The Worst Showman?

P.T. Barnum was actually terrible!

First of all, spoilers! If you haven’t gotten the chance to watch The Greatest Showman, please do so! It is absolutely amazing, and I have nothing against it. Throughout the movie you continue to feel bad for the character P.T. Barnum in the movie. He meets this girl he loves, but he doesn’t think he will be able to get her because her father hates him. He is a boy from a very poor family, and his love is from a family that is very wealthy. Her father tells Barnum he is nothing, and will never be anything.

Eventually he and the girl run away, and they’re poor again. She doesn’t mind because she is with him. They have children and he’s trying to make the best money he can. He decides to open a museum basically for the strange. It’s people that you just wouldn’t see everyday. Fast forward through the movie and the place ends up burning down.

After talking to a few people, and a lot of research, I found out that a lot of what he was doing was actually a sham. The dwarf that you see in the movie was actually a 4 year old in real life! One of his most famous hoaxes was The Fiji Mermaid. People came from all over the world to see this mermaid, because who wouldn’t want to? It turned out the “mermaid” was actually made of fish and monkey body parts. Weird, right?

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Not only did he fake a lot of his performances, but those performers were often forced into this. He had an elderly, blind, and paralyzed woman he claimed to be over 100 years old, and George Washingtons former nurse. Although she was under 80, that still did not give him the right to parade her around the world. After she passed away, Barnum did not seem upset, in fact he actually sold tickets to her autopsy!

We spent two hours rooting for a man we thought was a great family man. We thought he cared about people around him, and who he was working with. We are all very wrong! As I said in the beginning, the movie was very good! The music was fantastic to listen to, but the story seemed all wrong.

One thought on “The Worst Showman?

  1. I have to admit I hated the Greatest Showman. I guess some appreciated it as an optimistic, idealistic story, and I can kinda see that, but the total ignorance of history does a disservice to the real people who lived in that time, IMO.

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