Tangled (2010) Decoded: Rapunzel Ritual Towers the Patron Saint of Artillery

➡ This text is a conversation from a podcast discussing the Disney movie “Tangled”. The hosts share their personal experiences with hair, discuss the origins of the Rapunzel story, and analyze the film’s animation techniques. They appreciate the movie’s pacing and storytelling, but also notice some oddities in the animation, such as the way the characters’ clothes move. They conclude that “Tangled” represents Disney hitting its stride in CGI animation.
➡ The text discusses the Disney movie ‘Tangled’, comparing it to other Disney and Pixar films and discussing its production history. It also explores the symbolism in the movie, suggesting that Rapunzel could be a reference to Saint Barbara, a Christian saint known for being kept in a tower. The text also mentions the original Rapunzel story, an Italian folklore about a girl named Parsley who escapes a tower using magic acorns. The author appreciates the movie’s coherence and symbolism, despite its complex production journey.
➡ The text discusses the evolution of the Rapunzel story, from its origins in Italian folklore and the story of St. Barbara, to its modern Disney adaptation. It highlights how the character of Rapunzel has changed over time, from a self-reliant girl using magic to escape, to a damsel in distress needing to be saved. The text also explores the symbolism in the story, such as Rapunzel’s hair representing light in darkness and her tower symbolizing her purity. Finally, it mentions how the story has been adapted in different cultures and is part of a recurring ‘Maiden in the tower’ archetype.
➡ This text discusses the casting and production of the Disney movie “Tangled”. It mentions that Mandy Moore voices Rapunzel and Zachary Levi voices Flynn. The text also talks about the decision to change the movie’s title from “Rapunzel” to “Tangled” to appeal to a wider audience. Lastly, it mentions the high production cost of the movie, which was $260 million.
➡ The text discusses the financial aspects of movie production, using Indiana Jones and Demolition Man as examples of films that made money but didn’t turn a profit due to high production costs. It also mentions the high budget of animated films like Frozen and Tangled, and speculates on where the money goes in such productions. The text then delves into a detailed analysis of the movie Tangled, discussing its plot, characters, and the subversion of traditional fairy tale tropes. It ends with a discussion on the use of songs and symbols in the movie to advance the plot.
➡ The text discusses the music and plot of a Disney movie, presumably “Tangled”, focusing on the magical song that makes Rapunzel’s hair glow and its implications. It also mentions a Tangled-themed restaurant in Disney Japan serving unusual food. The text further explores the idea of Rapunzel’s life in the tower and compares it to various movies and real-life scenarios, including underground bunkers for the rich. Lastly, it delves into conspiracy theories about underground civilizations.
➡ The text discusses the symbolism and mythology in the story of Rapunzel, comparing her to a solar deity and Jesus. It mentions the tradition of creating a shrine to St. Barbara, the patron saint of tunnels, at the start of tunneling projects. The text also talks about the symbolism of the sun in the story, with Rapunzel representing the sun and light kept in darkness. It ends with a discussion of lantern festivals and the symbolism of light in various cultures and religions.
➡ The text discusses the Disney version of Rapunzel, highlighting its unique elements such as the sun drop flower and the transformation of Rapunzel’s hair. It also explores the alchemical symbolism in the story, like the balance represented by twins and the philosopher’s stone represented by Rapunzel’s golden hair. The text further delves into the evolution of the Rapunzel story over time, noting how certain elements were removed or altered, possibly due to religious sensitivities. Lastly, it mentions a Tangled video game and compares the movie’s performance with that of Snow White.
➡ The text discusses a movie that made a significant profit and became the source of a popular meme. It also mentions a song from the movie about dreams. The text further delves into the symbolism in Disney movies, referencing the work of Tracy Twyman who explored occult connections in Disney. The text ends with a discussion about the use of the word ‘ruffian’ in the movie and its significance in Freemasonry.
➡ The text discusses a unique, exclusive Disney T-shirt, a podcast about movies and TV shows, and a sticker sheet from Paranoid American featuring cryptids, cults, and mysteries. The author also shares their preference for blonde Rapunzel over brunette Rapunzel due to the magical properties of the blonde hair. Lastly, the text includes a rap verse about overcoming challenges and being unapologetically oneself.

This movie is an alchemical formula where they’re taking the male energy of the literal son of God that falls from heaven onto the earth. Right. And dies and is risen again. All the like. She represents a female Jesus. Ask about Illuminati sister. Charting the upbeat. Is it Disney mind control? Is this MK Ultra Deluxe? We go from real to real. I go this day. Obey me Room and no more deal. What business Ask about to move his name Teacher call to everybody A cold Disney. A wish upon a star. Welcome to the AKAT Disney podcast, where we light all the lanterns and let them out into the sky and whip them back to earth with our hair, which is very long.

I’ve never had long hair. I had an Afro in high school, a large Afro. Oh, was. People have mentioned, like, sometimes you watch my hair dry, but recently, I don’t know why, but my hair has just been thrown out a bit. So now I have to get haircuts more often. So I don’t know, it needs to come back. I haven’t seen anyone pulling it off in the last couple decades. Your beard is longer than my hair now, isn’t it? That’s amazing. Yeah, well, I mean, eventually it’ll get so long that I can curve it right back around and I can have, like, a little trump cut and everything.

No, longest I had is in the 90s. I was a Boy Scout and I played in a grunge band. So I had. Everyone else had just had the long, you know, like the Eddie Veteran hair. I had the bangs, the Satan bangs. You could eat them, right where one of them’s covering one of your eye and that means you’re into Satan, right? Which it didn’t. I just. I had to look like an Eagle Scout and a bass player in a punk band. I wanted it so bad, man. I used to pile gel and all sorts of hair product in my hair in the mornings to try and get it to be straight.

And it just. It just looked ridiculous. By the time it all dried out, it just had like a weird little straight part on top and this big puffy afro under it. So, yeah, shout out, dad. Thank you for the uproar. Oh, and once I went directly from Boy Scout camp to a punk rock concert in the worst part of Atlanta. And so I should have. I was still wearing the Boy Scout uniform or whatever, and everything was like, oh, he’s. He’s making a Clash reference. Because, no, he wasn’t. I actually didn’t know that the Clashes bass player were Boy Scout uniform at that point in time.

I love that. I almost feel like maybe the very first concert, AC dc and he was just like, forgot to take off his Catholic schoolboy uniform before the show. And they’re like, oh, you’re doing a bit. I love the bit. And he’s like, oh, yeah, totally a bit. The only bit I did is a few years later I played and I fronted a new. Kind of. More of a new wave sounding band. And I intentionally did dress up like the COVID of the guys on Kraftberg’s Man Machine. You know, skinny black tie, red shirt. So we’ve never introduced ourselves, though.

This is Matt here. I don’t. I don’t have hair. I can eat anymore. Paranoid Americans over there. I do have hair, but it’s growing in the opposite direction. You could eat the beard, though. Can you. You could flip it up and eat it if you wanted to. Right? I mean, it catches enough crumbs that you can save stuff for later. So y. That didn’t work with the. With the bangs. It’s just. You’re in high school math class and you start eating your bangs, right? Everyone looks at you weird if you get food in your hair and there’s bangs.

Yeah. Where were we, though? Yeah, well, hair talk makes sense. It’s. It’s. I keep wanting to say Rapunzel because it did keep the name Rapunzel in Japan, but it’s Tangled in America. One of. One of the complaints is they were like, why did you do that? It’s like instead of a Little Mermaid, if they had called that beach. Well, this one. Yeah, that actually sounds like a really good dark take on all of that. And actually, I’m looking forward to a dark version of the Little Mermaid in case that ever comes out, because that one’s not held back by Disney trademarks or anything, I don’t think.

But one of the weird things that came up in this movie in particular, you’re talking about Rapunzel. It’s the. The movie’s name is Tangled, but it’s basically Rapunzel. But Rapunzel wasn’t even the original name for this story. And in fact, even though this one does come from the Grimm Brothers, and when they originally include it in their folktales, they thought that it was Germanic. But it turns out that this is not a Germanic story. It actually can be traced back more most specifically to Italy. And the original version of this was called Pedro Sonella from 1634.

And Petro Sonella, I believe, is the southern Italian version of parsley. So the. The. I guess, doesn’t have the same ring to it as Rapunzel, but it was just a story about a girl named Parsley. Because in this movie they keep some of the same versions, but there’s this plant that’s growing outside of this land, and they have to go and, like, sneak into the land and take it away and. And it’s parsley. They want to, like, eat parsley because some pregnant lady has, like, a weird craving for parsley. So in this movie, it’s the same premise, but now it’s this, like, sunflower that the sun, literally, like a little piece of the sun breaks off and falls to earth, turns into a seed and grows into this special sunflower.

Not nuclear destruction as would really happen if a part of the sun fell to Earth. Well, this is a magical. You know. I know. Yeah. Yeah. I just, I just had to throw that out. There was a. A interim period as well where this movie was going to be called Rapunzel Unbraided and was going to be Disney trying to, like, more directly do, like, a Shrek thing, which you could see the bones of that with what’s. What’s his name, the horse sort of being your donkey. Right. And maybe you got the, the Pascal’s jive talking a little more, that sort of thing.

Well, actually, let’s get some of the bias review stuff out of the way. I’ll just come out and say that this is probably easily in my favorite top 10 Disney movies. It might even be in my top five. And I was not expecting that. I. I see. I don’t even. I, I kind of agree, but watching it last night, I was like, this is one that played a lot when my daughter was young. So I’m like, I’ve seen this burnt out on it. I’m a little burnt out on it. I. I think I mentioned you. I just rode the ride.

There’s a new Rapunzel ride in Tokyo, and I wrote that two, three weeks ago, something like that. So now that one’s inside me too much. Like, none of the characters in this one excite me, but it’s just really well done. The pacing is really good. Like, everything about the. The movie itself, it feels like a cinematic experience that doesn’t really leave a whole lot to the side. Like, I. This is kind of a return to Disney, doing what Disney does really well. Especially cool to see them finally nail it in this, like, CGI space. They do consider, or they consider this to be a bit of a hybrid.

The backgrounds particular, they were like, oh, let’s go look at that Snow White cottage and have it look kind of like that. And when you think of the backgrounds in this film, you don’t think of like the CG gloop that you think of other things. It does, you know, the way the characters move is supposed to be kind of like that two, three, you know, hybrid approach. Now technology has changed. Something I noticed, especially with Rapunzel and Mother Gothel. And this one is their dresses move with their bodies. They don’t move as like a separate piece of clothing.

So it’s like a plastic figure or something. So I thought that was a little weird, but maybe that’s still a thing. I was just noticing it yesterday. I don’t know I noticed it, but I honestly, I was very forgiving of that because I also feel that this movie represents again, Disney may be in a stride where some of the earlier CGI stuff, you could tell they were just using every damn new feature that came out. Every new like ray tracing or physics thing. They were just trying to stay ahead of the curve. And this, I keep want to call it Rapunzel Entangled.

You can. I live in Japan. That’s how I always hear it. Entangled. You can kind of see where they don’t have to do every single thing. Although they’re using a lot of that rendering on just the hair, I assume because the hair is over the place. But really it, it, it’s refreshing though because now they can, they can focus on the techniques that help better tell the story versus things that are just there. So someone’s like, oh, wow, did you see how the fabric move differently from the bot? Like those kinds of things are cool, like little tech bits.

But if it takes away from the movie or if they spent time on that and not something more important, it, I think it stands out even more to me just to get my specifics correct, the Japanese title is Rapunzel of the Tower. So they also include the tower in the name. Not quite as weird as the up title in Japanese, but a little more explanatory, I guess, than we’re used to. I’ve got some pretty fascinating breakdowns of that tower too. This one kind of rocked my world a little bit and it made me feel like we’re going back to the basics in some good old fashioned.

Oh yeah, decodes of a lot of this. Like, I really do think this is where Disney figures out how to basically match Pixar. Probably because they’re being run by Pixar people now. Right. But this one has again, the Pixar movies Seem to have a weird obsession with bureaucracy. Right. Where the Disney ones are fantasy. So we’re back in that we’re doing that level of animation in a fantasy world, which, you know, hadn’t really been the case. I mean, what, what’s the most fantastic? Pixar has like, Monsters Inc. Which is an extreme bureaucracy at the same time.

It’s in the title. It’s Inc. Right, Right. Well, that one is future. Right. Remind me. On the Disney timeline. Timeline, it’s the far future and they’re going to the past. But if we just want to say that’s a fantastic monster world too. If you, if you don’t want to go with the Pixar timeline. No, I do want to go with the timeline. The timeline. Okay, then it’s the distant future. But is it more past cars? I don’t remember. I think Cars is the furthest in the future because humans have evol into cars. Like the inside of the car is a human.

Right, Right. Sort of amalgamation. Right? Yeah. Anyway, the point is we’re back in a basically prime Disney stuff. I, I, yeah, like you, this is top five, top ten Disney for me. This bats against any of the classic animated stuff or the Disney Renaissance stuff. Do I like this? I like this better in Beauty and the Beast, that’s for sure. Probably not Aladdin. Maybe about the same as Aladdin. Yeah, I mean, I think that this one too, it has some of that original symbolism that Disney kind of lost their way for a little bit. And who knows if this was intentional.

In my mind, this is one of the most intentionally symbol heavy movies in recent Disney history because so many of the other ones, you kind of have to like squint and turn your head a little bit to be like, oh, is that a reference to this? In this one there are so many references to the original stories that inspired even before Rapunzel, even before the Petro Sonilla, the Italian parsley version. There’s one that goes back a little bit farther than that one too. And I, and I can almost see nods and all these different versions of it.

But the biggest one for me was that Rapunzel could also be a reference to Saint Barbara. And Saint Barbara, if you’re like, who’s the hell is Saint Barbara? Well, this is where like the city Santa Barbara is named after St Barbara because it was founded on her patron day, which I think is December 4th, if I’m not mistaken. So the, the city Santa Barbara, St Barbara was, is also the patron saint of artillery and firepower and firearms and explosions. She’s also the patron saint of tunnels and she is the patron saint of mathematicians, but I think only in that mathematics was very heavily associated with artillery shells and sort of early like, like warfare so that you had to be good at math in order to be good at ammunitions and at all these.

So anyways, she’s a patron saint of all these cool things. She was known to have been kept up in a tower so that she a couldn’t have premarital sex. But like her dad also put her in that tower because she wanted to convert to Christianity and he was a pagan and that she denied his pagan ways her entire life. The same way in this movie Rapunzel is stored off in this tower by evil stepmother. Well the actual Saint Barbara allegedly, but the actual Saint Barbara, she was stored up in this tower by her dad so she wouldn’t convert to Christianity.

She did it anyways. And one of the main reasons I even bringing this part up is that she, she cites all these Christian specific symbols and that like she, everything that she did, she even tried to make this window that had, that represented the Holy Trinity in the tower as a way to show that she was disobeying her father and she was converting regardless. And in this movie Entangled, they show a particular shot of the door, the COVID that goes over the window and at the top of that it has the symbol of the Holy Trinity just kind of like carved into the wood.

And you would never even notice that normally. And they don’t make a mention that this is about Saint Barbara. But once I read into that particular background of this, everything else kind of like fell in line. Like everything that happens in this movie couldn’t be linked directly to St Barbara in multiple ways. It is interesting looking as usual. I’m looking at the production stuff here and what you just described sounds like such a flowing thing where as normal this is a stop and start, you know, going through different hands. We’ll, we’ll put the symbolism back into it.

Even if Disney corporate screwed it up along the way. Well, no, that’s, that’s part of the strength of the movie. It does feel coherent. It does feel like it just, you know, took a drive straight down the street. But this is another one. And we’re going to see us again with Frozen where the, they were trying to break it back in the 30s and 40s. This could have been an OG Disney movie. The Watt himself thought the story was too small, which, which continues to be a problem and they have several fixes. So the one you just described is probably the best fix.

So this almost became a Disney Renaissance film. Glen Keane, the supervising animator in the 90s, wanted to do it. Eisner insisted it be computer animated and he was like, we can’t do it that way. Yet the text not there. So it got shelled for a little while. Shrek comes out and that’s where they’re like, oh, let’s make this our Shrek. We’ll do Rapunzel as Shrek. And there’s. There’s a pitch where Eisner himself had proposed using modern day San Francisco as the initial setting of the film. Two teenagers are transported into the fairy tale world where they inhabit the bodies of Rapunzel and her prince.

Then Rapunzel and the prince are turned into a squirrel and a dog. So that sounds more like convoluted than tangled in a reverse. Enchanted. Right? It sounds like they just took that, reversed it, made it enchanted. Right. This sounds like a horrible boardroom decision that never should have made it outside of like a late meeting. And it didn’t. Well, basically it didn’t. So once Eisner’s out, Pixar is in, it gets retooled into this Keen, as seems to be normal in our narrative, is the director, then the co director and then he’s out in 2008, which he later attributes to having a heart attack.

So maybe we’ll, we can trust him or not trust him on that. But yeah, so the guy that was basically running it for 12 years, you know, late stage gets out and the final film is directed by some, some other people. They did Bolt. Yeah, people that did this did Bolt, but we like, for the, for the quote unquote crappy CG Disney films, I guess Bolt was the one that came across the best. I didn’t hate Bowl, I remember, you know, it didn’t stand out. It was on par with like Goofy movie and not like symbolically, but just like production wise, it kept my interest about the same.

And, and honestly, the weird meandering journey that this particular movie went on to get produced, it’s also sort of the original Rapunzel story, because in that original, again, not Germanic, but it was an Italian, Southern Italian folklore about parsley that this girl, I’m just going to call her Parsley because that makes more sense. Parsley, she had way more agency because at a certain point she escapes the tower and she has these three magic acorns. And again, I would say this probably represents the holy Trinity because you take three acorns together, it kind of looks like. So she has these magic acorns and when she throws these magic acorns on the ground, they turn into these objects and animals which throw her father off of her scent in a way.

And that her father in the original story, this is also in St Barbara, the St Barbara story, because the. They all sort of linked together, right? There’s these old Italian versions of it, but the St Barbara one had been passed down and has the exact same motifs. And in St Barbara’s story, her dad eventually becomes her own executioner and chops her head off. Like he. She gets sentenced for converting the Christianity. So he kills his own daughter, but after he kills her, he gets struck by lightning and dies. And which is why I believe she’s linked to patron of artillery and ammunition and shells is because she represent this sort of like missile from God that’ll just take out your enemy if something goes wrong.

And she also represents light within darkness. And there’s a couple scenes in this movie where we see Rapunzel using her hair to kind of like shown some light when they’re in like a dark area. But the, the reason I was mentioning that is because as soon as that story of St Barbara starts to take over the like the older Italian folklore version of this, because she is converting to Christianity, it’s not a good look on a new fresh Christian convert to be throwing magic acorns around and like doing magic and spells and stuff especially. I think this is in 14th century or so kind of looked down upon.

We’re getting into like the Middle Ages. So they neuter the story a little bit. And when that the story starts to morph a little bit into like a modern version of Rapunzel. Now she no longer has agency. She doesn’t escape on her own. She has to be saved. And when she does get saved, she’s kind of reliant on everyone else around her as opposed to her having some sort of ability. So in this, in the Disney movie, she obviously does get a lot of that agency back, but it’s not in the form of casting spells. It’s in the form of her hair and her tears bearing Magical.

Yeah, excuse me. I guess a Disney movie is not going to go well with dad chopping her head off at the end, which might be where that change happens also. Hey, you know what? That lightning would have been helpful five seconds earlier, right? And to be clear, that one was the St Barbara story. And St Barbara, even though she is still a saint, she got written out in I think like the 1960s. The Pope was like, here’s. Here’s the new calendar of all the. The different saints we care about. And she got bumped off the freaking list.

So. Got a city. Oh, no, she’s got a city. She’s got lots of different themes, things that were named after her. But, yeah, that this. This is really fascinating because you can even go and look like the connection to artillery is very real, that there was a coin for, like, the American artillery troop, whatever, like, society. And on the coin, it literally has a lady with long flowing hair and a huge tower in the background, and she’s holding a piece of wheat. Because one of the earlier versions of this Rapunzel story was that after she jumps out of that tower and throws these magic acorns, she hides in a wheat field.

So now you’ve got this wheat symbolism that she sort of occupies. And the wheat is traditionally used to imply agricultural spirits or agricultural symbolism, which then talks about fertility and the other. I guess the most obvious reading of what Rapunzel is about, if you go beyond the St Barbara stuff, is that it’s about this girl that’s coming of age. In the original stories, I think she’s around 14. In the Disney Tangled movie, they explicitly mentioned that she’s coming up on her 18th birthday. So, like, either way, she’s about to be legal and that she now represents this fertile vessel that needs to be protected at all costs against these, like, outside extramarital sort of influences.

And by keeping her in the tower, they’re making sure that she stays a virgin forever. But anything coming into the tower, like the prince entering that tower, impregnating the tower, kind of represents the prince impregnating her. And again, in the original stories, the prince gets up in the tower, and then all of a sudden she gets pregnant. And the. The evil stepmother or the father, they’ll say things like, oh, your girdle doesn’t fit well anymore. Your dress is really tight all of a sudden. And then she has twins. So it kind of. The other symbol here is that she herself represents, like, a father’s desire, a mother’s desire to keep their daughter pure versus the outside world.

It’s like, you’re ready to make babies for me now. That’s in. This movie portrays the king and queen, her actual parents, as basically being angelic, you know, living in this kingdom of the sun or whatever. So Mother Gothel has to be like some psychotic, you know, witch, basically, you know, that to keep her in the tower, it can’t just be her father. Like, in the in the St Barbara version that, that version’s too depressing, I guess. So let’s say you deep thing, the story becomes too small. Their, their way to crack this, by the way, the way the thing that first they tried that San Francisco crap, which like you said, sounded like it shouldn’t have gotten out of the boardroom.

And then basically they said the lantern thing. Oh, she’s watching the lantern. She wants to go see a lanterns. That gives us enough to make this a movie. And that, that was correct because that’s a very memorable scene in the movie too with that. That’s what they’ve made the ride out of. The main part of the ride is the, the lantern part, you know, very Eastern too. That’s not like a very western thing that I’m used to seeing, but it’s, it’s. I’ve seen it portrayed often in kind of like eastern cultures. But yeah, that, that was one of the driving reasons that lures Rapunzel out of her towers because she notices that every single year on her birthday, only all these, you know, these candle lit sort of lanterns fly in the sky.

And that’s because in this movie when Rapunzel was still, I guess still being cooked, right? Like when, when her mom got pregnant with her, the mom gets incredibly sick and they realize the only thing that can probably heal the mom is that this piece of sun that fell in, you know, fell from the sky and planted into this little like sunflower that if they can get a hold of this flower, it will cure the mom. So they find the flower and they use it to cure the mom. So that when Rapunzel’s born, not only does mom not die, which it looked like she was not going to survive the pregnancy previous to that, but also the power of sunlight is now sort of embedded in her hair.

And you find out later on her tears. But this made an enemy of the king and the queen of this evil sorceress, Mother Gothel, because she was secretly going and finding this, the sunflower, and using it to keep herself young. And the second that they went and stole it, now she starts becoming an old hag again. She’s the old crone sort of archetype in the original version of this story, both in Parsley and in the original Grim Fairy Tales ones, really it’s, it’s not a king and a queen. It’s that it’s just two regular people and that they live next to a witch and they realize that the witch is growing this thing that the mother either wants or needs.

Depending on the retelling of the story. So the dad sneaks over and steals this plant from the witch’s garden and gives it to the wife. And in exchange for her life and, you know, to not be, like, horrifically tortured by a witch for the rest of her life, they agree to give up their firstborn child being Rapunzel. So that’s in the older version. There’s almost a Rumpelstiltskin element to it where the parents willfully entered this contract with a witch. And then that’s why Rapunzel goes to her. In this one, she gets kidnapped because the witch wants to keep using her ability to look like she’s young forever.

Yeah, know when you’re describing the prologue of the movie, I was like, man, that sounds like the Dragon Quest side quest. So this story is incredible. Such a specific trope that again, in that rating chart that I just recently discovered, but in the Arn Thompson Index, this is known as Type 3. 10, the Maiden in the tower. So this, this Maiden in the tower, archetype 310 is so incredibly, I guess, substantial, and it recurs so often in so many different stories. So it would almost be natural that anything that you come across that has this maiden in a tower is going to automatically link to Rapunzel.

But again, remember, it’s Rapunzel, it’s parsley, it’s St Barbara. There’s even some, like two or three other ones from other cultures that have this exact same story for usually the same premise. Girls coming of age, her guardian, whoever that may be, is protecting them from the outside world. Before we get into deep, I’ll just go a bit over the voice cast since we tend to do that. We got Mandy Moore as Rapunzel, who was cast very late, and I guess that’s why we start off with a pop song. This is the full Alan Menken return to Disney for music.

He did that bit of Enchanted, but this is the first full length animated he’d done in a while. But yeah, they give her a pop song. Mother Gothel is Donna Murphy, who’s. Who’s not like, if you know Broadway, you know who she is. She’s kind of Broadway royalty. But I don’t. And I don’t. But I don’t. I don’t either. I’m just like, yeah. When you look at her thing, you’re like, oh, yeah. She’s like the queen of Broadway or something. And she gets to do her show stopping, you know, like belting it out. So that makes sense.

That’s good. Casting. This is fun. Zachary Levi is Flynn slash Eugene. He was Shazam in the Shazam movies recently. And they had decided they needed a British. A UK voice actor to do Eugene. Right. So he came in, faked a British accent. That convinced them. And then when they found out he’d lied to them, they’re like, just use your real voice. Which is why Fled is not speaking in a fake British accent. Oh, I love that. So he scammed his way in. One of the Stabbington brothers is Ron Perlman. So that’s the one that talks, is Ron Pearl.

Why would you cast Rod and Perlman if you don’t get his face? That’s like what you’re paying for, isn’t it? Like Mickey, makeup on that thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Put some makeup on that thing. I mean, he’s just. He’s built for that. Right. Jeffrey Tambor is the big nose thug. This is. Okay. Richard Keel is Vlad. Vlad. Do you know Richard Keel? You’re gonna have to give me more references. Oh, you’re gonna know. Sorry, just wondering if you know the actor’s name. He was Happy Madison, Happy Gilmore’s boss. And Happy Gilmore, he’s got the nail on his head.

Okay, right again. Why would you hire him without the. The physique? To show off. Exactly. The other one is he was jaws in the 70s, James Bond films. That’s his biggest hit. Oh, and he’s. As a Twilight Zone guy. He’s the Alien and Two Serve Man. But he’s overdubbed there. You don’t get his voice in the Twilight Zone. You just get the physique and someone else doing the voice. So. But this was his last role, which is. But yeah, that’s just like, what an awesome career. You’re like this big, weird looking guy. You get like several iconic roles.

I wouldn’t call this one of his iconic roles, but just gotta know he’s there, you know? I mean. Yeah, the exception, not the rule. Because I feel like there’s a lot of big, weird, ugly guys out there that don’t end up becoming Hollywood stars. Stars, right. Is. Is it just me or is. Is the. Is Happy Gilmore’s boss an iconic role? I feel it is in my world. I mean, he’s. He’s only his boss for like the first 10 or 15 minutes of the movie. Yeah, but he keeps showing up with you. Yeah, that is true.

Yeah. Yeah, he’s in the movie more than that. I mean, it’s not. It’s not a big role though. But yeah, for. That sticks in my Head like. Like the nail in his. His helmet and skull. So. But yeah, yeah, that’s. That’s the voice stuff. Paul Tompkins is the short thug. One interesting thing. I. I did mention the ride where the ride technically defangs the story. Mother Gothel is not in the new ride at all. You just kind of glimpse, I think, the Stabbington brothers and the duckling stuff. So it’s like this weird romantic ride where it’s outside, you pass the tower.

It’s got animatronics. You go in, it’s a scene of Rapunzel twirling around the tree. It’s a scene of her healing Finn with her hair, and then it’s the lantern. And that’s pretty much the whole ride. So it’s kind of like this, like romantic boat ride, which is a little different than the tone of the movie. Even in the movie, the evil, you know, stepmother mother go. Even though she represents this kidnapper, that Disney proxy, by the way, clearly, you know, kid. Kid gets kidnapped. If the kid gets kidnapped when they’re like two weeks old, though, does that count? Because she does think this is her mother, like legitimately.

Right, yeah, no. So it does count because it’s more about the viewer, less about the actual person going through it within the movie itself. But the viewer sees that this child is kidnapped from their parents, and then immediately afterwards we see her and then introduces Pascal, right, The sidekick. And I’m sure Pascal ended up being the thing that’s on T shirts and sticker books and Happy Meal toys and by fun little weird synchro, mystic connection here, but Pascal being named after Blaise Pascal, famous mathematician, which made me think, oh, is this Another reference to St Barbara, the patron saint of mathematics because of her link to artillery.

So maybe, maybe not. But just the fact that she has a sidekick that’s a freaking chameleon, which already doesn’t make sense, named Pascal, who wasn’t around in the 14th century. So I don’t know, it felt like somebody had somewhere in the chain knew about that connection to mathematics. And they like somehow got this into the movie without anyone asking too many questions. I mean, I know. I mean, I knew enough. When I heard Pascal, I instantly thinking of math, even when I first saw this. But you’re like, what the hell does math have to do with Rapunzel and a chameleon and.

But if you know the background is St Barbara, then you do understand what math has to do with this. Yeah. Oh, this is interesting, by the way. Sorry. I’m batting around subjects today. But the fact, again, of this movie not just being called Rapunzel, it was just called Rapunzel. Very late in the game, there’s actually official logos that say Rapunzel Princess. And the frog didn’t do as well as they had hoped. It had the word princess in the title, and they were like, oh, my God. That’s why it didn’t do well. Boys don’t want to see a movie with Prince Princess in it.

So they’re like, they won’t want to see a movie with Rapunzel as the name, because that’s basically the same as saying princess to most Americans. So that’s where the name change happened. And I do remember some of the marketing for this would just say Tangled. And it was just a picture of the princess getting tangled up in, like, hair that was coming off of the page. And I think the horse might have been in there too. So they. They definitely were playing into sort of a male audience. And in fact, the way that the movie starts out, as soon as the movie opens up, you hear Flynn, this male voice talking and being like, this is a story about how I died.

And it zooms in on a big wanted poster that’s got him on. So it’s immediately. Has almost Robin Hood vibes to it. But I felt that this was them making sure that, you know, all the boys in the audience aren’t like, oh, girl, princess movie, not again. And then leave immediately. See, I guess I was blinded to that because from 2010, I had a daughter. So I’m never thinking about that. Right? It’s like, yep, we’re watching. We’re watching Rapunzel now. Whatever. Well, I think about that now. Ever since you mentioned that Disney have been trying to court this male audience forever.

And, like, they. They know the formula. They know how to get, you know, like, young girls excited about princesses. They. They figured that part out long ago. They can keep playing that tune, but they weren’t able to crack, like, the boy code until they bought Marvel and Star wars, essentially. But the. You can see that this is somehow, like, they were able to take a princess movie and have it cater to both sides a little bit. It’s. I don’t know, it’s. And they do it in a way that it’s not as obvious as that in some of the previous movies.

And this was a massive hit. This is the first one in a while where it’s, like an unqualified hit. And then Frozen’s gonna knock out of the park even more, doing the same thing, having A title that isn’t quite, you know, gender coded, I guess, but yeah. Although, do you know what the budget for this movie was? $3 billion. Well, I, I know you’re exaggerating. Adjusted for 2040. Inflation. Oh, yeah, no, in 2010 or whatever, this cost $260 million. Okay. That is very substantial still. That’s insane. I mean, now they, they’re like Indiana Jones cost 300 million, which is why that’s more than I make in a year.

In a few years. Really. Yeah. And then the last couple Mission Impossibles, I mean, they will actually, Indiana Jones was considered a flop because it made money, but it was so expensive. Well, it didn’t make money. I mean, it didn’t make a profit. It made money, but didn’t make a profit. I always, whenever this particular discussion comes up, I always think of the movie Demolition man. Because Demolition man has been used as an example of creative Hollywood accounting practices where on the outside, all of the different spin offs and franchises and video games and all the ancillary stuff, plus the sales themselves made this movie profitable.

But somehow they were just able to make it look like it was losing money constantly because it just turns into this like black hole of tax write offs for some of these. And I’m pretty sure that when you get to the high levels, like a Disney blockbuster movie, there’s some element of that going on. Like someone is using that to launder Epstein money at some level. Right. And yeah, 260 million, that is. And think about it, it’s been the past five years, when that’s a norm, more of a normal budget. Right. It’s like, which doesn’t compute.

So yeah, something, something’s up there, but very expensive. In fact, now I want to see it. Is Frozen more than this? I mean, maybe I’m just completely lost. Yeah, Frozen was okay. Frozen was 150 million, which still a lot, but sounds more reasonable. And this one also, I don’t know if star studded is the right word, but. But most of the voiceovers were very, very recognizable names. I think that Rapunzel herself is played by Mandy Moore. And which is that sort of like her peak in this moment? Maybe a little bit towards the tail end of her career.

Oh, this is still the most expensive animated film ever made with the 2019 Lion King trailing it by a bit. And then going down to 200 for Toy Story 3 cars. And where all that money go now? Now I’m really thinking about it. Like, where did the money go? Computers? I don’t know. As they Spend all the money in the computers. Yeah. Cooling thing. What is it? What’s the thing, people? One of the arguments against AI is like asking Chat GBT a question. Like, insanely heats up, like, systems in California or something. I don’t know. I don’t know how this works.

Well, what happens is that it boils water to cool down. And as everyone knows, once you boil water, it’s gone forever. And we have a finite amount of water on this planet. And the more you boil, because you’re trying to make memes of cats in Indiana Jones, the whole world is basically going to die of thirst. So you did that. So old Tokyo is not going to be underwater. Oh, sorry. That was the other thing we were talking about. No, no flooding in this one. Let me see. Yeah, yeah. Oh, true, true. I do remember that scene being intense the first time.

It’s like, up there, they’re truly doomed. I forgot her hair glue. Glue glowed also. Yeah. Last movie. They’re tied up in their own tongues. This movie keeps getting tied up in hair. And by the way, Eugene’s got some brain damage. He took like, what, 10 hits in the head with a frying pan? Or Flynn, right? Who’s Eugene? Right, right. Flynn slash Eugene. Okay, either. Either or. Yeah, he. I mean, if you watch this movie in a certain context, Rapunzel kills him. She murders him and he’s dead. And she’s now trying to hide a dead body in her room because she has to make sure no one knows that anyone’s been in here.

And that’s kind of the gag. And then eventually Pascal shows up and sticks his tongue into Flynn’s ear. And then he wakes up. However, I have a better pitch. He is dead and she has to weakened at Bernie. Well, that’s. Well, yeah, I guess that’s kind of where that was going. Well, you don’t hide the body and weaken at Bernie’s. You use them as a puppet. And then we can. Have you seen Weekend at Bernie’s too? Yeah, that. That’s the one where it’s like, tropical setting and he gets. Yeah, he’s right. He’s resurrected with a voodoo curse.

He keeps doing, like, the mamba or something. Or like a dude, that comedy sequel. That’s my theory, man. We know this. Every single sequel for any movie ever made has to follow the Weekend at Bernie’s formula just right. Only comedies. Comedies I’ve seen break into Electric Boogaloo. It starts with a fantastic breakdown sequence. Well, I want to. I want to point out, too, because you mentioned that he Has a concussion multiple times throughout this because she finds a frying pan, and she starts using this frying pan for everything. And it turns into a running gag that the frying pan is beating out every other weapon known to everyone that’s in this story.

Even though she’s a patron saint of artillery, they kind of transition out of the pan. But I think another important reason why that even comes up is because it show. It shows an inversion of this concept that once the prince impregnates the tower, it means that he kind of impregnates her. But in this movie, as soon as she. He tries to come into the tower, he gets knocked out and she stuffs him in this dresser. And now she is the one that’s in control. She ties him up and she’s even like, you know, I’m. I’m running the show now.

She’s got him on a chair, kind of like he’s a hostage sort of situation. So I think it’s a smart and it’s an interesting way to invert that common, I guess, trope that, like, once the prince enters your forbidden bedroom, then that means that you’re having babies now, and that doesn’t happen. And they intentionally make a point of this, like, subverting that traditional trope of this maiden in the tower archetype. I guess we should just move on to the movie. So they. They get there, she hides. I do like the him guessing immediately where the crown’s been hidden.

So that was fun. There’s not a lot in the room because she’s got to keep it clean. Otherwise she’s dragging her hair, dirt and junk all the time. So, like, he looks around and it’s like, okay, there’s a dresser that I was just in. There’s the chair I’m sitting on, and then there’s a pot. Like, I wonder where you’re hiding it. And then we. We move on. We have the scene where she’s kind of having her. Her little bipolar thing about having left the tower, which plays for good comedy, but definitely suggests severe trauma. I mean, she’s going, like, going from programming to non programming, you know.

Well, she doesn’t realize that her mom isn’t really her mom yet. And. And that kind of persists throughout the rest of this entire movie, which I think is an interesting one. And maybe an insidious, subliminal Disney message that’s going out to all the kids watching it saying, hey, maybe your parents aren’t really your parents, and they’re just being mean to you. And they’re grounding you because they’re evil and they’re not your real parents. And your real parents are a king and a queen. Which, perfect is mysteriously close to what the FBI told Walt Disney when he was alive to recruit him to work as a special agent in charge and turn in anyone that was being subversive in the animation world.

So they, they told him that exact story. So I feel that if it works on Walt Disney himself, like the man, then putting that same formula in a Walt Disney movie will work on everyone else. Radio. Sorry, I had one of those thoughts and then lost it. Oh, well, too bad. Oh, the Snuggly Duckling. Anyway, we get to the Snuggly Duckling, which is fantastic. We’ve got the. The Dream song, all that sort of stuff. The Dream Song is actually. I mean, I kind of hate musicals of any kind, except for Book of Mormon, but this one wasn’t horrible.

Like the, the songs were horribly campy, but the actual animation and the story and kind of like the fun little things they throw in it. Maybe I’m just becoming more simple minded. But they have this whole dream story and one of the guys dreams is that he, he just wants to make little, I guess like ceramic unicorns. It’s like very specific. But it plays in later in the story when you see Flynn later on and he notices there’s this little ceramic unicorn on a windowsill and it like tips you off like, oh, his homies are here to save him.

And you kind of like get the jump off on that from this little ceramic unicorn. Which you only know from the song that came a little bit earlier on. So I don’t know, I think that it’s actually done really well. And they have a drunk old guy that’s dressed as a baby. Yeah, he’s in the ride for a second. Is that what Edward Jane almost character doesn’t? Blade Runner though, leaves the little unicorn to screw with. With. Is this a Blade Runner reference too? I mean, I don’t know. That’s kind of. Yeah, there we go. Blade Runner reference.

No again. Megan, I think does great with the music for this because the first song is a little poppy. It’s like, sure, whatever. And then it goes like full Broadway. But you know, the Mother Knows best song. You have got the Broadway queen belting it out as hard as she can with this insanely ironic song. This one’s just got some happy verve. Even the love song, this one I think is one of the better Disney ones. The melody of that one does stick in My mind more than some of the others. What was the love song in this one? I don’t remember the name of.

I just remember them. It’s got a haunting melody, doesn’t it? It’s kind of a riff of her. Her spell. Her spell song, which. I like the spell song because you can sing it quickly and stupidly and it still works. It’s all about the notes and the words, I guess. Or the notes because she doesn’t even do the words a few times. Yeah, it’s just. It’s a magical incantation which turns her hair glowing and then the hair can cure anything. And this was. So this is kind of interesting because the song originally came from Mother Gothel and she would sing it to the flower, and that’s how the flower would, you know, rewind her years.

She would sing it and it would give her years back on her life and she would immediately start looking younger. And then once the flower was used to cure Rapunzel’s mom to give birth to Rapunzel. Now this the same old lady. Mother Gothel would sing this song to Rapunzel and make her hair glow. And then eventually Rapunzel sings a song and it makes her hair glow. And that’s the whole reason why she’s even keeping her in this tower. She wants her all to herself because she knows if the outside world realizes that this girl that has magic hair could be captured and heal anyone, that she wouldn’t be able to keep her all to herself.

It also sounds like she could actually be protecting the world. Like, imagine if Hitler got his hands on this. This Aryan Covenant girl. Like, yeah, World War II would have taken a completely different angle if he had his hair. But here’s something that was even creepier than I thought. I realized that spoiler alert, at the end of the movie, she gets her hair cut. That Mother Gothel gets Rapunzel back. She cuts off her hair and she uses Veronica. She. And she uses the trick the, well, he’s not really a prince, but she. To trick Flynn into coming back into the tower and then realizes, oh, her hair’s been cut.

But then we find out that even though her hair was cut, it wasn’t the hair that was magic, it was Rapunzel. So when she cries a tear, that tear has the exact same properties that the hair did. And I just wondered. This movie could have been way darker if Mother Gothel realized that she needed tears from Rapunzel in order to look young again. Because now it seems way easier to extract. Here, you can bring them with you. Right? Like, yeah. Then we’re getting the Clockwork Orange setups, I guess. Yeah. Now she’s just gonna harvest the tears of Rapunzel.

I mean, this is basically how Adrenochrome works. Yeah, I’m talking about the duckling a little more. I sent you a link. Something they’ve gotten into is bizarre hamburger stuff. They built a. A pretty convincing Snuggly duckling construction. So you have to remind me where the Snuggly Duckling comes from. The name or the. Yeah, no, where. Where did the name, the concept come from? The Snuggly Duckling. Because it’s supposed. That’s the joke. Because he’s like, oh, I’m gonna take you to like the nicest place I can find. It’s a Snuggly Duckling and it’s, you know, filled with rap scallions.

Right? Oh, this is the bar? Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s the bar. So. So I just wanted to use this to go on my weird hamburger tangent, because at the Snuggly Duckling you can get this very bizarre looking dream burger, which I can’t quite tell what it is, but. So this is a Tangled themed restaurant at Disney Japan. That’s correct. That’s correct. So. But yeah, they just serve bizarre looking yellow food. Unicorn meat, I assume. Unicorn meat. I actually had this one. This was a Duffy. That’s a different thing. That’s not Tangled. But this was. This was one of the most bizarre things I’ve eaten.

It’s a pink hamburger, pink bun with salmon, cream cheese and avocado inside. So you’re rocking the bizarre hamburgers out at Tokyo Disney now. I mean, you know, when, when in Tokyo Disney. Right. Go to a good restaurant instead. I ate the weird salmon burger because we were like seeing the Duffy show because we had someone visiting. I want to see the Duffy show. Let’s see. Oh, I even put that in my note. Oh, I was also thinking Rapunzel doesn’t know what shoes are. And her feet must be like cut up and bleeding and freaky by the end of this movie.

Never wear shoes. Because she leaves this very sterile environment of her tower and she’s just out running around in nature and her hair is just dragging behind her everywhere she goes. Including through the Snuggly Duckling. Right. It’s coated in like beer and man smell and blood. And then from the Snuggly Duckling, she runs into an underground dirt tunnel. So I mean, this. She must have magical hair because it doesn’t have Magical hair. It looks like it would turn into dreadlocks at a certain point. And not the fun dreadlocks, like the 711 parking lot kind of dreadlocks.

Not the fun Japanese 711 parking lot. I guess I have to be even more specific. I’m from Atlanta. I know that’s a Circle K in Atlanta, but we got Circle K parking lot, dreadlocks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. With also, you know, that song at the beginning, even in her sterile tower, it should have been just her, like washing and brushing her hair for the entire song. 7:00am and brushing one part of my hair. 10:00am Now I’m washing 10 meters down. Sorry, 20ft down. I don’t know, Whatever. And she. Yeah, the whole point of that was that she’s got nothing to do aside from read books and clean.

She’s read these books a million times already. And I don’t know, she’s kind of falling into the life. She’s being very accepting. She’s lived close to 17 years of her life in this. Well, she doesn’t know anything else though, right? That it is like, you know, that’s all she knows. Right. It’s like the weird experiments, like we’ve mentioned of raising your family alongside chimpanzees or something. That’s what the kids know. Well, another Brendan Fraser reference, but there was that movie where he past. There you go. Blast. I’m glad you got that movie. But yeah, he’s raised in a bomb shelter and he’s told by his parents the outside world.

Also, Cloverfield Drive is kind of similar with John Goodman. Have you seen this one? No, I haven’t. Oh, my God. I, I, I have to recommend. It’s a weird one. And you don’t have to have seen Cloverfield in order to get it, but it’s kind of an inversion of Rapunzel. But John Goodman is the evil sorceress. Ooh, who is the debt? Yes, it was Christopher Walk and his dad and Blaster in the past. Just, just checking. But no, that has you obsessed, like the, the, you know, I’m sure you have to watch the weird YouTube videos of like, you know, underground bunkers have been refitted for, like, civilian living and stuff.

You know, millionaires buying missile silos. That’s, I find that fascinating. Well, I mean, this was just in the news this month about the Bush dynasty has used something like trillions of dollars to build an underground city in case the world ends and that they’ve got access to it and we don’t. About 10, 20 miles from here in Matsushiro. There is a mountain that you can visit and it has an unfinished series of tunnels that were going to be where they were going to move the Japanese government in World War II if they couldn’t stand Tokyo. So I gotta say, man, out of all the different conspiracy theories about like, you know, different civilizations and lost civilizations, Atlantis and the inner Earth ones, I feel the most receptive to.

Because if there’s one thing that seems. It’s a recurring theme over and over, it’s that when hits the fan, rich people will spend money to live underground. It’s. It’s been happening since before I was even born. Has always been the case. And to think that no other civilization in history ever had that same notion. Like I’m gonna take all my resources and build an underground city and live there. Someone’s had to have cracked that at. Some turkey has them. Right, right. Well, I mean, I’m just saying like once we get down there and. And it’s like someone else is already going to be there, like let you in.

Right. Like we’ve like that’s gotta be goes. Whenever they made the underground Denver Airport City, I guess. Right. They probably ran into an older civilization that’s like, yeah, we’ve been safe down here. Don’t let anyone else in. Like, close the door behind you. The X Men did that with their Morlocks, right? They move in, there’s all these people already squatting in the deep underground parts of New York City. Yeah, but the X Men get to jump to different dimensions too. Okay, like that’s like infinite real estate. Yeah, so why they need to be in the Morlocks territory? Yeah, they don’t even.

They don’t even be taking up precious real estate on this finite planet that we’ve got. They can jump over to like dinosaur world or whatever and. And set up a new camp there. Moment of silence for the Morlocks. They did get massacred. Okay, that’s enough. They weren’t real. Where were we? Oh, deep underground. Sorry, I’m now thinking of our last thing. But yes, that’s the hermetically sealed, you know, doomsday thing. Oh. One thing I was going to say about these tunnels, they’re kind of rough hewn mining tunnels. They didn’t finish them to speak of. They’re just rough hewn tunnels.

But you go walking and then suddenly in this cave, there’s like this nice tatami room, like bedroom. They were like, we. They finished the Emperor’s room, but they didn’t finish anything else. Speaking of tunnels, Catch this. This is another interesting note that within the tunneling industry, a long standing tradition is that one of the first tasks of each new tunneling project is to establish a small shrine to St Barbara at the tunnel portal or at an underground junction into long tunnel headings. This is often followed with a dedication and an invocation to St Barbara to protect all those who work on the project during the construction period.

So Rapunzel is also again, St Barbara, who is the patron saint of artillery, mathematicians and tunnels. And this isn’t just like something that’s getting pulled out of a random. Like they still do it today. You can still find examples, especially in Europe, where when they make like a new, you know, high speed underground modern tunnel, they are still doing this little shrine to St Barbara to kind of like make sure no one dies during the course of the project. So what were they doing at CERN again? Not. They were. Well, I’m sure St Barbara had a little thing, but yeah, they were like just straight up invoking demons.

Okay. That’s what I still haven’t worked out. I don’t know what’s going on with the CERN opening. So you know that that was just them opening an actual porter to hell and letting everyone know that this is exactly what the intentions were. The port in the doorway to hell. So I’m thinking of an old CTV sketch where Dave Thomas is doing an offensive Asian host and inviting people to. Maybe it was the portal to hell. I don’t remember. Is the doorway to hell the portal? But Dave Thomas. Was this a spicy chicken ad? No, this was the comedian Dave Thomas, not the Wendy’s guy, Dave Thomas.

But it is confusing because they do have the same name. Looking through Weaponized. Pam, we talked about that. I talked about the shoes. Oh, here. Yesterday was the first warm day. The reason I kept noticing Rapunzel had no shoes was yesterday was the first warm day we’ve had so far this year. So I’m sitting around and noticing that my socks are not doing the best. So every time I saw Rapunzel’s feet, I’d like correlate the two. So it was like watching in Smell O Vision. How do they know? Yeah, they know that Smell O Vision for you, right? Or her hair.

Like you notice Rapunzel don’t smell good, does she? I mean, yeah, but logic would say no. But in this movie, she’s like the cleanest thing that you see, right? Because she’s surrounded by animals and ruffians, something that Flynn Eugene refers to at the beginning of the movie. And then comes at the end that he did actually die. He’s gone past an nde, right? He was like fully expired, right? Or do we still call that he does have an nde, but he gets brought back to life by Rapunzel’s tears, which is really the tears of the sun.

Right? Because Rapunzel is just a personification of the literal sun. Does that make her an actual goddess? If you, if you have the power of the sun within you, that, that, that, you know, that makes you a sort of God. Right. See, when I’m watching this, I figured this is, this movie is an alchemical formula where they’re taking the male energy of the, the literal son of God that falls from heaven onto the earth, right. And dies and is risen again. All the like. She represents a female Jesus throughout the entire course of this movie, all the way down to healing properties.

Linking up with a thief. Right? Isn’t that like Jesus’s last days? He was hanging out with a thief the whole time. I really do feel that this particular retelling of Rapunzel, they, they took this solar deity mythology and they just kind of ran with it. And, and this isn’t just a link to Jesus too, because there is a, another solar deity. It was a Baltic solar goddess named Solly or Soleil, who’s also held captive by a king in a tower. And she represents this like light that’s being kept in the darkness. And this and this, a very similar thread here is that in this movie when Mother Gothel finds that sunflower, which is literally a, the flower that grows out of the piece of the sun, she immediately occults it.

She puts like camouflage over it, she hides it and she keeps it in the dark so that she’s the only one that can unaccult this knowledge and like use it for good. So I think a lot again in that original tale of St Barbara was all about Christianity versus paganism and how Christianity had to be a culted in its early time. And then once it was unacculted, then it could help everyone. Hence St Barbara converting the Christianity and dying for it. I don’t know. This movie, more so than any other in the last 10 decades worth of Disney movies, has so much symbolism that you can kind of like just jump in and out of.

Well, in my notes I’m like so much illumination, which I’m talking about the lanterns. But then, you know, Rapunzel herself becomes illuminated. Like somehow she remembers from being a two week old baby the sun symbol which he’s been perfectly painting around her room, you know, and. And the king and the queen, they both wear crowns that have the sun symbol on it. All of the different knights inside their army all have this sun symbolism, like very obvious. Even those little lanterns that they light and they shut up into the sky, they all have this little sun symbol on it.

Because this is the as above so below property, right? Rapunzel comes from the sun comes from the sky falls down. And when they lose the sun, when they, when they’re trying to find it again, they light this artificial fire and they send it up into the sky. Like this is them sending their version of fire back to where their version of fire came from. We have a lantern festival here, but it’s like the opposite of everything. It’s in February, so it’s colder and shit. The lanterns are all on the ground, but it goes on for a mile down the main street up to the main temple where you’ll see these series of lanterns at some are companies.

It’s like these old Japanese style looking lanterns, like company logos shining through or something. And then there’s you know, like legit ones and you keep going up and as you get to the main temple, they’re psychedelically lighting the entire temple as well. So that’s. That’s kind of cool. So it’s like this weird technologies, you know, slash old religion culture thing. Kind of like mashup. There’s a little bit of that here too. And I’m sure that you’ve. Maybe you’ve seen this before, but like around Christmas time, everyone will light all these bags with little candles in them up and down and it turns into these things where an entire neighborhood will all do it.

So if you go around a neighborhood, it’s just lined with these little candles and this also kind of gets absorbed into like pagan rituals again where now it’s like, oh, that’s so Santa can find his way to like bring his shaman magic to your house in the middle of winter. Right. But it’s also this another Christian symbol. Santa will give you the gift of mushrooms. Right? That’s what I always wanted from Santa. But do you have any other threads or of hair that you would like to pull on for this as far as like things you saw? Oh man, I feel like I could keep going.

I’ll. I’ll cap it off on a. A few of them. But yeah, so some of the other examples we see this Once upon a Time. This is the actual. I think this is verbatim from the movie Once Upon a Time. A single drop of sunlight fell from the heavens. And from this small drop of sun grew a magic golden flower that had the ability to heal the sick and injured. And as soon as he says that, I was just making a mental note, like, we’re talking about Jesus, right? You’re literally talking about the sun fell from the heavens, a small drop of the sun.

But then we. We see that it actually turns into a girl, Rapunzel. And then the original story, Rapunzel, then has twins. And in almost any sort of alchemical sense, you’ve got the male property, followed by the female property, followed by the combination of those two, which then creates twins. And this is sort of that same fight against Tiama, against Chaos. Right. This is like the one. The one active energy then turns into a passive. But since you need balance, they need to combine. And then you’ve got twins. And the twins represent balance in a more solidified form and, like a material form.

So even the story of the sun falling down and turning to Rapunzel, that itself is like a creation story. I don’t know. In this movie in particular, the way that they do that. Because this drop of sunlight, I believe, is somewhat unique to the Disney’s retelling of it. This is not the Grimm Brothers, and this is not the Italian parsley version. This is the Disney version. And then they’ve really massively, like, turned the original story into, like, this Rosicrucian sort of tale. Yeah, I was, you know, we were saying female Jesus. I’m almost wondering if the way we’re describing is that since we’re talking trinities, isn’t that more of a Holy Ghost situation where, you know, it’s kind of like, you can’t seem.

It’s like the George Carlin bit where he’s doing the interview with Jesus. Yeah. You ever Jesus come back and he’s being interviewed on 60 Minutes or whatever? Yeah, I never got along with the Holy Ghost. One day comes, you, he’s a fish. Next day he sees your mother. You just, you know, I don’t know what’s up with that guy. But that’s kind of how this works, right? Because it’s going into a flower, it’s going into Rapunzel. It was just alchemy. It’s straight alchemy where it keep the form, keeps inverting the whitening and a blackening. And now all of a sudden, like, it goes through different transformations.

Even at the end of this movie when they cut the hair and it turns brown. And now you’ve taken what symbolize Life and death and this golden thing that can save you and killing it and destroying it and then finding out that it’s now been consolidated yet again into another form. Now it’s inside like a fluid, like every single step of this movie. And what is that fluid? It’s essentially gold. It’s liquid sun, which is essentially the philosopher’s stone. Right. Is to be able to create gold out of any substance. And here gold is being created out of hair.

It’s being created out of tears. And I assume that any other bodily fluid that she emits from your body could potentially have these same healing properties. I was actually looking there was. This one did have an animated series which went for three season 60 episodes. It was just called Tangled the Series and then Rapunzel’s Tangled Adventure. Because I was wondering, are they. Did they continue there with like the twin thing or anything? Right. Also, you’re like, well, she had never hair. So in this show. Oh, and it’s King Frederick and Queen Ariana of Corona. That’s always fun.

It’s always fun when those references come up. For instance, Rapunzel is unable to properly adjust due to her father’s constant protection. She escapes with her handmaiden Cassandra. They come across black rock spires that magically restore Rapunzel’s long hair. And then Rapunzel, Cassandra, Eugene Pascal, and Maximus the horse try and figure out. Rapunzel learns that the sun drop flowers power resides in her with the black rocks directing her to the dark kingdom. This is. Yeah, this just goes more and more off the hoof, I guess. Not the hoof. I see what you did there with the Max.

Yeah. Reference. This group soon learned that the rocks are created by the sundrops counterpart, the moonstone opal. Okay, sun and moon, obviously. This sounds like we’re getting more elemental stuff in the movie where the show is having to get convoluted for children, I guess. And the third series just has her. Her parents have been overthrown and they have to fight an ancient demon. Okay, whatever. They didn’t go with twins is my point. None of the stories after the Grimm fairy tales got a hold of it. They all dropped the twins part. Yeah, because. Yeah, because again, this was actually salacious because of its proximity to the St Barbara thing.

And to now imply that St Barbara was having premarital sex was kind of a. No. No. So they kind of. They eliminated that particular part of the story. And you can almost see if you go back and. And look at some of the slow transition from the old story into the modern story first it starts very obvious. Like she. She gets out of the tower, she gets knocked up. Here’s these twins. Then it starts becoming. They don’t explicitly say that she has twins or a baby at all. They just notice that her dress is starting to get tight.

And that was this higher brown nod to not piss off the church when you were telling this story. And eventually they just get rid of that entirely because they didn’t even like you insinuating that this girl, which again in the Disney movie, she’s about to turn 18 and every other retelling, she’s way closer to like Belle’s age in the original Beauty and the Beast story. Right. She’s like 14 or something. So over time, because of the St Barbara connection, I think that part gets whitewashed a little bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s almost depressing just looking at this series.

So one I. I guess that’s just how you do a Disney thing. You can’t move on. No. She can never quite be the princess. It’s like, oh no. She has to be coordinated as a princess. Why she’s princess by birth, right? Yeah, that would actually be fun. Like she turns into like a. Like a bloodthirsty power driven. Like she needs to become princess. And she’s got this hair that can do anything that she needs it to do. She almost uses it in this movie like Indiana Jones style where she can whip it at things and open them up and use it as like a grappling hook.

Like it. It actually seems like they could have turned that into a cool video game if they didn’t already. Where she just her hair for everything. Oh yeah, there’s a tangled video game. Let’s see what the description on that is. If they don’t utilize her hair as like her weapon and way to get around then missed opportunity because she does in this movie gameplay. And keeping with the film’s overarching Rapunzel. Can he heal the environment and grow flowers with their hair while Flint and cut through shrubbery and obstacles with his saver? Okay. Rapunzel could use her hair as a makeshift rope.

Can she beat the crap out of people though? I don’t know. Well, I don’t think she uses it as a weapon in this movie. That would be even cooler. But they wait engaging in melee combat. So with. With her hair. Okay. It sounds like it might be with a frying pan. Actually. That would actually make even more sense. Yeah, it would. Anyway, that’s the game. So. Yeah, there was as Snow White did cancel the live action plans for this one, they were announcing actors in the roles in December of 2024 and then last month. Right. Yeah.

Yeah. We’re not doing this anymore. Okay. No. Good. I hope they learned their lesson. I hope they learned their lesson. Although again, Snow White very easily could have just been some way to funnel more Epstein style money through like a private island somewhere. Who. Yeah, it’s like, who is that movie for? I mean, okay, it’s. I don’t. I don’t think it’s for kids. Wouldn’t they be more appeal? CIA, I don’t know, military base, interrogation centers, bonds. I just see it as like legacy bonds, you know, like just keep. You know, because if you make. Everyone’s like this Snow White sucks.

Let’s go buy the old one. Or now that everyone threw away their dvd. It’s not. Maybe not on this streaming now you gotta go different streaming or. Or something. Or. Or maybe you do want physical media and a bunch of people buy the old Snow White again right after paying to see the new one. And I guess not many people paid for it, though. It was a flop, wasn’t it? What was the numbers on that one? Not good. Officially not good. Those were the official numbers. Okay, I’m. I’m just curious what we’re looking at here. Budget.

Oh, my. It made $200 million. How does that sound? It made 200 million? Yeah. Oh, so I guess they’re. They’re all in the green now. Budget. 240 to 270. There it is. So I guess that one. So this movie outperforms Snow White even without inflation added. Yeah, this movie, it made 600 million. It cost 270 or whatever, so I guess it doubled. Ish. Yeah. Frozen is the. Is the billion, right? This. This one, this was just Disney. Oh, it’s a hit. Yay. We haven’t had that for a while. That wasn’t Pixar. At least. I kind of remember how this feels.

I like this feeling. We’re making money. Yeah. Yeah. We made a movie that isn’t weird and flawed. You know, I had. I had two other notes. One of them is that this movie, I realized, is the source of a pretty popular meme. Now someone will be like, what. What kind of opinion do you have that’ll have people like this? And it’s a shot of a bunch of swords held up to this Disney guy’s head. That’s from this movie. And it’s when Flynn is in the. What is it? The Snuggly Duckling. Yes. He’s in the Snuggly Duckling, which is this horrible rundown pub.

And they’re all singing, and then it’s like, what’s. You know, what’s your dream? He’s like, oh, no, I don’t sing. And as soon as he says that, all the guys in the bar hold their knives up to his throat. And so this is the source of that, which I thought is interesting because it’s in the middle of a song about dreaming. It’s called I’ve Got a Dream, I assume, because that’s what they keep saying over and over again. So it’s a. It’s a song called I’ve Got a Dream about a guy that won’t sing about his dream.

And that shot of him not singing about his dream becomes a meme. And then there was the meme of don’t let your memes become dreams. And I almost feel like, in a. Again, like a weird, synchro, mystic way that, like, this connects to Shia LaBeouf, because that’s also a Disney Universe staple. So, anyways, this movie is one of the earlier memes that I think took off. Yeah, I’m not sure if I. I must have seen that one somewhere. It’s not one I see too often, but. Yeah. Yeah. There’s also one from the Road to El Dorado, I think is the name of it.

Is that a Disney movie? I don’t think it’s a Disney movie, though. No, that’s the DreamWorks or Fox one. That was the one that, you know, the paired movies. Disney had the Emperor’s New Groove. And then they also have a scene that’s very similar to the one that gets repeated from this movie. And then the other, the. The final note that I guess, is a rabbit hole in its own right. We haven’t really brought up Tracy Twyman a whole lot on the show, if ever, which is also a staple in, like, decoding Disney stuff. And if you look for Tracy Twyman’s work called Minnie Mouse, or I believe it’s called Minnie Moose, the Secret of Minnie Moose, M O U S S E, although that’s itself, is a reference to Rosemary’s Baby.

And in Rosemary’s Baby, this lady serves her poison, Moose, but she calls it Mouse. Anyways, Tracy Twyman goes way down the rabbit hole on these, like, occult Disney Mickey connections. And one of those connections is that the silhouette of Mickey’s head itself are these three circles. And that the three circles are the same as the trefoil, which represents the Holy Trinity, which Again, comes up not only in the tale of St Barbara, but in this tangled movie they show. At the top of the window is this holy trinity symbol. Although Tracy Twyman breaks that down way farther than I’m going to attempt here.

But I highly recommend just looking up Tracy Twyman, Minnie Mouse, Trey Foil and have your mind blown. Mini Moose, Mini Moon. It’s a case where spelling’s important, isn’t it? I guess we’ll wrap this one up for today then, is it? If those are your final points, I think we’ve untangled most of it, actually. I’ll sneak another one in. Screw it. Let’s. Let’s. Yeah, go for it. The other. I just thought it was interesting, the emphasis on the word ruffian, which you don’t hear very often. They mentioned thugs and ruffians. The thugs were a cult that worshiped Kali.

I believe in India. One of the. The original mind control assassination cults were the thugs. But ruffians has a very specific connotation in Freemasonry too, because it’s the known as the three Ruffians or the Jews. Not. Not the Jews, but the Jews, because it was three guys named Jubila, Jubilo, Jubalam. So they were known as the Jews in that all their names started with Ju. But these were three ruffians that were sent out to steal the secrets of Freemasonry. And they get lost to time, but they kill Hiram Abiv. It’s like this whole story, but I just thought it was really interesting because again, this plot of these ruffians that are out to steal the magic of this kind of Christ like figure, it kind of follows the same exact plot.

And I can’t remember any other Disney movie that emphasized the word ruffian so many times. Okay, I. I didn’t. I guess I didn’t want to write ruffian. So in my notes I wrote scum bums. They’re very specific. It’s even part of a song or two. No, no, no, it is. No, I get what you’re saying. You know, it’s the hooligans and the ruffians. Right? So no hooligans here, just ruffians. Feel like hooligans is industrial Age. So can you have hooligans before the industrial age? Hooligans are like drunk soccer fans. Yeah. Yeah. That’s maybe one where ruffians can be any sort of time.

So Sumerian ruffians. Does that work now? I guess you got to make it at least to the Middle Ages before you get ruffians. Roman ruffians. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. It’s interesting to think about how these. Like, I wrote. Like I said, I wrote scum bombs. That’s kind of a modern thing, isn’t it? You can’t call these guys scum bombs. I did wrong a gutter snipe. Because they didn’t have gutters. Gutter. They didn’t have, like, you know, sewage systems. Yeah, again, that city don’t smell good. That’s why no one knows his Rapunzel. Yeah. What else was in that pot she was hiding her tiara in? Wasn’t that literal chamber pot? Right, right.

That’s. It Isn’t that. That’s why men are supposed to walk closer to this, the road, than women. So if people throw their chamber pots out, they’ll go over the first person and the guy will get splashed. Okay, I didn’t know that. I thought it was so, like, if a car runs off the road, that takes. No, because this comes way before. If a horse craps everything too. The. The. You’re required if you’re walking with someone that outranks you, that you walk closer to the road than they do. Okay. It’s from what. At least my high school history teacher says, because of chamber pots and trash.

So, I mean, I. I mean, I assume the same thing would work in the military. It’s like if I outrank you, I don’t. And, you know, you can be my chamber pot. At you. Yeah. Come on. I don’t think you’re supposed to actively throw it at your girlfriend, but. Or throw at your boyfriend. Whatever. So I guess we’ll wrap this one up today. If you want to give the people your jam. Well, I’ll save you from my jam. But I’ll tell you about my website@paranoidamerican.com which maybe I will start selling concentrated Paranoid American jam. That might be an avenue that we’re ready to go into.

We haven’t got there yet. But I do have really cool custom toys and comic books and shirts, all kinds of fun things. In fact, I’ve been publishing comics now for over a decade. Started in 2012. And we are not slowing down. In fact, I’ve got more than ever. So if you were on the website a year ago or a month ago, or even a week ago, go back and check it out again, because I’ve always got new releases coming out. We’ve got a video game on Steam that’s going to be coming out called Lucifer. Lives in lower Manhattan, just Dropped the Illuminati comic.

Just dropped the second series of conspiracy cards, which has Puff Daddy, Taylor Swift, Jim Jones, Jose Delgado of MK Ultra fame. We’ve got so many different sort of like conspiracy legends. We’ve got something called Greatest Hits, which includes Barry Seal and Vince Foster. It’s essentially all the people the Clintons have assassinated. So if any of that sounds remotely interesting, just do yourself a favor and check out paranoidamerican.com and find stuff that is nowhere else on the Internet because all of those people are either dead or in jail. Oh, and thanks. I got my Call It Disney shirt in the mail, which comes of course with a fun story because I’m talking to my mom last week and it was late at night for us and my dad had set up the zoom or whatever, but it comes on and it’s, it’s an image of like fisherman Jesus because he has like a Bible study group or something.

I can’t see my mom at all. And then she’s like, oh, look, here’s the shirt. I’m like, I can’t see. I just see Jesus. And then she starts like describing it to me. So I still haven’t seen it. But yeah, thank you, it’s on the way. Yeah, we’ll have to rock our occult Disney, which, by the way, are not available to the outside world. Maybe through like a series of secret handshakes and riddles, you might be able to acquire one through like Patreon or something. But right now, me and Matt and my mom are the only ones on the planet that have a Colt Disney T shirts.

Actually, my mom has it right. She was at school. Yeah, both of our moms have a cold Disney T shirt. What a time to be live. As for me, I do a lot of talking about movies and TV shows@podcastiopodcastius.org It’s also that on Patreon, we just finished up the original Twilight Zone, or about to finish up the original Twilight Zone at Time Enough podcast. Then we’re going to do the movies Rod Serling wrote, which includes Seven Days in May, which is a good conspiracy head movie. And. And then we’re going to be on to two other series like that didn’t just.

We just finished talking about the Planet that Apes movies and live action TV show podcast 1999. Taking a short break there. And then we’re going to do the animated 70s animated Planet of the Apes series, which I’ve never seen and people talk pretty well about. We, we did the live action ape show, which is it’s it’s got good points. Obviously it’s like 70s TV, but apparently the animated one’s gonna be like a little bit like legit. Better. We will see apes. Yeah. Okay, I’m gonna get a haircut. So I just gotta ask not. Not to be electro Skywood, Blonde, Rapunzel or brunette or Ponzo.

Are you going Betty or Veronica? I gotta go blonde on Rapunzel because it freaking glows in. Once she turns brunette, it no longer glows in the dark. So. Right. It’s. It’s only when it’s blonde does it have like the magical properties. I. I guess I have to go brunette because when I looked at the TV show and it says she magically has her hair restore, it’s like, oh, no. Yeah. Which you have to do. You can’t have the series without doing that. It gets too close to the next one that looks kind of like her, which is the redhead.

I forgot what that one is. You know? You know what I’m talking about. Brave. Brave. Yeah. It’s. She looks too much like brave with the brunette hair. So I think the blonde hair is the only thing that helps her stand out. And also blonde hair has to represent those waves of wheat and grain. Right, Right. He uses to escape. So I don’t know, for symbolically, it’s got to be blonde. Yes. Okay. Even conspiracies all the more sticker sheets. There are non American stickers. They’ll make you smile and snicker False threads and secret society. All of these and more on our sticker sheets.

Explore the unique with Paranoid American sticker sheets. Unearth tales of Cryptids, cults and mysteries through each sticker. These won’t last long. Wrong. Get yours now@paranoidamerican.com American stickers, cryptids, cults and killers Killers. We got all your favorite conspiracies. All that ever been more on our sticky sheets. There are North American snickers make you smile and snicker Secret society. All of these and more of a sticker sheets. What the heck are you waiting for? Discover the extraordinary with Paranoid American sticker sheets. From Cryptids in the night to cults out of sight each sticker is a unique find. Get yours now@paranoidamerican.com yeah.

I scribbled my life away Driven the right to page. Will it enlight your brain Give you the flight my plane paper the highs ablaze somewhat of an amazing feel. When it’s real to real you will engage it. Your favorite of course. The lord of an arrangement I gave you the proper results to hit the pavement if they get emotional hate maybe your language engagement how they playing it well without Lakers evade them whatever the cause they are to shapeshift snakes get decapitated Met is the apex execution of flame you out nuclear bomb distributed at war rather gruesome for eyes to see Max them out that I light my trees blow it off in the face.

You despising me for what though Calculated and rather cutthroat paranoid American must be all the blood smoke for real Lord give me your day your way vacate they wait around to hate whatever they say man it’s not in the least bit we get heavy rotate when a beat hits so thank us you’re welcome for real, you’re welcome they ain’t never had a deal you’re welcome man they lacking a pill you’re welcome yet they doing it still you’re welcome.
[tr:tra].