Folk Tale Secret Stash: The Girl Who Married a Lion.

I was looking at the great majority of the folk tales I focus on and noticed that they seemed unusually weighted toward Europe and Asia.  And I felt the universe call out to me and say “Hey, Dummy, widen your scope!” (gee, the universe is a lot ruder than you’d think).  I especially noticed that I specifically seem to have left out tales from places like Africa and the Caribbean as well as African-American communities in the Americas.  In other words, I had inadvertently avoided the tales of Black folks (boy am I embarrassed).  Well, since it’s Black History Month here in the U.S. and we’re not long from the premiere of the movie Black Panther (can you imagine what Wakanda’s folk tales must be like.  I bet they’d be awesome) it seemed like a good time to start.

But, diving into a brand new culture can be daunting.  So, let’s start with something that I think we’re all a bit familiar with: animal bridegrooms.  This story does it a little bit differently, though.

This tale comes from a book that is conveniently titled The Girl Who Married a Lion.  It’s edited by the author of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, Alexander McCall Smith.  Now, one of the frequent problems that exists with books of African folk tales published in Europe or North America is that they’re frequently just billed as “African folk tales”, as if Africa isn’t a giant continent filled with numerous different languages, nations and ethnic groups.  Luckily, this book actually does provide us with a narrower scope than that.  The introduction informs us that these tales were collected from the countries of Zimbabwe and Botswana.

The story starts off with a young woman getting married.  She is happy because she has a fine, strong husband.  However, one person is not so happy.  That would be her brother, who is our main character.

Now, I know some of you may find this a bit odd.  The story is called “The Girl Who Married a Lion”, so why is the main character her brother?  Well, let’s remember that titles for folk tales are impermanent at best, often changing from place to place and teller to teller.  But one other thing I’d like to point out is that this is reflective of something I’ve noticed in the African tales I’ve read (though, mind that I’m no expert).  These tales do have a greater focus on family and community than tales from other parts of the world.  So, what the brother-in-law thinks is important.  He’s part of the bride’s family.  Heck, of all the characters in this story, the only one that’s named is the bride’s father, Kumalo.  I’ve read other stories where the actions and opinions of an entire village are important.

Anyway, the brother doesn’t trust the new bridegroom because he’s convinced that he’s a lion disguised as a man.

If this were anything but a folk tale, it would sound ridiculous.  And if this were a folk tale from most other parts of the world, it wouldn’t go down the way it’s going to go down.  In European folk tales, maidens marry beasts that appear to be beasts under duress and then discover they’re cursed humans.  In some Asian folk tales I’ve read (notably from Japan), a person would rescue an animal that would turn into a bride/groom for that person on the sly.  Then they’d be happy until the human would get suspicious or commit some act that would cause the animal bride or groom to take off never to be seen again.  Here, the groom being a lion is treated as a dangerous secret.

The man won’t talk to his brother-in-law, which the rest of his family and village find strange and unreasonable.  He just says “I can’t talk to a lion”.  However, it soon seems he might be right because his sister comes to him with an unusual problem: her husband smells strange.

A little info for those who don’t know much about wildlife.  Predatory animals are known for having a distinct smell and on the African savannah, few animals have quite a distinct smell as a lion.

The brother smells some of the husbands effects and he confirms that it is lion-scent.  Then they go to their father for advice.  He suggests tying up a goat outside the husband’s house and seeing what happens to it.  The next morning, they see the goat has been torn apart and eaten and they have their first clue.

I’m not going to give away too much more.  I don’t like giving away endings.  I will say there’s another clue that the husband is a lion.  They also deal with the question of “If the woman’s husband is a lion, what about her two sons?”.  A question that’s frequently glossed over in these kinds of tales.  The book this is in should be relatively easy to find in libraries or for purchase.

I like this tale.  It plays with some familiar territory but does it in a distinctly unfamiliar way.  There's a webcomic version of this story somewhere out there, but I can't quite locate it at the moment.

But now, oh great Universe, tell me what the next thing I should tackle is .

It is . . .

Dammit.  You know, Universe, you’re a real piece of work.

Sorry to any of my non-American readers who might not get it.  But it looks like next time I’m going to attempt to tackle the minefield that is Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus books and their complicated legacy.

See you then.

Fairy Tale Media Fix: Puss in Boots (1988)

We have a winner for our first Fairy Tale Fandom poll.  And it is (drum roll please) . . . Puss in Boots!

You know, the reason I wanted to review the various Cannon Movie Tales is because of the strange way we approach fairy tale productions.  For those who don’t know, Cannon Films was one of the most infamous low budget movie studios of the ‘80s.  They’re the studio that created such famously cheap, flawed pieces of work as Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, the straight-to-video Captain America movie and the Masters of the Universe movie.  They excelled at creating cheap action movies.  Heck, they’re pretty much the reason Jean Claude Van Damme became a star.  When you see the logo “Cannon Films” or the credit “A Golan-Globus Production”, you should know exactly what you’re getting.  Yet, the funny thing about fairy tales is that they’re the one kind of fantasy story we should expect to get adapted on the cheap.  Maybe it’s their ubiquity.  Maybe it’s the fact that they’re often aimed at children.  But how many low-rent animated adaptations have there been?  How many Christmas pantomimes?  How many school plays or puppet shows?  Sometimes I think Disney only became as famous at adapting fairy tales as they are because they throw a whole lot of money into their productions.

Anyway, let us go on to our main subject here.  Puss in Boots was a live action family musical starring Christopher Walken and Jason Connery (son of actor Sean Connery and star of the show Robin of Sherwood).  Trailer video?  Sure, have a trailer video!

The story basically follows the story as it was written down by Charles Perrault.  The one major difference is that instead of a cat walking around in a pair of boots, when the cat puts on the boots he becomes Christopher Walken.  Though the trailer suggests that this is a magic power embodied by the boots themselves, it seems to actually be a power that Puss possesses.  He appears for brief moments toward the beginning of the film to tell Coran the miller’s son (Connery) to get him some boots but appears to be unable to keep that form.  It’s like he can’t do this specific trick for long unless he has a nice pair of footwear.  They make pretty good use of this "trick", though.

Beyond that, it’s a fairly faithful adaptation.  Basically, it’s the story of a cat who undertakes a complex confidence scheme in order to get his poor master, a miller’s son, married into royalty.  There’s some gift giving, some lying and a little ogre slaying.  Some parts of the story are tweaked.  Other parts expanded upon.  One thing they expand on is the part of the ogre.  In Perrault’s tale, the ogre just kind of appears at the end.  In this film, he’s introduced early and Puss and Coran have a run-in with him early on.  However, the ogre isn’t really given more character development as much as just more screen time.  Another aspect that expands the tale is the role of the princess.  The princess in Perrault’s tale didn’t have much going on besides being conned into marriage below her station.  In this film, we’re presented with a princess who is clever and a bit feisty (remember, this is the late ‘80s.  Princess Leia had already debuted in Star Wars.  Feisty princesses were starting to be in).  She’s clearly fed up with all the “genteel” ways she has to act and tired of the governess who is making her learn them for the purpose of betrothal.  It’s to the point where she’s absolutely thrilled with the idea of marrying a miller’s son when Coran confesses who he really is (you know, if this movie were made today, I bet the princess would have sleuthed it out herself to show how clever she is.  But I give the film points for making Coran an honest fellow).

The other way the movie expanded things out is with musical numbers.  Now, I’m not an expert on music by any means.  I’ll try my best, though.  The songs in this movie are fun in the moment you’re listening to them, but I don’t think there are any great examples of songwriting here.  The performances are pretty good, but then there’s Walken.  Christopher Walken is not a terrific singer (as we may all remember from that Peter Pan Live thing).  So, despite having a fair chunk of the songs, he does verge a bit on talk-singing a lot of them.  He conveys the message of the song and the place it has in the story, but it’s not great.  However, he’s a surprisingly good dancer (as you may remember from the music video for Fatboy Slim’s song “Weapon of Choice”).  When given the chance to cut loose dancing, like in the “country dance” sequence of this film, he’s actually pretty good.

The place where the low budget really becomes obvious is in sets, costumes and special effects.  For special effects, this movie has a tendency to overlay stock footage onto background from scenes from the movie.  When the ogre transforms into a tiger, bear or elephant, you can tell that the tiger, bear or elephant was not actually in the scene.  They do a similar thing with Puss in an earlier scene.  In terms of costumes and sets, a lot of them have this vibe of being something made for a theme park or particularly high-end renaissance faire.  I think it’s probably most evident with the king’s carriage.  Also, the ogre is clearly just a large man wearing padded clothes to make him look even larger and a face painted green.

And yet, despite the flaws, I can’t say that this film is a bad watch.  Why?  Because it plays to the strengths it does have.  Walken himself is an entertaining, charismatic presence.  The movie also likes to play around with the social situations in the plot.  It’s clear from the beginning that Coran, while being a bit of a wet blanket, is not really any worse or more unfit than the king or any of the nobility.  In fact, the first time we see the king, he’s playing with toy soldiers.  Meanwhile, Coran is unfailingly practical.  After Puss tells Coran that the king wants to meet him, he muses on what kind of work the king is going to give him, fully expecting to end up as a stable hand or a scullion only for puss to let him know later that  the king thinks he’s a marquis.  There’s a whole song about how acting “genteel” is essentially acting like a hypocrite.  And in another scene, Puss manages to convince the band at a ball to play a country dance to cover up Coran’s lack of skill at courtly dancing by telling them that the Marquis had just been travelling and that country dancing is “all the rage abroad”.  There are a few other scenes like that, but I don’t want to give them all away.  But it’s really watching Walken’s Puss play the role of social engineer that makes the movie fun.

It’s certainly entertaining for what it is.  When watching it though, you just have to expect it to fall in a strange budgetary middle ground between Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre and a Walt Disney production.

So, that’s it for our first Cannon Movie Tale.  There’ll be a new poll going up soon, but I won’t get to the review for a little while after that.  You see, February is Black History Month here in the United States and I thought I’d spend the rest of the month spotlighting some tales from Black communities in the U.S., Africa and the Caribbean.  So, stay tuned.

Once Upon a Pixel: Stardew Valley and the balance between magic and mundane.

I was going to wait on this one, but since I spent about seven hours playing this game the other day, I might as well tackle it now.

Lately I’ve been hooked on a game called Stardew Valley.  Stardew Valley is a farming/life simulator.  The idea is that you play a character that after getting tired of a life of corporate drudgery, inherits a farm from his or her grandfather.  The farm is in a place called Stardew Valley right outside of Pelican Town.  The farm is overgrown and it’s up to your character to clear it out and plant crops.  You can also fish, chop down trees, work in the mines, make friends with the locals (and eventually date and marry the single ones), cook, create artisan goods and raise animals.  All that basic, domestic, agrarian goodness.

And did I mention that there’s a wizard’s tower on the edge of the valley.? There are also little nature spirits living in the broken down old Community Center.  And there are monsters infesting the mines.  There are even rumors and evidence of dwarfs living in the mines. 

Yup.  Magic and fantasy exists in this game and no one seems too bothered by it.  And that’s why this game reminds me of fairy tales.

Fairy tales, like Stardew Valley involve magic but often find themselves most concerned with everyday problems.  The parents in “Tom Thumb” are concerned with the possibility of having a child.  Jack and his mother in “Jack and the Beanstalk” are worried about poverty and where their next meal is coming from.  “SnowWhite” and “Cinderella” are concerned with abusive family situations.  “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” and “Bearskin” (among others) are both concerned with soldiers building some kind of life after a war has ended.  Don’t even get me started on all the ones that hinge on the idea of marriage.

If anything, the goals in Stardew Valley are even more tame than the ones in fairy tales.  Other than marriage, which is a common goal between both fairy tales and Stardew Valley.  Most of the goals in the game are things like planting and harvesting in keeping with the seasons.  Saving up enough materials and money to build new farm building.  Stuff like that.  But even that isn’t so far off from how fairy tales function.  The seasons and growing things are an issue.  The Tale of Tales had a story built on the changing of seasons called “The Twelve Months”.  I once read a French folk tale titled “The Wooden-Clog Maker and the King’s Daughter” in which one of the more miraculous, magical elements was a peach tree that bore fruit even in the winter (doesn’t seem like such a big deal today when we can get produce shipped from all over the world, but it’s a big deal in the story and it would be a big deal in Stardew Valley).

Fairy tales have kind of a strange double identity.  On one hand, they’re widely considered the hallmark of fanciful storytelling.  Someone saying “that’s just a fairy tale” usually means someone’s being unrealistic.  Yet, fairy tales are often the most grounded and relatable of all fantasy stories.  I mean, I’m sure there are relatable things in other fantasy genres.  Epic fantasy, for example, is about things like war and politics and I’m sure someone can relate to those things.  But fairy tales are about the things that happen between the war and the politics.  Things like getting married and planting crops and selling your cow and making sure you have enough food or money.

Fairy tales aren’t about the magic within the everyday or magic replacing the everyday.  They’re about magic existing alongside the everyday, like some kind of unusual neighbor.  All the while, the question of belief never even comes up.  It’s just not an issue.

I’m not quite sure I really managed to tease out a point here, but I think I may have at least provided some food for thought in regards to the unique qualities of fairy tales.  This relatability and groundedness might account for their continued staying power.  It might also be what makes Stardew Valley so damn addictive.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to harvest the crops and tend to the animals before the winter comes.

Fairy Tale Fandom Book Report: Geekerella.

So, let’s start off a new year of Fairy Tale Fandom with something that’s a bit of a mirror image of this blog.  We're a fandom take on fairy tales.  So, how about a fairy tale take on fandom?

Geekerella is a Young Adult novel written by Ashley Poston and published by Quirk Books (the same people who publish stuff like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and William Shakespeare’s Star Wars, naturally) is a “Cinderella” story infused with the trappings of fandom.

The story follows two perspectives.  The first is our Cinderella, a young woman named Elle Wittimer.  Elle is a girl who’s put upon by her cruel step-mother and two wicked step-sisters.  She’s also still recovering from the death of her father and an attempted romance that ended in a particularly ugly fashion.  Her escape and salvation from this is immersing herself in the low-budget, cult favorite sci-fi show her father (who was a bit of an uber-geek himself) introduced her to: Starfield.

The other perspective is that of would-be Prince Charming, young actor Darien Freeman.  All of 18 years old, Darien made his name as a heartthrob on a CW-esque teen drama but has now landed what would have been his dream role as Prince Carmindor in the long-awaited Starfield movie.  Darien’s got his own problems though.  Namely, his controlling father/agent, a back-stabbing by a one time friend, his own insecurities about taking up an iconic role and his own loss of freedom and privacy that comes with being a celebrity.

Now, here’s where the real romantic comedy stuff kicks in.  It turns out, they don’t like each other even before they’ve met each other.  Elle has written off Darien as a shallow heartthrob and has expressed this on her Starfield fan blog in no uncertain terms.  This blog post has of course been picked up by online news sources and proceeded to go viral.  Darien has seen the post and has in turn written off Elle as an angry, reactionary, unflinching fan who will not give his performance a chance.  And yet, through a case of mistaken identity, the two begin texting each other when each of them desperately needs a confidante.

Yes, this is pretty much what everyone expects.  There are only so many different ways you can do a retelling of Charles Perrault’s “Cinderella”, especially a modernist take.  Here, it’s really the grace notes that really make the difference and they’re not even necessarily aspects of the Cinderella story.   Most of them are issues within the modern world of media fandom.

They touch on the idea of representation.  One of the big issues with the casting of Carmindor in the Starfield reboot is that he was played in the original TV series by a noteworthy Indian actor.  Fans of the show were apparently wishing desperately for the role to not end up whitewashed.  It’s also why the role is a big deal to Darien Freeman.  Darien is half-Indian and Carmindor is the first hero he ever saw on TV that looked like him.

They touch on the negative aspects of fandom.  Like fans who take advantage of others or try to be gatekeepers and keep people out of the community.  I’m not going to say much more because that’s a big part of one of the characters’ arcs.

But probably the thing that I noticed most and which kind of overlaps both the Cinderella thing and the fandom thing is how Elle acts.  Elle isn’t your typical pleasant Cinderella type.  She’s closed off and quick to judge.  She routinely pushes people away and feels like she can only count on herself.  Her immersion in Starfield is to a large degree a means of escape from her regular life.  Now, I’m not a psychologist by any means, but a lot of this is what I’d expect someone who experienced the kind of loss and abuse Cinderella did might react to it.  While they don’t get too deep into it, Elle’s just a little bit broken by her experiences.  But that’s okay because she can do better when she gets out of her own way, and it doesn’t mean she doesn’t deserve better.

Most of the typical Cinderella stuff is there in some form.  The Fairy Godmother is Elle’s coworker who’s an aspiring fashion designer.  The coach is the food truck The Magic Pumpkin that she works in.  The ball is a science fiction convention with her entrance and her dance with the prince split between two events: a cosplay contest and a cosplay dance.  There’s a bit of a twist with one of the step-sisters this time.  It’s one that’s been done before in other Cinderella projects but this time there’s a twist to the twist if you know what I’m saying.

I’m not going to say this is any sort of groundbreaking take on “Cinderella” because it’s not.  However, it is a lot of fun and moves at a nice brisk pace.  I’m not going to say it’s for everyone.  If you’re one of the types who gets annoyed when books or TV shows reference pop culture just for the sake of it, well there’s some of that in here.  I do think this would make for a nice vacation book or a palate cleanser after reading something a bit heavier if that’s the kind of thing you’re looking for.

Until next time, live long and prosper, may the Force be with you and never stop chasing that Happily Ever After. : )

The Tale Continues . . .

Well, that was fun.  I had my hiatus (more or less) to relax and get my ducks in a row.  I've reconsidered how I'm going to approach things here.  But this is to announce that the Fairy Tale Geek is back!

So, what can we expect in the near future?  Well, let's break it down a little bit.

Folk Tale Secret Stash- It's still going to be me making my case for folk tales that I think deserve more attention.  However, I'm going to try to make it even more international.  I've noticed that I've had some really big blind spots in my folk tale promotions, notably the continent of Africa and to a lesser extent North and South America and the Middle East.

Fantasy Literature Rewind- Still bringing back classic works of fantasy literature for another look.  On the occasions that I can tie it in with a recent movie I will.  But there are some other ones without tie ins that I definitely want to cover.  I want to spotlight more E. Nesbit and George MacDonald and get to Frank Stockton's stories and some of L. Frank Baum's less easily remembered works.  And while we're at it, can you believe I haven't covered The Wind in the Willows yet?  I also think I have a good one for March (I nearly did A Wrinkle in Time because of the upcoming Disney film, but I think this one has more folkloric mojo).

Fairy Tale Media Fix: Movie and TV reviews and spotlights on a case by case basis.  However, for part of this I want to have a little more fun with the format by adding some audience participation.  You see, I happen to be in the possession of the famous Cannon Movie Tales (well, most of them anyway).  In many ways, they are the holy grail of 1980s low-budget fairy tale films.  But it could take me a while to get around to viewing and reviewing all of them.  So, I want to make sure that my readers get to read the reviews they most want to see.  So, that's why I've added that poll widget on the left side of the blog.  So, the results of that poll will decide which movie I review next.

And that covers the "Big Three" columns on the blog.  Yes, I know I didn't mention Four-Color Fairy Tales or Fairy Tale Fandom Book Report or Once Upon a Pixel or The Top Seven, but those ones will pretty much come along as the situation demands (maybe not Top Seven, that one's kind of a pain in the butt to write).  I also won't be taking any review requests for a while because I'd really like to work my way through the stuff I've already amassed on my own that sits on my bookshelf unread.

But that's the plan going forward.  Hopefully, it'll be nothing but good things going forward.