I told you I’d be back…provided the stomach flu decided to release its grip on me. Well, today was solid food day—the first day since Sunday that everything I ate stayed where it belonged. Earned a couple pounds back too. I’m not gaining weight though: I’m retaining food. Yay!!

To add to the frivolity, my email reminded me that today Rocky the WonderDog celebrates his 467th birthday (seriously, he’s been with us for 2 years but I think he was Jesus’s dog. He’s old.)

Anyway, as long as we’re celebrating birthdays, how about a gift? How about some villains? I said I’d bring back the Disney villains and we start with one of the oldest: Maleficent from Sleeping Beauty.

Now, I am not a Sleeping Beauty fan. Not at all. Among the lame Disney movies I’ve seen, I always this one was up right near the top, just below Bambi and Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Some of that is age, some of it is true lameness. But after watching, I have to reconsider. Check it out.

The movie starts out like any other Once Upon a Timer, all singing birds and trumpets and prancing horses and whatever. The perfect queen and her perfect husband are celebrating the birth of their perfect daughter and the whole kingdom is present and enraptured and I want to gag. And THEN the fairies come and bless the child with beauty and a good voice and some other shit—sewing ability or something. If the fairies wouldn’t have come, would the child have grown hooked and sounding like Danny DeVito? I wonder…

Anyway, the fairies come and make lil Aurora’s perfect life perfecter, right? And this is in the first 20 minutes (because the credits are like 12 minutes long). Where can this movie go?

Then Maleficent shows up and it gets all Real Housewives of Disney.

This chick is so pissed that she didn’t GET INVITED to the baby shower or whatever, she decides her gift is the child is live to be 16, prick her finger and die. WHAT?? What kind of shit is that? I leave you off the guest list and you kill my kid? And then she leaves! And that’s the movie!! The king don’t send his soldiers after her, the fairies ain’t shit—there are three of them and they can’t undo Maleficent’s spell, they can only put the girl in a coma. Boooo!

Then the movie gets boring. The fairies take Aurora from her parents like Child Protective Services. She learns to sing one song and then sing to the freaking birds. Then the girl sees Prince Phillip in the woods and falls in love because they know the same song, there’s a bunch of bullshit about whether the dress should be pink or blue and then Aurora falls asleep.

OK as villains go, you gotta give ol girl her credit. You wanna talk about a social slight? This chick didn’t get an invite so she kills the princess (or tries to). What would have happened if her chicken dinner didn’t sit right? Or if you skip her birthday party? Or don’t buy her Girl scout cookies? The whole kingdom lives in fear so they do NOTHING. Nothing! When the prince tries to free her, Maleficent captures him and his horse, then puts up like 100 yards of thorn bushes at a castle all the way across town.

I gotta take a moment to talk about the sheer meanness of Disney villains. I’ve spoken about Cruella DeVille wanting to kill puppies so she can wear them, right? That’s fucked up. Or the Evil Queen trying to kill Snow White because she was prettier. But how do you kill a child because you didn’t get invited to the party? I mean Damn. And, as an aside, I do have to mention the foulness of the fairies: rather than let the king and queen and townspeople know Aurora might be dead, they just put everybody to sleep. What kind of shit is that?

Your girl is mean, petty, powerful, feared and actually wants nothing from the protagonist. Maleficent doesn’t give a damn about Aurora. She doesn’t. She just didn’t get invited. Think about that. This is a whole movie where the villain is completely unphased by the hero. It’s not even Aurora’s movie; it’s Philip’s. They shouldn’t have called the movie Sleeping Beauty; it’s more like an episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent.

And if that’s not foul enough, Maleficent can turn into a dragon. A dragon?

I think she just won Disney.