Say for one moment that I believe in fairy tales.  I can totally buy that there would be an enchanted castle with a spoiled prick of a prince turned into a beast who must make someone love him or else remain a beast forever.  In a world of magic, this would be an entirely plausible scenario.  That being said, the logistics of Beauty and the Beast are full of gaping holes that I find very distracting.

Let’s start with our douche-tastic prince, for example.  If you’re a prince, then you naturally rule a surrounding kingdom.  You’ve got servants, family, probably some equally stuck up friends.  There are also your “loyal subjects” scattered throughout the area.  The point is, you’re pretty damn famous.  If you up and get turned into a ferocious beast, the townsfolk are going to be talking about it the next day at the marketplace. 

Which makes me wonder, why is everyone in Belle’s “poor provincial town” so surprised to learn that just a hop, skip and a jump (or a night’s march with burning torches and pitchforks) away lies an enchanted castle with a beast prince in it?  Surely there would be at least one person in the town who remembered the local celebrity pissing off the vagrant enchantress.

The way I see it, there are only two possible explanations for this mass ignorance:

1)   1)  Some sort of biochemical weapon was released into the air, simultaneously giving the entire population amnesia.

2)   2)  The prince was turned into a beast so long ago that the event has faded from the history books and nobody currently living has ever heard the story.   

Considering that Belle’s town doesn’t have cars, telephones, televisions, or iPods, I’m going to go ahead and say that option #1 is pretty unlikely.  This leaves us with option #2: the beast is older than dirt.  How is it then, when he finally returns to human form (in a scene so beautiful it still makes tear up every time), that he winds up looking like this:

Holy hotness.

Clearly the cosmetic companies of the world should be scrambling to find our enchantress in disguise and coercing her into releasing the secrets of an everlasting youthful glow, a face without wrinkles and tresses so beautiful they should be in a John Frieda commercial, because that prince looks like an underwear model. 

Screw the fountain of youth; get me ten – twenty decades in beast form.  Yeah it would suck to be that shaggy for an extended length of time, but you’d get to live an incredibly long life and come out looking hot as hell at the end of it all.  That is, of course, assuming that you find a Belle to love you and release you from your hairy prison.  Good luck with that.

There's only one tiny problem with option #2, which princess_riceball pointed out to me.  The Enchantress tells the beast that he only has until his 21st year to find someone who loves him in all his beastly glory.  This means that the answer MUST be biochemical warfare.  Either that, or one beast year is equal to at least ten human years.  Drat, there goes my slim but not impossible shot at eternal beauty. *Cue sad music*

Please keep in mind that while I find these minor plot inconsistencies annoying, I’m not really complaining.  They say “age ain’t nothing but a number,” but would I want the beast to reform as a wrinkled and shriveled old man in the end?  Absolutely not.  As a child, that would have absolutely crushed my childhood sense of wonder.  Plus it’s creepy.  Nope, give me my blond-haired, blue-eyed Adonis any day.  I’d be lying if I said that he wasn’t one of the reasons why Beauty and the Beast is my favorite Disney movie, and, in my opinion, a timeless classic.

***Note: This discussion only pertains to the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast.  I’m sure there are many other versions out there, perhaps ones that discuss this whole time issue, but those aren’t the versions discussed here.