The Disney Remake Machine.

First of all, before anyone asks, I’m recovering fine.  Thank you.

Anyway I thought, with the announcement of the Sword in the Stone remake, that I’d take a moment to touch on Disney’s new trend of revisiting their past animated works in live-action form.  Unfortunately, this will only have a little bit to do with fairy tales because contrary to popular belief, not all Disney animated films are fairy tales.

As many of you know, starting with Maleficent, Disney has been steadily releasing and announcing new live action features based on animated works they’ve done before (that’s right, I’m crediting Maleficent with the start of this, not Alice in Wonderland.  I’ll explain why in a little while).  The trend continued with the Kenneth Branagh directed Cinderella from last year (which I actually enjoyed).  However, since then they have announced new takes on:

1)Beauty and the Beast

2) The Jungle Book

3) Pinocchio

4) Dumbo

5) Winnie the Pooh

6) Pete’s Dragon

7) Mulan

8) Peter Pan (technically a Tinkerbell solo film)

9) Aladdin (a prequel about the Genie)

10) and finally The Sword in the Stone

(Note: this list does not include Disney’s Descendants, which is a TV movie and a mash-up)

Keep in mind, I think I may have missed one.  Reaction to these announcements has been mixed.  The loudest ones seem to be from people decrying the death of all creativity in Hollywood.  However, others seem to be having fun with it, making guesses and suggestions about what animated film they should tackle next.

Now, the thing to remember is that this isn’t exactly new ground for Disney.  All those animated films listed above were originally based on other sources (with the exception of maybe Pete’s Dragon).  On top of that, Disney has already made live action versions of their animated movies a couple of times before.  Am I the only one who remembers the other live action Jungle Book?  Or how about Glenn Close’s enjoyably manic turn as Cruella DeVil in the live action version of 101 Dalmatians?  Heck, they don’t even necessarily stick to adapting their own cartoons into live action.  Remember George of the Jungle or Inspector Gadget or Mister Magoo?

So, adaptations are not anything new to the Disney company.  This trend toward adapting a number of their own past animated works shouldn’t really surprise anyone.  Except for maybe being a surprise to Disney themselves.  You see, I’m not sure they were really intending on starting this as an ongoing trend.  Or, at least, I’m not sure they intended for it to start as early as people seem to think it has.

Now, according to most people, the whole thing started with Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland.  The funny thing is that when Alice in Wonderland was released, I don’t remember it being credited as a remake of the animated film at all.  It was just thought of as “Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland”.  If you wanted to see what Burton could do with the weirdness of Wonderland, that’s what you’d get.  There was nothing in terms of story, style and music to specifically pin it as a “remake”.  And it made a lot of money (actual film quality is debatable). 

So, while they planned (and continue to plan) a sequel, they decided to follow it up with another retake on a classic children’s fantasy book series.  That follow-up was  . . . Oz the Great and Powerful.

That’s where they seemed to be going at the start, there.  No specific Disney call-back, just revisiting old fantasy literature.  Oz is a franchise most usually associated with an MGM film which is now owned by Warner Bros.  Oz the Great and Powerful did not do so well at the box office, however.

Next, Disney took another approach and decided to draw from one of their animated films directly.  The twist being that they’d focus on the villainess as a misunderstood protagonist.  The result was Maleficent and Disney had another hit on its hands.  It’s probably around then that Disney realized that they had greater success when they revisited stuff they’ve done before.  I imagine this is also when the Disney script department started making a lot of calls to screenwriters.

Disney is now indulging in its own nostalgia, but with a twist.  Cinderella was made into a Kenneth Branagh period film with more focus on the heroine herself.  Beauty and the Beast will be a musical.  Genies is going to be a prequel.  Every film seems like it’s going to be doing something a little different.  This makes a little bit of sense in this post-internet era when Disney nostalgia with reinterpretation is big.  Where and when else can you see stuff like “Disney Princesses as Raptors”.  So, why are the first responses to these movie announcements usually so negative if this is nothing new?  Well, my first instinct is to say “because this is the internet”.  However, it might also be because to many of the people who grew up watching Disney animated films, these movies are kind of sacred ground.  I mean, it’s considered okay to make ridiculous Disney fanart.  However, when Disney does it themselves, it has a sense of authority.  It might feel almost like they’re trying to correct or fix their past films.  That could cause some trepidation for those who loved those films growing up.

Do I care?  Not really.  I mean, this is the same company that reinterpreted Baloo the Bear as a cargo pilot and that worked out fine.  If anything, for me it’s review fodder.  I’ll be there for Beauty and the Beast and Genies with pad and paper in hand to take notes.  Heck, maybe I’ll even stretch my definition of fairy tale a bit and review Pinocchio and Tinkerbell.  The original movies will still be there and it won’t be the last time Disney reinterprets something.

Yellow Brick Road to Recovery.

Okay, so I’m about a week post-op and in recovery mode.  I now have an artificial aortic valve as well as a certain length of artery which has been replaced.  Now, I’m still in recovery and can’t guarantee a lot of other posts in the coming weeks.  However, I wanted to take some time to reflect on the idea of this surgery and what it does.  In essence, what it does is it takes part out of an existing yet flawed system and replacing it with something artificial.  It essentially renders the system fixed but no longer whole.  It’s one form of damage being replaced with another more efficient form of damage.  It could be enough to make anyone feel a bit broken.

I know.  This may seem like it’s getting a little heavy.  I’ll try to keep it light.

Now, there are any number of characters in popular culture who can be considered in connection with this.  There are various superheroes, for example.  There’s Marvel’s Iron Man, as well as DC’s Doom Patrol and Cyborg.  Speaking of cyborgs, we also can’t forget Marissa Meyer’s Cinder which takes the emotional scars of the classic Cinderella and makes them physical in the form of cybernetic parts.

However, what it has made me think of from the start is the Land of Oz, created by L. Frank Baum.

From the day The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was published in 1899, the book proved to be a phenomenon.  It spawned a series that included 14 books by the original author and countless others by his successors, as well as various films, toys, comic books and so forth.  The series was pretty much the Harry Potter of its day.

I’ve wanted to talk about the Oz books for a while, now.  However, I’ve never been quite sure of when to approach them.  There is a lot to talk about.  There’s the fact that Oz is arguably the most successful fantasy realm created by an American author.  There’s the fact that the Oz series of books was so successful that it extended way past the point where the author intended to end it, and was even continued by his successors.  There’s the fact that Oz has long seemed to be a largely feminist fantasy land.  There’s the way that the Oz books indicate the sliding scale of narrative darkness, being designed to be lighter than Grimm and Andersen, but still being darker than their most famous cinematic adaptation.  There’s even the way that L. Frank Baum’s books (Oz and others) presaged the unique qualities of another American art form, the superhero comic, by having crossovers.

However, the thing that I can’t stop thinking about in regards to Oz is how all the characters, or at least all the male characters, either lack something or think that they do.

This goes back to the very first of the books, too.  You know the one.  It was made into that MGM movie.  The viewpoint character, Dorothy Gale, is dropped into the world of Oz and starts on a journey to find her way home.  Along the way, she meets three characters who feel they lack something.  There’s a Scarecrow, who needs a brain.  There’s a Tin Woodman, who seeks a heart.  There’s also a Lion, who seeks courage.

All three of these characters have their own reasons for seeing this lack in themselves.  The Lion just seems to see the lack in himself all on his own.  Largely because he can’t seem to see the difference between being fearless and acting in spite of fear.  The Scarecrow took the words of others, namely a crow, too much to heart.  The most tragic of all is probably that of Nick Chopper, aka The Tin Woodman (my personal favorite).

In a back story that was a little too intense for the famed cinematic adaptation, Nick Chopper is a man who lived his life cutting trees as his father did before him.  Nick falls in love with a Munchkin woman and plans to marry her.  The old woman who keeps the Munchkin woman as a servant doesn’t want to give her up.  So, she contacts the Wicked Witch of the East who enchants Nick’s ax.  Every time he tries to chop a tree, the ax slips and chops off a piece of him which he has replaced with tin.  Eventually, he’s nothing but tin.  At this point, Nick has forgotten all about his Munchkin sweetheart and he’s come to the conclusion that it’s because the tinsmith forgot to make him a heart.

Now, getting past the fact that Baum actually managed to include this explanation in his whimsical children’s book, let’s think about this.  Nick Chopper was basically an accident victim.  Can we really blame him for feeling a bit numb and disconnected after all that?

All three of our heroes eventually find their way to the Emerald City and manage to get what they seek from the Wizard.  Or do they?  The Wizard himself is a con artist.  He practically fell into his role in the Emerald City.  So, to the Tin Woodman he gives a placebo heart, made of fabric stuffed with sawdust.  For the Scarecrow, he just fills his head with bran (wood shavings) and adds some pins to show how “sharp” he is.  And for the Lion, he pours an elixir that gives him some kind of “temporary courage” (I’m guessing it’s some kind of booze).

Now, this is pretty common knowledge for those who’ve read the first Oz book.  However, this collection of odd, flawed characters doesn’t end there.  They continue throughout the Oz books.  There are also characters like the mechanical man Tik Tok who can think, move and speak but will never really be alive (another character I relate to, seeing as my artificial valve does make a clicking sound sometimes).  There’s also the Very Hungry Tiger, who’s never satisfied with his food because he wants to eat small, helpless creatures but his conscience won’t let him.  Some characters are flawed but don’t see it like H.M. Wogglebug, T.E., who always brags about his education but doesn’t seem to realize that being educated and being smart aren’t the same thing.  There are those who see flaws in themselves that others don’t.  Like Ojo, the Munchkin boy who sees himself as unlucky while everyone else tells him how lucky he really is.  There are also those who embrace themselves regardless of what others think like Scraps, the Patchwork Girl of Oz who may be too free-spirited and poetic for anyone else in Oz to really stand, but who really doesn’t seem to give a fig.

What’s interesting about all these characters is that we never really see their ails fixed, yet we’re still satisfied with how their story ends.  Why is this?  Well, there’s the most obvious one, which is taken as the lesson from the MGM movie: “they had it in them all along”.  The Lion was really brave, the Tin Woodman really big-hearted and the Scarecrow really wise.  Though, this is arguable.  Despite being so wise, the Scarecrow can still act pretty stupid sometimes.  However, we could also argue that as flawed, damaged or lacking these characters are, it doesn’t really matter in the end.  We love these characters not despite their faults and flaws, but because of them.  In other words, it’s okay to be a little bit broken.  Even with their flaws, they’re still some of the best people you can meet in the strange and wonderful Land of Oz.

So, that’s it for now.  I don’t know when you’ll be hearing from me again, but you will.  I just still have a fair bit of road ahead of me.

Into the Heart of the Woods.

I was born with a broken heart.

Okay, maybe that's not the best way to start.

What I'm trying to do is give you folks, my readers, an idea of what's going to be going on for a while.  Okay, here it is.  I have a heart condition that I was born with.  A bicuspid aortic valve.  I lived with it my whole life not knowing it was there until a couple of years ago when my doctor detected a heart murmur.  He sent me to a cardiologist who told me that eventually this condition would eventually need to be corrected with surgery.  So, after a couple years and some more tests, it looks like I'm at that point.

I'm nervous but I try to remember what I learn from all the stories I've read.  For one thing, the importance of having "magical helpers".  Working up to this, so many people have been fantastic.  This ranges from friends, family and co-workers to fellow storytellers and even the receptionist at the dentist who helped me make sure I got a tooth fixed before surgery (very important).  The other is that sometimes you have to go into the darkness and unknown.  Many scholars say that's what the woods are in fairy tales.  So, I'm headed into the woods.

So, you probably won't be hearing from me for a while.  All the folk tales and legends and children's stories and incongruous pop culture references will have to wait for a while.  But don't think this is the end of the story.  I know I haven't reached my Ever After point and neither has Fairy Tale Fandom.  Not by a long shot!

Until next time.

Adam Hoffman, Fairy Tale Geek, signing off.

The Stuff of Legends: Saint George and the Dragon.

When researching and writing about legends, sometimes you come across a figure who sort of comes at you from two directions.  Such is the case when I decided to look into the legend of Saint George.  Saint George is largely considered to be the patron saint of England.  Though, a great number of other countries claim him as well.  As a saint, he of course has a great deal of religious significance.  However, he’s also a character who’s worked his way into more secular entertainment.  He’s appeared in children’s stories by Kenneth Grahame and E. Nesit.  He’s appeared in or been name-dropped in cartoons like Ben 10 and Dragon Hunters.  He’s even inspired the movie Dragonslayer, though rather loosely.

Who was Saint George, exactly?  Well, according to the book Saint George: Hero, Martyr and Myth by Samantha Riches, no one is quite sure.  However, it’s largely suspected that he was a soldier in the Roman army.  His parents were supposedly Christians of a Greek background.  From a religious standpoint, the most important story regarding Saint George has to do with him standing up to a pagan emperor.  In some cases, it’s the emperor Dacian.  In others, the emperor is named Diocletian.  George had been a member of the Roman army for some time when the emperor gave an order to round up all the Christian soldiers and sacrifice every other one to the Roman gods.  George naturally refused, being Christian himself.  The emperor had been friends with George’s father and didn’t want to see him executed, so he tried to lure him away from Christianity with offers of land, money and slaves.  George still refused.  So, the emperor had to make good on his decree.  George is then tortured to an astonishing degree.  Across the different versions of the story, there are over twenty different tortures ascribed to the martyrdom of Saint George.  He seemingly dies and is resurrected three times in the process.  At one point, St. Michael the archangel intervenes and gets him freed from prison.  At this point, he manages to convert many people to Christianity including the emperor’s wife.  He also visits and defiles one of the Roman temples.  Eventually, he’s arrested again and beheaded, thus allowing for his future canonization.  After his death, his legend and cult grew.  He was regarded as a military saint and “Our Lady’s Knight”, or a knight errant in service to the Virgin Mary.  He supposedly appeared to Crusaders bound for the Holy Land.  He’s also considered the patron saint of England, Georgia, Portugal and Malta and Gozo.  Some say he even partially inspired the legend of the Knights of the Round Table.  Riches even makes the case that St. George is linked to older fertility rituals meant to guarantee a good harvest and the Muslim figure of Al Khidr.

So, how is it that a Christian megalomartyr can find his way into some rather secular examples of children’s literature and entertainment?  Well, that would have to do with a certain encounter with a dragon.

The story of Saint George and the Dragon probably came about a good while after the rest of the story.  The tale says that in the city of Silene in the country of Libya, there was a body of water (some say a lake, some say a pond) that was infested with a dragon.  To appease the dragon, the townsfolk would feed it sheep.  When the sheep started to fail, they started to feed it their children chosen by lottery.  One day, the lot falls to the king’s daughter.  The king in his grief offered all his wealth and half his kingdom to the townspeople in exchange for letting his daughter go.  The townspeople refuse and the princess is sent out to the lake dressed as a bride as a sacrifice.  Now it so happens that saint George is riding by and sees the damsel in distress.  As the princess tries to send him away, the dragon rears out of the lake.  George fortifies himself with the sign of the cross and charges the beast, dealing it a grievous wound.  He then asks the princess to throw him her girdle, which he puts around the beast’s neck.  It now follows the princess around like a dog on a leash.  They lead the dragon into the city where it terrifies the people.  George then shouts that he’ll slay the beast in front of them if they agree to convert to Christianity.  He ends up baptizing fifteen thousand men not counting women and children.  He then slays the dragon with his sword, which is sometimes called Ascalon.

Many interpretations have been made of the legend of Saint George and the Dragon.  It’s not unheard of for there to be stories of saints encountering dragons.  Though, usually they’re the devil in the form of a dragon.  In Saint George’s story, the dragon is usually accepted to be a dragon.  Some have claimed that the dragon represents the pagan religions which were being wiped out as Christianity spread.  Some say that the dragon represents lust, which must be overcome.  In these cases, the dragon is usually gendered as female.  Yes, as unfair as it is, in the Middle Ages lust was largely considered a female attribute.  The world must have changed a fair deal to go from “lust is female” to “boys only want one thing”.  The truth is that dragons can represent any number of things, and are probably worthy of a post all their own.  Let’s also not forget that during the Middle Ages, people also thought dragons were a real animal.

The funny thing is that all this interpretation has very little impact on Saint George’s appearances in more modern literature and popular culture.  The more important thing is just the iconic image it creates.  There’s a good Christian knight.  There’s a princess.  There’s a dragon.  Can it get any more archetypal than that?  The images of Saint George have probably done more to influence our image of knights and dragon slayers than any other image out there.  Heck, it probably even influenced our images of Prince Charming as some sort of knight errant type.  There have been alterations.  In “The Reluctant Dragon” by Kenneth Grahame, both Saint George and the dragon of the story are painted as rather foppish (note: in the Disney version, Saint George is replaced with Sir Giles).  In E. Nesbit’s “The Deliverers of Their Country”, Saint George is not martyred but asleep in the form of a stone carving on a tomb.  I think that bit kind of recalls stories of King Arthur as “the Once and Future King” who will return to Britain someday.  And in Ben 10: Ultimate Alien, the dragon is a powerful alien and George is a knight who waited thousands of years to fight him again.

So, this one legendary figure has been used for a few different purposes.  Some have been more solemn and religious.  Others have been more fantastical and secular.  However, as I’ve said before, malleability can be a good thing for a legend.  Though, it’s not usually so clearly divided between two different stories about the same man.  But still, this ability to appeal to different audiences in different ways does make Saint George THE STUFF OF LEGENDS!

Fairy Tale Media Fix: Folktales from Japan.

If my loyal readers have been paying attention, they may have noticed that I have a soft spot for fairy tale anthology shows and comics.  Jim Henson’s The Storyteller is a favorite.  Grimm’s Fairy Tale Classics is another.  In terms of comics, Erstwhile is a stand-out.  However, I’d be lying if I said it was easy to find shows and comics like that.  Anthologies are a hard sell.  Sci-fi and horror anthologies aren’t that big either (when’s the last time you saw a network air a show like The Twilight Zone).  When it comes to fairy tales and folk tales, most shows, movies and comics aim more for reinvention and long, serialized single stories with recurring characters.  Grimm’s Fairy Tale Classics and The Storyteller are long gone and Erstwhile is telling its last story as we speak (sigh).  It’s through anthology shows like that I was introduced to some of my more “Secret Stash”-worthy tales.   However, through the magic of the internet, I may have found something almost as good.

The show is called Hometown Rebuilding: Folktales from Japan, but I’m just going to call it Folktales from Japan, for the sake of brevity.  It’s an animated show produced by Japanese animation company Tomason and which aired on TV Tokyo starting in 2012.  Each episode features three shorts, ranging from five to ten minutes in length that adapt traditional stories from Japan.  All the voices and narration in the show are provided by two Japanese film actors, Akira Emoto and Yoneko Matsukane.  The art style varies between each story, but is always somewhat whimsical and pretty much never adheres to what Americans would view as the usual “anime style”.

This show is just a lot of fun.  It gives a good glimpse into Japanese folklore.  As an American, I can say that this show is not what most of us would expect from anime.  The stories are also not what most of us would expect from folk or fairy tales, unless we’re already well-versed in the folklore of Japan and other Asian countries.  Watching the show at first can seem a little repetitive as certain motifs come to light.  For example, there are any number of stories that have that “Tom Thumb” like quality of a couple having a child either adopted or born to them, that is highly unusual or magical in some way.  There are also lots of greedy, antagonistic neighbors who should leave things alone.  There are also a number of stories of less-than-perfect priests and monks.  However, this starts to seem less and less glaring as you get immersed in the show.  Just as the recurring motifs of European folk tales don’t seem as obvious when you’ve grown up with them.

After watching a number of episodes, I’m hooked.  I’ve even got some new favorites from it like “The Pond-Snail Millionaire” and “The Rats’ Sumo”.  However, I’m also going to admit that maybe this show isn’t for everyone.  The art styles can be unusual.  Also, the short running time of each tale might give people the feeling that the stories don’t have enough time to “breathe”.  I’m also going to warn against trusting the translation in subtitles too much.  Some things don’t translate, like puns and plays on words.  Also, the version I saw referred to the tanuki or Japanese raccoon dog (an important, if somewhat strange creature in Japanese folklore) as just a “raccoon”, which isn’t quite true.  Tanuki are more closely related to foxes from what I know.

Aw, so cute!

There isn’t much else I can say about this show.  Either you’ll want to watch it or you won’t.  Where can it be found?  Well, I found it on Crunchyroll right HERE.  But that’s the American version of Crunchyroll.  Other versions may vary.  Someone did post some of it on YouTube, so I’ll link to a video to give you a sample HERE.  Come on, give it a try.  Like sushi, it might not be for everyone, but it’s at least worthwhile to say you tried it.

Folk Tale Secret Stash: The Youth Who Went to Learn What Fear is.

You know, sometimes you just have to indulge in some fiction that’s . . . well . . . stupid.

While I am all for intelligent, thought-provoking literature, I’m also a big fan of just indulging in some mindless entertainment.  What season is better for this than summer?  It’s the season to go to the movies and watch big, dumb, splashy blockbusters.  It’s the season to go to comic book conventions and buy up all sorts of comics from the days when comics were disposable literature for kids and teenagers.  It’s the season to lie on the beach and read cheap romance and mystery novels.  In fact, I’d argue that some amount of junk literature is good for you.  Writer Peter Dickinson has even come to the defense of junk literature in regards to its effect on children in his blog post “A Defence of Rubbish”.

Now, it’s a completely different cultural landscape today than it was when folk stories started circulating.  So, I don’t know if folk literature has an equivalent to the dumb summer beach book.  However, if they did, it would probably be some sort of fool story.  Ah yes, the fool!  One of the great folkloric archetypes.  Those unassuming types who succeed through some combination of naiveté and dumb luck.  In folklore, supposedly there are whole villages populated by nothing but fools, like the Polish town of Chelm in Jewish lore or Gotham in Nottingham, England.  Usually these characters sport average unassuming names like Jack, Hans or Ivan when they’re named anything at all.

Now, it’s not to say that a fool story can’t have clever bits to it.  One of my favorite fool stories has a rather clever set-up to send the main character out on his adventure.  In fact, it’s that set-up that earns this story its title: “The Youth Who Went to Learn What Fear is”.  For the record, this one’s another tale from the Brothers Grimm. 

Our story begins with a man who has two sons.  The older son is smart as a whip and capable of a great number of things.  The younger was a fool who didn’t seem to be particularly good at anything.  Now, whenever the older was asked to run any errands after night fell he’d say “No, the darkness makes me shudder”.  Or when people would tell ghost stories by the fire, he’d say “That story makes me shudder”.  Now, the younger son was puzzled by this.  He had never shuddered in his life and was pretty sure he didn’t know how.  The way he saw it, it was some sort of art that he didn’t know how to do.  So, when his father asked him what trade he would like to learn in order to earn his own fortune, he’d say “I would like to learn how to shudder”.

Naturally, his father was less than pleased.  The father explained his troubles to the village sexton.  The sexton told him that he’d put his son to work and teach him to shudder at the same time.  So, our nameless protagonist went to work ringing the bell of the local church.  One night as he climbed up to ring the bell, he saw a figure in white standing near the sounding hole.  It was the sexton dressed as a ghost trying to teach the boy how to shudder.  Now, the thing is that our hero did not take him to be a ghost.  Instead, he figured him to be some kind of thief or troublemaker lurking about at night.  So, the boy shouts to the sexton to identify himself or else he’ll throw him down the stairs.  The sexton says nothing, figuring that he’s bluffing.  The youth asks two more times with no response.  So, what does he do?  He throws the sexton down the stairs.  Then he rings the bell and goes back home.   

The next morning, the sexton is found at the bottom of the stairs with a broken leg.  Our hero’s father is not happy.  He gives his son fifty talers and tells him to hit the road.  Furthermore, he tells his son to not tell anyone where he’s from or who his father is in hopes that he’ll live this down someday.  The son, with what he perceives as his father’s blessing, vows to go off into the world and learn how to shudder.

Now, our hero (antihero?  Maybe we should make that “protagonist”) . . .  Anyway, now our protagonist makes it to a town where he meets a fellow and explains his current quest and how he will give fifty talers to anyone who teaches him how to shudder.  The fellow tells him of a tree where seven criminals were hanged and are still hanging.  He tells him that if he stays under that tree all night, that he’ll surely learn how to 

shudder.   

So, he takes him up on that.  Now, our protagonist doesn’t quite seem to understand the situation of the seven hanged men.  The situation of them being dead, in fact.  So, while he sits cold by his campfire, he figures that the men hanging from the tree must be positively freezing.  So, he decides to take them down and warm them by the fire.  However, once a spark catches on one of the dead men’s clothes, he figures that they’re too stupid to keep from getting burnt and hangs them back up.  The next day he meets with the fellow who tipped him off to the hangman’s tree and tells him that he surely hasn’t learned anything and how he’d never learn anything from people so stupid that they’d let their clothes catch on fire.  So, he left with his wallet still full.

Now, I think this is enough to really communicate our protagonist’s unique character and unique quest.  Believe it or not, this is just prologue.  The real main event comes when he finds out about a haunted castle.  Naturally, the king is offering his daughter’s hand in marriage to anyone who can stay there for three nights.  So, our dim-bulb protagonist, who’s likely more interested in learning to shudder than marrying any princess, decides to give it a whirl.  He does so armed with only a fire, a lathe and a woodcarver’s bench with a knife.  I won’t give anymore away, but you can read the story right HERE.  Okay, maybe I will tell you that a scene like the one below happens.

What I like about this particular fool story is the character’s stated goal.  While most Jack tales and other tales of the sort have a protagonist who is simply going off to “seek his fortune”, this story has a main character with a very specific stated goal of learning something.  This task, though, is of course a fool’s errand.  And while he does learn how to do it in the end, shuddering was maybe not as useful as not shuddering in the grand scheme of it all.

For those who are Henson fans, you may recognize this story in that it was adapted into the “Fearnot” episode of Jim Henson’s The Storyteller.  The thing I love about the Storyteller adaptation, other than just how well told it is, is the facial expressions of the main character.  Half the time, he has an expression that reminds me of an excited Labrador retriever.  So, there we have it.  Our dumb yet kind of clever summer folk tale.  Pop the popcorn and sit down to enjoy the tale in good fun.  Until next time, I’m the Fairy Tale Geek.