Monthly Archives: January 2016

Weight-Watching Fairy Tales

A new year means a new weight-loss goal, right? Many of us make resolutions to lose weight or get in shape because we know we’ll feel better when our bodies are functioning properly. We make plans to transform our bodies into a calorie-consuming furnace. With three fruits and two vegetables in our tummies, we hope …

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Fairy Tale and Place: Between Portland and Storybrooke, PT 1

When it comes to fairy tales on television, the big heavy hitters are, of course, NBC’s Grimm and ABC’s Once Upon a Time (OUAT). Both of these fairy tale shows are live-action and share a protagonist that is introduced to the hidden, fairy tale world. These protagonists, Nick from Grimm and Emma from OUAT, first inhabited our world—Nick from Portland, Oregon, and Emma from Boston, …

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Back to Basics in the 1980s

In 1984 Jack Zipes published “Folklore Research and Western Marxism: A Critical Replay” in which he summarized the research of several folk lore scholars and ran it through a Marxists lens. In that article he concluded that fairy tales in television and film “exploit folklore to evoke images of the attainment of happiness through consumption.” …

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