OK, this is the weirdest piece of Dragonslayer merch I’ve come across: the Dragonslayer Storybook. This is from Random House and is the exact same format as the storybooks  for Star Wars, Willow, Annie and the Muppet movies. Remember, this is a movie that opens with a cold blooded murder, there is no clear hero and a dragon eats multiple princesses.

I’d like to dwell on that for a second. At the climax of the movie, Galen (Peter MacNichol), our hero, has gone in to slay the dragon and save the (second or third?) princess. He frees the princess, who then flees in terror down the wrong tunnel. Galen fails to do much more than annoy the dragon, who then flies off. Galen then goes looking for the princess, who has fallen down and is being eaten by the dragon’s hatchlings. The scene with the baby dragons on the bloody princess bugged me out as a kid, but it is featured in every piece of Dragonslayer merch I own. Which is fine, sort of, because I think Dragonslayer is one of the best fantasy movies ever made because it subverts so much of what we expect out of the story. But all this merch is geared for kids! Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying kids shouldn’t see Dragonslayer. I am instead bewildered by how willing the powers that be were to showcase a princess getting eaten by dragons in a children’s book, is all. That seems…sort of astonishing. Almost like no one actually watched the movie before they greenlit all this stuff.

(In fairness, the first two Indiana Jones movies got storybooks like this too. I kinda feel like they’re just as weird. Temple of Doom in particular. A guy gets his heart ripped out in that!)