Posted on 11/19/2017 8:10:06 PM PST by Simon Green
As TV Tropes puts it...
It appears that villains in the Disney Animated Canon have an especially curious tendency to exit the film by falling off or out of things. Unfortunately for them, even though they are animated characters, they cannot defy gravity.
To begin with, not every villain in the 56 films of the Disney Animated Canon dies. Quite a few of the films don't even have a villain as such! But here are the fates of the eighteen villains who actually do die:
The Evil Queen - Falls off a cliff
Maleficent - Killed with the Sword of Truth
The Horned King - Disintegrated by the Black Cauldron
Ratigan - Falls off Big Ben
Bill Sykes - Run over by a train
Ursula - Impaled by a ship's bow
Percival C. McLeach - Falls over a watefall
Gaston - Falls off a castle
Scar - Eaten alive by hyenas
Claude Frollo - Falls off Notre Dame
Shan Yu - Killed by the explosion of a giant fireworks rocket
Clayton - Hanged by the neck by jungle vines
Carnotaur - Falls off a cliff
Lyle Tiberius Rourke - Turned into crystal and shattered by a propeller
Scroop - Falls into the void of space
Doctor Facilier - Dragged to Hell
Mother Gothel - Falls off a tower, aging into dust as she does so
Turbo/King Candy - Disintegrated by flaming Mentos
So 8 out of 18 of them actually do die by falling. It's a cliche for a reason!
Looks like the LD50 for them is higher than for humans though, for us it’s 8 feet.
And two seconds later Coyote is right back like nothing happened.
In real life coyotes run down and eat every roadrunner they see.
A big part of that is back then violence in movies was much more theoretical than shown on screen. So you didn’t usually see characters die on screen, it was more an implied death than a visual one.
Disney’s Goofy yell:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOqbMSzd7Yg
Goofy yell in the Emperors New Groove:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEOi1uMZFzA
That’s because they make the mistake of looking down. The Cartoon Laws of Physics clearly state that gravity only takes effect after a character looks down.
Together with his latest Acme road runner catching contraption.
[[In real life coyotes run down and eat every roadrunner they see.]]
They don’t eat the ones with switchblades
There is always a lot of villains accidentally meeting their comeuppances. It is a way of defeating the villain without turning the protagonist into a killer.
Good point. By my count, only 4 of the 18 villains are actually killed by the actions of the heroes.
I'm pretty sure Bonnie and Clyde changed that, in 1967.
The data is a bit skewed by the large number who slip and fall and bang their heads on a curbstone or some such, statistically, that counts as a fall of zero feet.
Counting Pixar? Don’t forget the villain from “Up.”
Also the Ducktails Movie.
Pixar pictures and straight-to-video/TV do not count as Disney Animated Canon.
http://disney.wikia.com/wiki/Disney_Animated_Canon
Also, Jaffar disintegrated rather horribly when his magic lamp was thrown into hot lava by Llago in Aladdin 2.
I recall Ducktails Movie getting a theatrical release, though I was really young so who knows.
"It was paired with the Donald Duck short Dude Duck for its theatrical release."
I do not know why it is not considered canon.
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