In reading all of the various tales over the past few weeks, I've been extremely surprised at the number of fairy tales that I've either never heard of or have been changed so much in modern versions that reading the originals makes them almost unrecognizable. I think it's amazing that there are so many fairy tales and yet we tend to read or focus on just a handful. Yes, everyone knows the story of Cinderella and now, the Frog Prince (more or less...Disney's version is way different than the classic) but who has ever heard of "The Devil with Three Little Golden Hairs" or "The Six Swans?" Why do we tend to repeat the same stories to children over and over again?
I understand that some of those stories can seem a bit risque but I know that personally, when I was younger, I would have loved to have had more stories than your typical Little Mermaid and Sleeping Beauty. One of my favorite quotes actually comes from Mr. Disney. He said, "Disneyland will continue to grow as long as there is imagination in the world." This is completely true, yet ironically Disney has contributed to the destruction of imagination in the world. As much as I love Disney, I think they are partially to blame for the lack of inclusion of many fairy tales in the lives of children. They have saturated the children's market with their movies and stories so really, you don't need to look elsewhere for entertainment. When I was little, the only fairy tales that existed were the ones Disney put in theatres and for the longest, I believed that they actually came up with those stories.
I think we should start exposing children to fairy tales other than the popular ones everyone knows. There are a lot of great stories out there and I think kids could really benefit from entertainment that stretches the imagination rather than that which requires little to no thought. Imagination did after all, give us these great fairy tales.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I remember distinctly the moment in my childhood when I realized the scope of fairy tales. When i was around 7 or 8, my brother (2 years older than me) and I had just finished watching some cartoon with a Red Riding plot. He was into weirder stories than I--like John Scieszka books--and he told me that in a version he read, a lumberjack came and saved Red Riding Hood by stabbing the wolf violently and splittng open his stomach with a knife. Being a precocious youth, I liked the violence. What interests me now is how easily i accepted the fact that this story had been told throughout the ages--countless iterations. I feel that i should have questioned his sources, but i didn't. I think this is a parable for how kids see fairy tales these days. They accept, without fully knowing, that fairy tales have been changed for them. With that acceptance comes the knowledge that other fairy tales must exist even without the exposure.
ReplyDeleteWho is to say that these "original" or "classic" versions are better than the modern ones? Just curious. We all seem to assume that they are, and I wonder what the basis is for that. As for why we repeat stories, I would guess that the original storytellers repeated their own stories again and again. After all, how likely is it that they each remembered (or had even heard of) every story in our Grimm book?
ReplyDeleteAnd go easy on poor, dead Walt, yeah? I would hardly say that the "destruction of imagination in the world" is his fault, and to be perfectly honest, I'm pretty skeptical of the idea that imagination is being destroyed at all. Have you been to YouTube recently? Or seen a collection of young children's drawings? People from all stages of life come up with the strangest, most imaginative things. If it looks like imagination is being destroyed, maybe it's because we've stopped looking for it.
Of course, that answer is about as unscholarly as it gets, so I'll leave you with a shameless plug to go check out my blog for this week, "Whose Line Is It Anyway?"!