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Dragons are some of the most famous stock creatures in fairy tales, right on par with fairy godmothers and wicked witches. Dragons might actually have a more prominent presence in legends, like St. George saving the local princess from a hungry dragon and King Arthur’s knights galavanting around the countryside to slay them. In Greek …
Continue reading “How Dragons Slither Into Fairy Tale Media”
Five years before Prince Harry proposed, Meghan Markle was already a fairy tale princess. The American actress, best known for her role as Rachel Zane on the legal drama Suits, guest starred as Sleeping Beauty in a 2012 episode of the crime drama Castle. In the episode “Once Upon A Crime,” (season 4, episode 17), …
Continue reading “Prince Harry to Marry Former Sleeping Beauty”
Ella Enchanted author Gail Carson Levine said of Cinderella’s Stepsisters, “If I had been around when “Cinderella” was first concocted, I would have argued against two stepsisters. We don’t need two! In the fairy tale they’re indistinguishable.” Indeed they are. Groupings of three are common in fairy tales. Cinderella’s stepsisters function to provide two failed …
Both the 1998 animated Mulan and the recent live-action remake draw from an ancient Chinese poem entitled The Ballad of Mulan. This poem is not as well-known to audiences as the European texts that serve as fairy tale fodder for other movies. Western audiences are primarily familiar with the story through the animated film and …
Continue reading “Four Secrets Allusions to The Ballad of Mulan in the Live Action Remake”
The queen of YouTube is a three year old girl who eats pink goop with an overgrown teddy bear. Masha and the Bear is a children’s TV show based on a Russian fairy tale of the same name. Masha has achieved a fair amount of success on streaming services, like Netflix, but she’s most successful …
Continue reading “Toddlers, Arise! Why Recipe for Disaster is a Recipe for Success”
Classic. Old-fashioned. Anti-feminist. Cinderella seems to belong to a bygone world of ball gowns, but for the past century, she has been modernized at least once a decade by the magic of television. Our oldest database entry, not just for Cinderella but any tale type, is a silent, black-and-white cartoon produced by Disney in 1922. …
In a previous post, we went over how Cinderella was modernized in the first few decades of the twentieth century in pre-television cinematic featurettes. The 1950’s brought a television boom. By 1953, half of all American homes owned a TV set. Sadly, the small screen Cindys of fifties haven’t survived in a form that’s currently …
The recent release of the live action Mulan has generated a buzz on whether this new film’s plot and character changes constitute a step forward or a step back for women. Filmmakers made the controversial decision of cleaving Li Shang’s character in two. Her romance with a commanding officer was seen as a problematic power …
In fairy tales, transformations from one creature to another are wonderful and instantaneous. Change is rarely so instantaneous or painless in reality. We have been working behind the scenes to prepare a fairy godmother worthy transformation of the Fairy Tales and Television project. We at the FTTV are excited to announce that we’ve returned to …
Ever wonder why there are so many fairy-tale remakes out right now? It’s not because the original was terrible. It’s because the nostalgia hit is a powerful thing, and it’s a very easy way to make money. Millennials in particular are the target audience for people who want to capitalize on nostalgia. It’s an odd …
