This episode is produced by Ashley Brown, Caroline Mathelin,

Carolyn Pizato, Sierra Kaufman,

Courtney Hickling, Eric,

Hena Kay,

Isaac Thompson, Jeremy Simmons, Joel Schmulky, Kathleen Hale, Tracy Hanson, Tracy Motica,

Saudo Hassan, and Vaughn M Dennis.

Disney Story Origins is proud to support the Rising Star Music Fund, a nonprofit organization helping to fund music education and underprivileged communities and music therapy programs for kids with special needs. If you'd like to make a tax

deductible donation please visit rising star music fund.org and help us bring the

joy of music into the lives of children. This episode contains some language, sexuality,

and material that some might not find suitable.

Discretion is advised. Hello and welcome to Disney Story Origins episode 17, Beauty and the Beast, Part 1. The I'm going to go. Oh, The tale of Beauty and the Beast is one of the best known stories in the world

with a history that's somewhat different from other popular fairy tales.

The earliest versions of Cinderella Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, the frog prints,

and many others precede the invention of the printing press and got their starts as folklore passed

through oral tradition from storyteller to

storyteller until enterprising authors such as the brothers Grimm and

Charles Perot captured them on paper for us to read and enjoy centuries later.

Beauty and the Beast, on the other hand, didn't start this way. Though we can trace several archetypal versions of Beauty and the Beast back some 4,000 years, influenced by Greek stories such as Cupid and

Psyche from the golden ass in the second century AD and the pig king in

Italian fairy tale in 1550. So it did grow from folkloric roots derived from mythology. If you were looking for

beauty and the beast in the Arm Thompson-Euther classification system, the system which

classifies folk tale types or fairy tales using the motifs or themes of the stories,

...