My daughter is like many other proto-femme-consumers and has become quite enamored of the Disney “Princesses” franchise. “Disney Princesses” is basically a gatling-gun style of marketing in which Disney lumps all of its princess and princess-like intellectual properties together for maximum impact. As such, “Disney Princesses” represents all that is wrong with the Empire of the Mouse.
    Even if I could logically accept that female cartoon characters, illustrated in wildly different art styles, living in geographically disperate locales and completely different eras, might actually be able break the bonds of time space and good taste in order to have tea together and discuss what it means to be ladylike, I still resent the deification of this pagan pantheon of privileged gals. I’m no feminist, but I still think hyper-feminizing the tastes and interests of young girls for purposes of financial gain is unhealthy. I mean, fuck, PINK PINK PINK PINK PINK…..

Whatever. Samantha also enjoys racing games, wrestling, soccer, mummies, vampires, story books and card games as well. So if she digs on the Disney girls I don’t really see the harm. At least they aren’t slut trainer dolls like Bratz.*     But I digress…

Bratz Doll

    I have an old Game Boy Advance that I Samantha plays with and we recently purchased a very inexpensive game called “Cinderella: Magical Dreams.” Happily, this resulted in Samantha happily murdering Cinderella over and over again with rain puddles and lambs. Curious? Read on!
    The game begins by your child controlling Cinderella as she goes about the daily chores forced upon her by a certain wicked step-mother and step-sisters. Cinderella’s old family estate is quite extensive and is broken up by a series of wooden gates which refuse to open and, despite being only waist-high and made of seemingly normal wood, are completely unscalable. How can Cinderella get back to the house and make breakfast? No problem; as soon as she shoves a wad of hay into the knickering maw of the chestnut gelding penned up in a nearby dilapidated stable, that recalcitrant gate swings open to allow her access to… another gate. Good thing there’s plenty of crumbling stables with hungry horses here, or this barnyard would be completely impassable. And just when you think you’ve left those barns behind, Cinderella finds herself forced to water sunflowers to open gates, or catch falling apples to open gates, or fill her underpants with oatmeal to open gates***. Farm-work sure is tough. Good thing about the gates, the apples might infect the deadly haystacks and cross-pollinate with the sunflowers. Cinderella would probably be allergic to the resulting vegetation and go into anaphylactic shock at the sight of it.
    Which brings us to Cinderella’s severe immune deficiency; what’s a quick way to kill a teenage inginue with a minimum of fuss? Have her walk through a rain puddle and touch a chicken–problem solved! Yes, any contact with the adorable chickens, lambs, bunnies, gophers or shallow mud puddles littering the estate can bring on a fatal collapse. Somehow the original movie left this character flaw out, so its a good thing we have this game to fill in the back-story; Cinderella is a far more intrigueing character knowing that she’s likely to be cuted to death.
    But my daughter Samantha, being a NORMAL thinking little girl, doesn’t grasp the fact that puddles are deadly, or that cute little bunnies should be avoided at all costs, or that a wooden gate can only be opened by watering flowers in its general vicinity. Oddly enough, she doesn’t seem too upset by her heroine’s messy and frequent deaths.
    And so we leave Cinderella trapped behind a foreboding two-foot tall wooden gate, repeatedly assassinated by a cute lamb and a rain puddle. The Game Boy resurrects her over and over again, but the damn fuzzy bunnies and roly-poly gophers will always be waiting for her.
    I like this game.

    TOPICAL CHEAP HUMOR WARNING!!!
    Perhaps Anna Nicole Smith accidentally touched a bunny or brushed up against a gopher. Her symptoms were strikingly similar to Cinderella Syndrome.

* – Go visit the site. Its frickin’ crazy. Even the load statement “please wait, it takes time to look this good” makes me want to shove a French rolling pin up my ass in mental self-defense. How can the people responsible for Bratz go to bed at night?**
** If you answered: on satin sheets covering a red heart-shaped bed with a coin-operated “Magic fingers” machine attached to it, then perhaps you are right.
*** I can’t tell if Cinderella actually wears underpans.