Transforming the “Beauty” in “Beauty and the Beast”

Bonjour! Are you a “Beauty and the Beast” fan? Do the adaptations of Belle’s character intrigue you? Are prized like free movie tickets something you’re after? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, then you should definitely be our guest this Friday at our event: “Transformation of Beauty: The Evolution of an Icon.” You’re invited to enjoy this tale as old as time with us as we provide insight on the various versions of Belle’s character and how …

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150 Years Down the Rabbit Hole: Our Annual Un-Birthday Tea Party

Alice: “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” Cheshire Cat: “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.” If you love Alice in Wonderland, fairy tales, tea, cocoa, finger foods, and/or a great time, you will want to go to our Alice in Wonderland Un-Birthday Tea Party! Our annual tea party bash will be held this Friday, January 27, at 3 PM in room B003 of the JFSB. We will all …

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Do Blondes Really Have More Agency?: A Cinderella Case Study

The following is a guest post written by Hannah Earl, a freshman in the English Department. This was a final writing assignment for Dr. Rudy’s Late Summer Honors course entitled Agency, Media, and “Tale As Old As Time,” then was workshopped with the FTTV team for publication on the blog. We hope you enjoy! Blonde hair, blue eyes, a blue dress – these words describe millions of girls all over the world. This description also typically calls to mind the …

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Young Meets Old: Contemporary Children’s Television and Traditional Grown-Up Fairy Tale Characters

Television for children has characters that are children, right? It seems like an obvious assumption. The most clear way to communicate to a viewer that a show is for children, besides using puppets or animation, is to have the characters on the screen be the same age as the target audience. How does this relate to fairy tales? Fairy tales have a tendency to be loosely structured and contain few details by way of location, age, or other characteristics. The …

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Visualizing Wonder: English 394R Winter 2017

English 394 is no ordinary English class, this class is specially designed to teach you marketable skills that will help you in the workplace. In this class, you will: Gain a working knowledge of the contemporary scholarship in the field of fairy tale studies in the context of media studies and adaptation studies Build a solid grasp of the field and practice of digital humanities and use those strategies to approach the study of fairy tales and television in innovative …

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Girls and Boys and Animals: Graphing Patterns in Mash-up Episodes

One of the unique elements of TV is that they don’t have to market towards a specific group to buy their product, the way movies, books, or toys do, so they work to make a product that will attract as many viewers as possible across a much wider spectrum. Though children’s TV is created with children specifically in mind, the shows want to attract as many different types of children as possible. This makes studying gender patterns of characters and tales …

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Fairy Tales on the Small Screen: Summing up the Salon

Not so long ago, not so far away, a group of project participants and like minded individuals gathered to discuss the classic salon topic of fairy tales and this newfangled invention of television. Well, maybe television is not exactly bleeding edge, but it would certainly be foreign to those creating the genre of fairy tales in salons in the 18th and 19th century. We replicated these social and educational gatherings to celebrate and discuss what might be the end of …

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Fairy Tale Salon : Event on October 20!

We will be having a wonderful event next week in 4101 JFSB where we hope to have some cool conversations about fairy tales and television and their interesting relationship. It’s a salon, so there will be great discussion and some refreshments and we hope that you all come and contribute and join in! From 5 to 6 pm on Thursday, October 20th, we will be on the fourth floor of the JFSB having a great time! Below is an interview …

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Cinderella’s Sidekicks and their Choices, or Lack Thereof

When Cinderella is adapted into other mediums, especially when these adaptations are intended for children or families, the animals barely in the original tale become sidekicks with a lot more screen-time. So what happens when you take a plot point and turn it into a character? You give it the ability to make choices within the story — you give it agency. Betty Boop’s Poor Cinderella is, for my purposes, the first time these animals are given any characterization. And …

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But HOW are the Fairy Tales Mashed-up in Children’s Television?

Fairy Tale Mashups. We all know about them. We’ve all seen them in many forms, from books to movies to TV. Fairy tale narratives are so short, simple, and familiar that it’s easy to combine them to make something new and fun out of these old stories. Studying the ‘why’ of fairy tale mashups gets to the heart of what we do at the FTTV project, but this particular post is about the ‘how’. HOW are these fairy tales mashed …

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