Evil Disney Queen Attacked By Actual Evil!
Read our thrilling Wonk-vestigation!
If there is one thing you can know for sure about drag queens, it is that they are evil. Wait. Maybe that’s large media corporations. Well, one way or another, someone was being evil last week and we here at Yr Wonkette are not afraid to find out who!
Our tale of drama begins with a perfectly nice (if creepy) visit to “Storybook Dining,” a restaurant within a location within a lodge within the greater Walt Disney World park. YouTube user LocalFloridaGal recorded her family’s experience and posted it on YouTube for all the world to see. Storybook Dining has a mix of Disney characters in full costume and servers in somewhat more ordinary attire. LocalFloridaGal’s experience included Snow White, Dopey, and Grumpy, the latter two not speaking and wearing gigantic cartoon masks over their heads. At the end of the evening, the family was invited up to meet and take pictures with the evil Queen, famous for poisoning princesses in the park.
And … that was it. Good Wonk-vestigation, Wonkette!
LocalFloridaGal and fam appeared to have a great time, despite a truly weirdly obsequious performance by Snow White at their table. While Yr vegan Wonkette would have fled the scene even before the hunks of cooked mammal were served, different strokes for different folks and all that.
But some people watching the video were determined to believe that the evil Queen (who, for some reason, Disney insists goes by only “Queen”) was actually being portrayed by a man. The backlash began with terribly intelligent “That’s a man, baby!” comments below LFG’s video, though that was seemingly not enough for your average Florida-visiting Republican. And so last week, the blog That Park Place published a terribly cis-sexist piece detailing the experiences of a different family who were shocked —SHOCKED — to find that during their Storybook Dining experience the Evil Queen seemed not to entirely share their wholesome Christian values. So shocked, in fact, that they had to reach out to the theme-park-obsessed blog to tell their tale of woe:
While we were waiting for the desserts to come out we received our invitation to meet the Evil Queen which we were really looking forward to. […] I was doing some video and took a few pictures from about 10 feet away then handed my iPhone over to the cast member to take some pics for me so I could get in the picture. It was kind of loud inside so I couldn’t really hear what the character was saying until I got face to face (typical conversation distance of a few feet) and then it hit me that the Evil Queen without a doubt had a man’s voice.
Real Man Dad (as we’ll refer to him) had more evidence, too. He reported that Evil Queen was, in fact, taller than his “average height.” While Real Man Dad’s exact height was not specified, we are terribly sure that it was between 11 and 12 units of 6 inches each — you know, average — and refuse to mock him for his spatial perception and/or his apparent lack of awareness that heels and platform shoes exist.
Struck by this evidence, RMD bravely defended his vulnerable children against “tall” and “deep voice”:
At first I said I wanted to formally complain about the Evil Queen being a man and that I felt very disrespected by Disney because this is not the sort of thing my family values and they didn’t give us any type of notice that this sort of thing was even a possibility. After that my wife then signaled for me to stand up and take a step from the table so that our kids didn’t have to overhear the conversation.
Can’t have the kids overhear “tall” and “deep voice”! They might catch trans cooties, the most dreaded sonically induced disease after windmill cancer!
I stated we are a conservative Christian family, I’m spending $8,000 on this current trip in addition to the tens of thousands I’ve spent together in the past at Walt Disney World and Disney Cruises, and that this is not right.
Tens of thousands on Disney norovirus extravaganzas? Have you, RMD, perhaps ever considered your priorities? Far be it from me to validate Ron DeSantis, but your very presence there at Storybook Dining seems to indicate that you did not take seriously his warnings of EvilDireEvil at Disney HQ. Are you quite sure you’ve been getting your conservative bigots’ newsletter?
For the most part the manager just listened and never once apologized for anything. At one point the manager stated “I can assure you that she is a woman.” She went even further, trying to shame me, informing me that “she” was so excited to get the part as the Evil Queen. For a brief moment I thought “oh… maybe I’m wrong” but then I realized that I was just being gaslighted. I politely told the manager that “I know what you are doing and that I do not appreciate the fact that you are trying to be funny and disingenuous.” So since the manager doubled down I also doubled down and asked “is the Evil Queen a biological male?” The manager’s reply was, “I’m sorry sir, I cannot answer that.”
LOL. RMD thinks this is a horrible gotcha moment, like any normal restaurant manager would respond to that question with, “Oh, please allow me to describe the genitals of our performers so that you can Do Your Own Research. Should I add a blood sample to your bill for karyotyping our performers at your convenience?”
Despite the only evil on evidence being Snow White’s squeaky voice and the use of “Queen” for anyone other than Mercury and May, That Park Place seemed to take the whole RMD complaint as terribly serious, protesting just the right amount of much that yes, thank you, they are aware that Disney theme parks have frequently cast actors for physical characteristics other than dick length or capacity to menstruate:
The stage performance of Maleficent in the Fantasmic pyrotechnical effects show has often been played by men, presumably due to physical constraints. In the same way, the gender of characters in masks [is] generally unknown to guests. For height reasons Mickey Mouse is often played by a woman. What is different about this experience is that a rather tall person appearing to be biologically male and sounding biologically male is playing a female queen in a way that might not be authentic to the character’s traditional depiction.
“Traditional depiction” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Looking at the role of Peter Pan alone we find the first film performer (Betty Bronson, during the silent era); the first stage performer (Jean Forbes-Robertson from 1927 to 1939); the first actor to portray Pan on Broadway (Jean Arthur, 1950); the film model whose movements were animated in the original Disney movie (Bobby Driscoll, 1953); the first TV Pan (Mary Martin in 1955 and 1956); and the two most famous Peter Pans when I was growing up (Mia Farrow, 1976 and Sandy Duncan, 1979). Those include a grand total of one cis dude, Bobby Driscoll. The ever-young pre-pubescent boy was more than once played by women over the age of 50. And Driscoll, while clearly a great talent, sadly became addicted to drugs and died at only age 31, hardly what one might want as a child’s role model.
Honestly, one might look at that history and start to think that for fantasy characters maybe it’s cross-dressing that’s traditional. And yet it somehow escaped That Park Place’s notice that even if a trans actor was hired to portray the Evil Queen, that maybe the real problem here is just that she’s so lovely she can’t help it?
Transvestigation (did we really need that word? Yr Wonkette thinks that “stalking,” “harassment,” and “invasion of privacy” all do just fine) is hardly unique to Disney theme parks. Random bathroom-goers, teenage basketball players, superstar athletes and even Madonna and Beyoncé — Beyoncé? Yes, Beyoncé — have been subject to everything from in-person harassment to braindead YouTube hit pieces. Even so, there’s something particularly vile and stupid about attacking a fictional character for your “Think Of The Children And Western Civilization” movement. And there is something worse about complaining to the manager, being told that the actor is, in fact, a woman, and then taking your case to the nearest several billion people because dammit how could good stereotypes be wrong?
We could go on about over-the-top makeup and voice acting and how deep voices might deliberately play on common reactions to increase the menace of an evil character, but honestly we are just not that obsessed. The Evil Queen has genitals at all only in the sense that she has magic apple-poisoning powers: fantastically. For Yr Wonkette’s 8,000 dollars of vacation money, this character actor knocked the Evil Queen out of the park in a way that Real Man Dad could never hope to do.
Also, too, let's just snarkily comment about if that picture provided by Real Man Dad to That Park Place is really that family, those were teenagers --or very close to-- that Real Woman Mom thought could not withstand the damage of overhearing "tall" and "deep voice".
This entire family is more snowflakey than Elsa.
Hold up, mouse lesbians?!