Modern Usage
In Sleeping Beauty, Walt Disney concluded the tale by having the wicked fairy godmother Maleficent transform herself into a dragon to withstand the prince, converting the fairy tale of the princess and the dragon.
In Ian Fleming's Dr. No both the book and film versions feature a tank in the shape of a dragon that protects Dr No's island from superstitious intruders. James Bond and Honeychile Rider are menaced by the dragon, do battle with it, have their friend Quarrel killed and are captured by the crew of the Dragon tank. Ann Boyd's 1967 book The Devil With James Bond explores the theory of the updating of the Princess and dragon genre.
In modern fantasy works, the dragon may hold the princess captive instead of eating her. Patricia Wrede spoofed this concept in Dealing with Dragons.
A subversion of the concept for young readers is Robert Munsch's The Paper Bag Princess, in which a princess outwits a dragon to save a prince (her betrothed, whom she proceeds not to marry upon him insulting her makeshift clothing instead of thanking her).
In Jay Williams's tale, "The Practical Princess," a dragon demands that a king should sacrifice his daughter to him so that he will leave the rest of the kingdom alone. But the princess saves herself by making a "princess dummy" out of straw, and filling it with boiling pitch and tar. The princess dresses the dummy in one of her own gowns, then goes to the dragon's cave where she offers herself as a sacrifice. The unwitting dragon swallows the straw dummy whole, and the pitch and tar explodes inside the dragon's stomach, killing him. Afterwards, the princess observes, "Dragons are not very smart."
In the Isaac Asimov short story "Prince Delightful and the Flameless Dragon," it is revealed that Dragons used to be slain as part of a passage from princehood to adulthood, though after a while, they became a protected species. Contrary to popular myth, they don't eat princesses as they tend to smell of cheap perfume and give indigestion.
Read more about this topic: Princess And Dragon
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