Here is Rachel Rackham to give us this week’s guest post from Dr. Rudy’s Applied English class Winter 2017. Warning, spoilers ahead! If you have not watched the series finale of Grimm, or are not caught up with the episodes, stop reading, and go catch up first! Then, keep reading, as Grimm is pretty great! “The wolf …
Category Archives: Watching TV
Super Fairy Tales
“Fairy tales are for little girls.” So says my thirteen-year-old brother, scorn filling his eyes. He and his little sister are locked in another battle over which movie to watch, and Beauty and the Beast has just been taken off the table. In retaliation, my little sister has banned all Marvel movies. This battle over …
What Are You So Afraid Of? A Rapunzel Analysis.
This is the second in our guest post series for the summer from Dr. Rudy’s 394R class, this time written by Heidi Grether. We hope you enjoy! We’re all familiar with the story of Rapunzel, right? A girl, a tower, and a whole heck of a lot of hair. But the shocking part of this …
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Follow the White Rabbit
The following is a guest post written by Erica Smith, who was enrolled in Dr. Rudy’s 394R class Winter Semester. This was a final writing assignment for Applied English Visualizing Wonder: Fairy Tales and Television. We hope you enjoy! When Lewis Carroll’s novel, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, was published in 1865, it was received as …
Concluding the Promotional Small-Screen Fairies Series
In his 1979 book, “Breaking the Magic Spell,” Jack Zipes shared the story of Priscilla Denby, a researcher who spent an entire day watching TV in 1969 logging all the traditional folklore and fairy tale items featured in shows and commercials. In 1969 Denby logged 101 themes in one day of television. In 2016 we …
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Fairy Tales in the 2010’s Remix Culture
Harvard law professor Lawrence Lessig published a book in 2008 titled “Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy,” which hypothesized about the societal effect of the internet, specifically for the way in which it gave rise to the remix culture. Lessig recognized a trend in the rising popularity of derivative works that …
The Digital Age of the 2000s
In the new millennium the buzzwords of the first decade were globalization and technology. Across the globe the internet, computers, and cell phones were bringing people together and changing the way people lived their lives. A pair of studies at the start and the end of the decade showed a jump from 6% to 62% …
The 1990s Corporate Takeover
In Marina Warner’s short history of the fairy tale book, Once Upon A Time, she posits that one of the primary functions of the fairy tale is the sharing of familiar stories with an audience. She goes on to explain “the stories’ interest isn’t exhausted by repetition, reformulation, or retelling, but their pleasure gains from …
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.” …