In 1987, Disney began to invest more in the production and promotion of its characters through merchandise and retail through their newly opened line of Disney Stores. During this time in films and television, the Walt Disney Company also started producing a fine collection of villains that became instant classics because of their cruel and sadistic personalities and character traits.
But recently Disney has turned down the heat in their portrayal of villains. Fans soon began relentlessly demanding to experience the old nostalgia of Disney’s earlier feared villains and to bring back classic characters like Scar and Hades.
Also read: 5 Disney Villains Who Are Just Purely Evil
Fans Want the Old School Villains From Disney
Recently, Disney has been overdoing it with their morally grey villains and the redeemable ones – villains who don’t equate to the heroes despite having some tragic backstory. Well, the fans don’t have anything against those villains, but they are not the so-called pure evil with which Disney started.
Also read: Disney Villains Who Are Just Misunderstood
During the era of earlier Disney films, the villains were shunned by society, insulted, and wronged, purely with evil purpose and intention. The creation of their backstory had minimal sympathy, not like the ones in modern films that are more anti-heroic in nature rather than pure evil. Obsessed with revenge and armed with destruction as their only motive, these villains reveled in spreading hatred and chaos.
The villains that Disney produced were powerful enough to destroy cities, cruel enough to manipulate the protagonist or his followers, and problematic enough to cause chaos in a peaceful world. The fans want these types of villains to return because nowadays the villains are mere stepping stones for the heroes.
Disney Villains Add Texture to the Movies
Disney villains are said to be overly ambitious in their goals. They have dreams and aspirations even if they are evil within, their thirst for power and desire to successfully overcome many. Unlike the princes and princesses we grew up watching and admiring, the villains with their flawed characters displayed real struggle.
The adult world harbors harsh reality and unrealistic dreams that the villains embrace during their journey. From our early childhood, we are taught to love the heroes through fairy tales and movies and to differentiate between good and evil. But it was due to the villains’ arcs and stories that the movies actually serve the hero’s purpose. It was for these villains that heroes would be born or would rise up to the occasion and save the world.
Also read: 14 Disney Villains Who Need An Origin Movie
Even Elsa from Frozen, one of Disney’s biggest productions, was intended to portray the role of a villain and gave her a completely different arc than a regular princess. They would have explored the dark side of Elsa, as was portrayed in the original tale by Hans Christian Anderson, but due to the film’s success, the character was later completely redesigned.
Source: Twitter
