FTTV
The first of four case study posts about my presentation for Western States Folklore Society’s Annual Meeting in April 2018. Introduced here, the presentation was titled Princess and the Letter P: Fairy Tales and Edutainment in Preschool Television. The other case studies can be found here. Sesame Street started in 1969 as one of the most …
Continue reading “Edutainment Strategies: Sesame Street’s Story Book Community School”
My last big project was about fairy tale mashup episodes in children’s television, and took a large-scale data approach. In choosing a new research topic, I remained interested in the phenomenon that, currently, fairy tales are marketed as “kid stuff.” If marketers want adults to watch their content, they usually sell it as either “gritty” …
Continue reading “Preschool Edutainment and Fairy Tales: The Groundwork”
Two weeks ago, the FTTV team had the opportunity to attend DHU3, the Digital Humanities Utah conference. A quick trip up to Logan (even through the snow storm) was worth it to get to the conference generously hosted by Utah State University on February 23-24. It served as a great chance to meet people working …
Our 4th annual Unbirthday Tea Party brought in a wide variety of Alice fans and fairy tale fans alike. Everyone knows that our research team is mad about fairy tales, and we wanted to share that passion by discussing the portrayal of madness in Alice in Wonderland adaptations across time. As the audience enjoyed tea …
Continue reading “Unbirthday Tea Party: “We’re All Mad Here” Event Recap”
Just as Scheherazade spun tales for the king that kept his interest for 1001 nights, so do the shows we watch spin tales that entrance and delight us until we’ve binge-watched our way through an entire series. From the oldest listed fairy tale based television program in our database, a Disney Animated Short on Cinderella …
Continue reading “From the Page to the Screen: Why We Study Fairy Tales on Television”
Nearly half of the data points in our FTTV database come from animated shows or specials, including the oldest entries in our database, the 1922 animated short “Cinderella” (video) and “Three Little Pigs” from 1933 (video). This led me to a question. What is it about fairy tales that lends them so well to animation? …
Week three of Applied English guest posts comes to you from Emma Anderson. This was written for Dr. Rudy’s 394r class from Winter semester, and similar posts will be continuing throughout the summer. Hope you enjoy! Sunlight glistening through the ivied trellis. Flowers in full bloom. Birds chirping their sweet songs. A three-foot-tall pastry …
Continue reading ““Fairy Tale Weddings”: The Examination of a Misnomer”
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 …
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 …
Continue reading “Visualizing Wonder: English 394R Winter 2017”
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 …
Continue reading “Girls and Boys and Animals: Graphing Patterns in Mash-up Episodes”
