Here we are, the day before Thanksgiving... also the day before the 28th of November. And the 28th of November happens to be a friend's birthday. Maleficent is kind of his jam, and by that I mean he has a super sexy car (and I mean SEXY) named Maleficent. If you saw her, you wouldn't doubt the name for a second! Be that as it may, I've decided "When was the first Thanksgiving?" takes the doodle on Thanksgiving... and Maleficent ends up a day earlier than she should.
Maleficent! Defined by the Oxford Dictionary as, "Causing harm or destruction, especially by supernatural means." Which makes sense why Disney named their evil fairy "Maleficent". Now, the antagonist in this type 410 story (what scholars are calling 'Sleeping Beauty' like story lines apparently) is much older than the 1959 Disney movie Sleeping Beauty. There's the Brothers Grimm story in the early 1900's, Charles Perrault's, The Sleeping Beauty in the Woods first appearing in 1695, Giambattista Basile's Sun, Moon, and Talia in 1636, the romance, Perceforest, which was written between 1330-1345 and rumors that oral stories go back maybe even a thousand years. Throughout these tales, the evil fairy/angel/woman/person was just that, evil and not much more. It wasn't until Disney's, Sleeping Beauty that she got a name. And, I would argue it wasn't until Angelina Jolie's portrayal of her in Disney's Maleficent in the 2014 that she gained a cult following.
