Yelling dumb things on mic for 10 years and counting

This month marks the 10-year anniversary of the I Will Fight You podcast. In celebration, my co-hosts and I decided to revisit the first movie we ever covered: The Swan Princess.

I keep track of all the movies I own and watch via a website called Trakt, and when I looked up The Swan Princess, I noticed something unusual about the banner image attached to its Trakt listing:

I’ve seen a lot of official promo images for The Swan Princess over the years, and this didn’t look like any of them. That, plus the signature down in the corner, made me suspect this wasn’t an official image at all.

It’s sure being treated like an official image, though. It shows up in the photos section of the movie’s Rotten Tomatoes listing, its Common Sense Media listing, its TMDB listing, this listicle on Looper, and appears to be somewhere in the movie’s image library on Sky TV:

I posted this picture in the Crooked Russian Cam Discord, and eventually one of our members managed to track down the source (thanks, Zagil!). It’s a piece of fanart, drawn by an artist who goes by madam-marla on DeviantArt.

It seems that, sometime in the early 2010s, a blogger went looking for art to accompany a post about The Swan Princess and found madam-marla’s piece through Google image search. Then another blog picked up the image, and another, until inadvertent SEO pushed it near the top of the image search listings for the movie. From there, tired interns and/or automated image scrapers picked it up as an official promotional image, and now it’s everywhere.

I think madam-marla might be owed some money.

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-K