeat dad than anything else. When he was missing for the first part of the movie, was he in Florida?
So this deer gives birth to his heir, the one who will inherit the responsibility of just kind of walking around aimlessly and the king takes off. He leaves Bambi to be raised by mom who (spoiler alert) has her brains scooped from her head by a hunter's bullet twenty minutes into the tale. That's when dad decides its time to do something. After his son has been through one of the traumatizing events to ever befall anything. Why the hell wasn't he charging down the hunters? I've seen the youtube videos, deer do that. And by the way, what asshole hunters are hunting does? Isn't that illegal or something? Everytime I play deer hunter at my movie theater I get a life taken away if I accidentally shoot a doe. So now with mom dead, dad decides its tim for the weeks old Bambi to quit acting like a bitch, and man up for God's sake! Your mom's dead kid, you're stuck with me! Which filled Bambi to no end with comfort I'm sure. You wanna know how he survived that fight at the end of the movie? He was thinking of his lousy father.
8: MR. PORTER TARZAN
"Oh, my daughter has fallen in love with this rippling ape-man of the jungle. We were on a ship on our way home to London where they have things like penicillin and houses. But she's in love, what am I to do? I guess I'll just live in the jungle with her. After all, I've wanted to study apes my whole life. And when I say study I mean I wanted to live with them, share their meals, and their diseases. I wasn't doing it to help preserve their species by proving their not the wild monsters we've seen them portrayed as. I've always secretly wanted to live in the jungle while my daughter swings recklessly around with a man who wouldn't know how to set a broken bone if you explained it to him.
We can all believe in the fantasy of true love conquering all, its fun to buy into it. You know what love can't conquer though? Malaria, appendicitis, scarlet fever. There's plenty of people who back in the day tried to love their loved ones through that, wanna know where they ended up? No you don't. At the end of their jolly adventure through the jungle Mr. Porter is just fine with daughter leaving the ship bound for home to stay with her king of the jungle. He jealously looks on before deciding that he is better off living there as well. Which is what I'm sure Tarzan wanted, his future father-in-law living in the tree across from his while he's laying pipe.
7: SIMBA THE LION KING II SIMBA'S PRIDE.
Everything you need to know is pretty much said, right there in the title. Simba's Pride. Meaning that everything his fater Mufasa was, Simba is not. You would think the events that lead him to overthrowing his uncle and reclaiming Pride Rock would have taught him something in humility and not judging others before you get to know them. Nope. He's had a daughter with Nala, and is showing her the kingdom when the come across the bastard son of Scar, Kovu. Suddenly Simba goes all clan dad and tells Kiara she's to stay away from him at all costs. Even though the kid didn't do anything. Oh yeah, Kovu is a kid. No older than Simba was the day Musfasa died. Here's our benevolent lion king, making judgements and snap decisions based on a past that Kovu had nothing to do with.
Did you leave your white hood back at the cave Simba?
Eventually Simba comes around, but by the end he's proven that he is more like his uncle when it comes to judgement of character and less like his dad.
By the way, did they bury Mufasa? Or did they eat him? Just asking.
6: ZEUS HERCULES
Ignoring the fact that this movie plays more like a remake of Superman than it does telling the actualy mythological tales of Heracles, we have another fine example of a father who is so busy making an ass of himself he fails to see the coniving plotting uncle set up the demise of him and his new born son. How awful of a drunk do you have to be to ignore the fact that your brother who has fire for hair is probably evil? Hercules gets kidnapped because his bed is a mile's distance away from his mother and father's room. (Who are really brother and sister, but we're not going to talk about that now). And even though the plot failed to kill the tyke it left him with his god-like strength. When he's finally old enough to realize where he's from Zeus, his father appears to tell him that he can only return to Olympis if he can prove he's brave enough. What a dumb-ass rule that is, huh? What boner decided that was the case?
Uh, Zeus, you did! You're the father of the gods! If you didn't write the rules, who did? I'm sure your devestated that your son isn't beside you on Olympus to distract you from whoring it up with his mom (your sister), so why not just tell him, "Look you're gonna be down there for a while. I've got a ton of wild oats to sow and you're only going to get in the way. I'll see you next weekend!" Instead he makes his son risk life and limb for the better part of a decade and just when he's about to die, there you go. You can come back now.
What a dick.
5: MR. DARLING PETER PAN
You want to know how badly the Darling children hate their father? In every translation of the Peter Pan story, the dastardly, murderous, no good, evil Captain Hook looks just like the old man. What sort of sadistic transgressions are going on in the Darling household that the children imagine a world in which their father's hand is severed and fed to a crocodile? Was it the hand he beat them with? I'm hoping for a worst case scenario when my son is a young adult, that he'll call me a dick behind my back to his friends. I certainly hope he doesn't imagine in his childhood a place where I have limbs hacked off by his imaginary protector.
Mr. Darling is a monster.
4: GEPETTO PINOCCHIO
Gepetto is a lonely old man who talks to his cat and goldfish while he makes wooden puppets. He's so lonely that after finishing his latest puppet he wishes on a star, specifically, for this puppet to become his son. Lo and behold a fucking miracle happens. The puppet wakes up and starts calling the old man father. Holy hot shit! I have a son! Well off you go, into the world of 1800 Italy. You better get to school or you'll be late. Here's a book, and an apple for the teacher.
"Thank you father," Pinocchio responded before asking, "Now can you please tell me what the hell school, books, apples, and teachers are? You see I was just brought to life a scant four hours ago. I also have a head full of wood shavings and termite bites. I'm likely to get into trouble because even though I hear the words you're saying I have no context for what they actually mean. Does school mean rob a store? Does apple mean beat the homeless?"
After Gepetto sends Pinocchio to his probable doom, he's surprised that he doesn't return. Because he's old, he's surprised when he gets his shoes on the right foot. So what's he do? He packs up shop, including the cat and the fish, and takes to the high seas looking for his walking puppet. Then the dope gets swallowed by a whale. You know how all this could have been avoided? By home schooling the kid until he understood how the world works. But its hard to be angry at Gepetto, he was poor and thus probably didn't have access to a good education and couldn't develop critical thinking skills. Plus he's old, like really, really old.
3: SULTAN ALADDIN
Ugh, I have to get this bitch daughter of mine married off before she drives me insane! Is what I'm sure the Sultan was thinking while he introduced suitor after suitor to her. He didn't care for her happiness or if she actually loved any of the schmucks he kept presenting to her, he just wanted her and her damn tiger out of the house. You know what he was more interested in that the happiness of his only born child? His toys. He wanted to sit and play with puzzle pieces and put the idea of his daughter out of his head. So what if she married a guy who would beat the living crap out of her nightly, or make her one of seven wives that would have to fight for his affection, or maybe he would just behead her when she gave him a daughter instead of a son.
After Aladdin is revealed to be a phony prince, he sees how much his daughter loves this kid who has nothing to offer her. I guess the tramp is just going to move him and his monkey into the palace and eat all the Sultan's cheese and drink all the Sultan's beer. He seems to be fine with that, so he changes to law to say the princess can marry whomever she deems worthy. Why didn't the twerp do that in the first place? He's the Sultan, if he wanted he could have the villagers he's in charge of put death. Every last one of them. Wouldn't it have been a slap in Aladdin's face if she decided that after this law is changed she decided that Hakeem, the dude shoveling manure, was a better fit for her then good ol' Al?
2: SIR EDGAR THE SWORD IN THE STONE
Sir Edgar took young Wart, real name Arthur, in after his parents died. Not knowing that this boy was the future King of England he proceeded to treat the boy worse than a slave. But that's a story as old as time, the kid no one wants living in the house with the birth kids of the mean adults who are treated light years better than themselves. HA! You wish. Sir Edgar's birth child is the knight Kay. And the old man slaps him around like he caught the boy stealing coins from his purse. Just for fun! Arthur didn't have a chance in this house. And when he stands up to the old goat he gets "demerits" which I'm sure is code for violent and brutal beatings. As far as we can tell its just Sir Edgar, his son, and a washer woman living in the run down castle. A punishment for Arthur is to clean the dirty pots, pans, and dishes from dinner. When we see the mess its a freaking dungeon full of dirty crockery! Who the hell is eating that much all the time?
Probably the worst part of it, is that Sir Edgar thinks he's doing the boy a favor. He claps himself on the back for taking in the lad and giving him a place to stay and live. All the meanwhile if the kid has an hour for himself he thinks he's just woken up on Christmas morning with presents by the truck load to open. Only when Arthur is revealed king does the bastard beg his forgiveness. So he's completely aware that he's treating the boy like shit and the threat of jail, or worse is the only thing that makes him bend his knee and beg. The child would have been safer living with Madam Mim.
1: KING TRITON THE LITTLE MERMAID
In world history, it was not uncommon for a family to marry off their daughters as young as eleven years old to husbands who might have been as old as twenty or thirty. Maybe even older. I'm sure during the mid to late 1800's when Hans Christian Anderson was alive, this was still a fairly common practice. But if we're going to talk The Little Mermaid as Disney sees it, we're going to pretend they live in a world where they obey our laws and standards of decorum. So before we even delve into how Triton allows his sixteen year old daughter Ariel to not only live on land, but marry a man who looks twice her age we're going to examine why growing legs and getting up out of the ocean may have saved the young girl's life.
First, we know Triton has a temper. Its said so in the first few lines of dialouge in the movie. "King Trition must be in a fine mood today!" Says one sailor thankful for the good weather. Meaning that if he were pissed Trition would sink the ship they were on and claim every sould aboard for his own. Cock. We do learn that Triton is in a good mood. He's attending a concert being conducted by Sebastian the crab, and his daughters. The star of the show is Ariel, who is missing at the finale. The look of fear and utter terror that grips not just Sebastian but the rest of the ocean community. You know that Triton has taken that magic staff of his and laid waste to everything in his path.
Like he does when he discovers his daughter's hidden trove of land treasures. Holy barnacles of Neptune! Triton doesn't just decimate the items, he sacreligiously smites them, in front of her. Its a wonder that she and her friends didn't boil in the water as his temper flared. For everything you can say about Ursula being evil, to her credit she doesn't go out looking to cause mischief. The stupid and the desperate seek her out. But there's no running from Triton if he wants you dead, you're fucking dead.
Humility at the hands of Ursula makes him realize that maybe he shouldn't be quite so hard on his daughter. She loves this man she barely knows, so he grants her wish and gives her legs in place of a fin. The Prince marries her and they all live happily ever after.
By the way, do you think Triton even explained fish sex to Ariel? I'm guess no. He might have found it an awkward discussion to have, explaining the process of laying her eggs and a mer-man coming up behind her to fertilize them with his seed. If that was just too difficult a topic to breach, do you think the thought crossed his mind to try to explain human sex to her? An act I'm sure the human prince was expecting on their wedding night? What are the chances that as soon as he got a fraction of a centimeter in, she went screaming from the castle and threw herself back into the sea, only to drown because now she has lungs. Triton didn't think anything through, not one action from beginning to end. The other father's may not have listened or play close attention to their kids, but Triton was just the absolute worst example.
But hey, you can't judge. The lifestyle and customs of the mer-folk are there's and ours are ours. You cannot judge. Except King Triton. Go ahead and judge him.
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