Beauty & the Disney Beast

"Beauty and the Beast" was never really about beauty or ugliness. It has always been about admiration; the reaching out and obtaining of a kind of wealth that otherwise seemed beyond comprehension. Not surprisingly, of course, since ugliness cannot be rewarded in its own right -- or at least it couldn't be prior to the advent of reality TV -- the creature gifted with the keys to the treasury was almost always a character of seemingly mysterious appeal, the beautiful woman. The fact that what made for the physical or intellectual basis of that beauty could itself be transformed into its own kind of commodity & #8230; well, that was just another kind of deception.

There is no question but that it is impossible to do justice to the many transformations of Beauty and the Beast since its incarnation (though Windling did an exceptional job)....
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