Summary: When you stop and take a moment to think about dragons, chances are you have a very specific image in your mind of what this mythological creature looks and acts like, depending on whatever your formative dragon experience was. So you might find it weird that a dragon can actually be a lot of different things to different people. A lot of the differences in dragon representations are cultural; for example, Westerners trend more towards a dragons-are-evil mythos, while others, especially the Chinese, revere dragons as bringers of luck. Dragons have also changed over time; we’ve somewhat overcome our stereotypical dragon sensibilities in favor of the more modern notion of seeing dragons as ‘people,’ or at least assigning some sort of human or uber-human characteristics to them. Below is a handy guide to the panoply of dragons in movies that might, perhaps help you learn how your ideas of what a dragon is came to be, and whether or not those ideas are terribly wrong. The entries are listed roughly in chronological order, so you can see the evolution of dragon representations over time. 1. Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty (1959) Could be a good dragon. We don't want to judge on this picture alone. No representation of dragons in movies is more traditionally Western than that of Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty. If you went back a few centuries and showed this movie to a bunch of townspeople… well, first of all they’d flip out over seeing moving pictures… and then they’d probably torture you and burn you at the stake for performing witchcraft. After that they’d all sit down together and say, “Yeah, looks like a dragon to me!” A lot of Western myths use dragons as symbols of the devil. There are no redeeming factors, nothing besides true, unadulterated evil to this terrifying creature. The fact that this dragon actually is a wicked witch just tops off the perfect image of everything we’ve come to know about good and evil. 2. Smaug in The Hobbit (1977) Are dragons supposed to be that hairy? There might have been some miscommunication with the drawing department here. This is another dragon that’s pretty one-dimensional; however, we’re starting to get a bit more into the mythos of dragons with this character. We can’t say for sure if Tolkien invented the idea of a treasure-hoarding beast living forever in a cave, but he invented pretty much everything else we know of as fantasy, so it’s a fair bet. This dragon eats people, destroys towns, is greedy, and thinks only of himself. At least Maleficent only put people to sleep and blows a bit of fire now and then. This is possibly the worst-behaved dragon on our list. 3. Elliot in Pete’s Dragon (1977) Look! That dragon is copying Mickey Rooney's facial expressions! We’re not sure exactly what to make of this. The same year that brought us Smaug also brought us Elliot, the misbehaving dragon that may or may not have been a figure of Pete’s imagination induced by too many beatings or excessive drug use. Of course, by the end everyone can see Elliot, so maybe the drugs were in the water? Maine has always been a kind of ‘live and let live’ place, so it’s no surprise that they set a movie with a heart-of-gold dragon in a town there. Still, although Elliot cares for Pete very much, he’s got some characteristics that wouldn’t be tolerated in an upstanding human citizen. He loves pranks such as pulling out a lady’s slip and getting egg all over people’s faces. And that’s the true essence of dragons – whether they’re good or bad, they’re never entirely human, and don’t necessarily play by our societal rules. 4. Falcor in The Neverending Story (1984) Drugs were most definitely involved in the making of this movie. This is the first movie on our list based roughly on Eastern folklore. Falcor is a luckdragon, which you might [...]
