On Saturday night, the day before the traditional celebration of a saint famous for destroying a dragon, the Maleficent dragon in Disneyland’s “Fantasmic!” show accidentally went up in flames and triggered an emergency evacuation from the scene.
From the New York Post:
A 45-foot-tall animatronic dragon caught fire and forced parkgoers to flee a popular show at Disneyland on Saturday night.
The blaze started during the theme park’s “Fantasmic!” show at the Tom Sawyer Island attraction… The show was abruptly stopped as guests and Disneyland cast members were rushed away from the scene as emergency personnel extinguished the fire, which was seen spreading down the body of the giant dragon…
The Anaheim Fire Department responded to the blaze and reported no injuries… The area around Frontierland was cordoned off, with the remainder of the park kept open.
Watch below:
The entire battle of Prince Phillip and the dragon in Sleeping Beauty is chock full of Christian allegory. Since the Bible refers to Satan as a dragon (Rev. 12:9), dragons have long been used in the West to symbolize the devil and evil. Walt Disney was drawing on that long tradition of religious and cultural symbolism when he had the evil horned sorceress Maleficent transform into a dragon in Sleeping Beauty.
In that movie, Prince Phillip fights the dragon with the Sword of Truth and the Shield of Virtue, given to him by the good fairies. The shield has a cross on it. Walt Disney meant for movie viewers not only to celebrate the victory of Phillip over the dragon so he can rescue Princess Aurora in the fantasy world of the movie, but to understand that demonic evil can only be conquered through religious truth and virtue. “Now, shall you deal with ME, O Prince — and all the powers of HELL!” Maleficent tells Phillip before he kills her.
But there was a soldier who fought and killed a demonic dragon over a thousand years before Walt Disney invented Prince Phillip and Maleficent. And, unlike Prince Phillip, this soldier was a real man.
St. George was martyred in the Holy Land at the start of the fourth century. A talented and brave soldier, he rose through the ranks of the army of the Roman emperor Diocletian. George was eventually killed for being Christian after he refused to participate in a required pagan sacrifice (George knew there was no compromise with evil). George is most famous for killing a dragon or monstrous beast (some now speculate it was a saltwater crocodile or an incarnation of the devil) to save a local town that was sacrificing its young women to the beast. His feast day, April 23, was tremendously popular during the Middle Ages and he has been for centuries a patron saint of England. Unfortunately, England is turning on its Christian heritage. This year, for instance, Oxford’s Magdalen College canceled its St. George’s Day dinner to focus on a Ramadan celebration.
The dragons we have now might be only animatronics, but demonic forces are certainly at work in the U.K. and America, and around the world. Like the fictional Prince Phillip and the real St. George, we should be ready to fight evil and stand for truth and virtue, whenever necessary and no matter the risk involved.
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