Reading/Watching Log #130

I had three weeks off this month, so I spent most of it relaxing and catching up on various things – and also finishing things: Trollhunters, Hilda, DuckTales and The Owl House, which meant I got a little verklempt at so many emotional goodbyes between assorted animated characters.

I spent time diving into the last three Earthsea books, which I generally enjoyed (with some caveats) and watched plenty of black-and-white films that have been sitting on my hard-drive for years. Throw in my usual two Babysitters Club book, the fourth season of Outlander, and a rewatch of The Others, and it was a busy few weeks of couch-reclining.

The reason this is late is because despite winter coming to an end, some sort of bug managed to catch up with me just last week, so there’s been a lot of sleeping and groaning (and not much writing). But as always, better late than never.

Faerie Tale Theatre: Hansel and Gretel

Shelley Duvall passed away two years ago now, though back when I first heard the news I initially planned to return to a VERY long-gestating first-time watch of her passion project, Faerie Tale Theatre. I started this ten years ago, folks. All I can say is better late than never.

The show was best described as an anthology series, comprised of twenty-seven comic retellings of traditional fairy tales. They all look pretty low-budget, but there was some eye-opening talent involved (the ones I’ve watched so far have starred Robin Williams, Mick Jagger, Jeff Bridges, Christopher Reeves, Mary Steenburgen and Joan Collins – insane!) I’ve already covered the first seven episodes in the series, and this is its eighth: “Hansel and Gretel.”

The episode is different in a couple of important respects: firstly, that it actually casts children in the child roles (in “Little Red Riding Hood,” a fully-grown Mary Steenburgen played the titular character) and secondly, that it eschews a soundstage in order to go out on-location. Those real kids are in a real forest, and the Gingerbread House is clearly a real construct – not just a badly rendered drawing on a backdrop.

“Hansel and Gretel” is a quick, simple story, but one that’s surprisingly easy to adapt into a full-length feature. In fact, I grew up with a version that was part of the Cannon Movietales collection (another series of fairy tale retellings made in the eighties) and which clearly derived a lot of inspiration from this episode – particularly in the use of Engelbert Humperdinck’s score for his “Hänsel und Gretel” opera.

It’s also a very frightening story, featuring legitimate child endangerment not only from the cannibal witch, but also the children’s parents: a homicidal stepmother and a useless father. It’s only the quick-thinking of the children (mostly Gretel, which is surprising given the period when this tale was originally told) that gets them out alive.

I’d go so far to say that this fairy tale lies at the root of a huge chunk of our horror stories. Cannibalism, like in The Silence of the Lambs? You saw it here first. Child abandonment and/or endangerment found in things like The Black Phone? Has its roots here. Creepy old hags such as Aunt Gladys in Weapons? Definitely born from this story. Is somebody being tempted to do something or enter somewhere because of the delicious food on display, such as Ofelia in Pan’s Labryinth? That’s the Gingerbread House trope at work. How about aesthetics like those found in Robert Eggers’s The Witch or Terry Gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm? Goes without saying.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer pulled off a subversion in the episode “Gingerbread,” in which two dead children (referred to as “Hans and Gretta”) are actually a demon that feeds off the paranoia and mob mentality that follows in the wake of a tragedy. The first King’s Quest game requires the player to enter a Gingerbread House and win extra points for pushing the witch in the fire. I’m pretty sure one of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies bases itself heavily on the story (sorry, I’ve only seen the first) and the phrase “follow the breadcrumbs” has entered the vernacular as a way of following clues left behind someone.

I believe even this year’s Obsession made direct references to the fairy tale of “Hansel and Gretel.” In other words, it’s everywhere.

King's Quest: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder

It’s been well over a year since I last delved into the King’s Quest series, the computer games that defined a healthy portion of my childhood – but now it’s time to return to the land of Daventry and the adventures of King Graham, now in middle-age and with two grown children of his own.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, these games may very well be the source of my love for fantasy, mythology and fairy tales, as I really can’t understate how much I lived in these games as a little girl. Distributed by Sierra Entertainment and designed by Roberta Williams, I’ve already covered the first four in the series here. The first two feature Sir (then King) Graham as their protagonist, who wins a throne in Quest for the Crown, and then finds a wife in Romancing the Throne.

The next two games went in a markedly different direction, leaping forward eighteen years and featuring two new characters as protagonists: first Gwydion in To Heir is Human, the slave of an evil wizard who manages to escape captivity before discovering he’s actually the long-lost son of Graham and Valanice, and then Rosella in The Perils of Rosella, Gwydion’s twin sister, in an adventure that picks up only seconds after the conclusion of the third game.

So, now we reach King’s Quest V: Absence Makes the Heart Go Yonder, and it soon becomes very clear we’re no longer dealing with standalone stories, but the interconnected saga of a single royal family. As Graham discovers over the course of his adventure, the actions Gwydion took in King’s Quest III directly shape the narrative of this game – specifically, that in escaping the evil wizard Manannan, Gwydion (or Alexander, as he’s now known) used a magic spell to transform his cruel master into a cat. Now Manannan’s brother Mordack is seeking revenge, transporting Castle Daventry and its inhabitants to his island fortress in order to extort Alexander into transforming Manannan back into human form.

For this reason, KQV feels like a turning point in the series – though not just narratively, but technologically as well. At the time of its release in 1990, there was simply nothing else like it on the market. The immersive graphics, the point-and-click interface, the story cutscenes, the voice acting – all of this was the first of its kind, and it ended up selling half-a-million copies, making it the best-selling PC game between 1990 and 1994.

Woman of the Month: Webbigail Vanderquack

Webbigail “Webby” Vanderquack from DuckTales (2017)

When it comes to remakes, reboots and sequels, characters like Webbigail Vanderquack present a challenge to the writers’ room. Much like Chani in Dune, who someone decided could no longer be presented simply as a concubine and mother, but a fierce warrior with opinions and outlooks of her own that ran counter to Paul’s, or Bo Peep from Toy Story, who went from love interest and sounding board in the first two films to an active free agent in the fourth (again with opinions and outlooks that opposed Woody’s), many older incarnations of certain female characters no longer pass muster in the court of public opinion, the sensibilities of contemporary writers, executive boardrooms, or among focus groups and/or test audiences.

This characterization shift is also true of Webbigail in her move from the nineties cartoon to the 2017 reboot of DuckTales. She was originally depicted as an extremely young child, with a baby-voice, a fixation on her dolly, and a tendency to be treated as a tagalong nuisance by Huey, Dewey and Louie, who were considerably older and more active participants in the adventures. As someone who grew up with the original cartoon, I have to admit she wasn’t all that compelling, and it’s a bit of a bummer when a show’s only notable female character is heavily coded as little more than a toddler.

So, when the inevitable time came for a DuckTales remake, Webby was heavily retooled. Here, she’s much older – the same age as the triplets – and as a result, not only included in their adventures, but given her own storylines, with her own group of friends. Not exactly a tomboy, as she wears a skirt and pink accessories, she’s now characterized as quirky and talkative, with a fangirlish love of adventuring and a tendency to pull things like grappling hooks and night-vision goggles out of Hammerspace. An added wrinkle is that despite her friendliness and enthusiasm, she’s also rather socially awkward.

The process of updating a female character for modern audiences is a fascinating one, though one that potentially has a lot of pitfalls. On a Watsonian level, there’s technically nothing wrong with the inclusion of timid, dainty, domestic, feminine women/girls – after all, the real world is filled with them, and they’re no less important than the assertive, independent ones. Furthermore, you can’t magically make a female character more compelling simply by giving her more boy-coded attributes (that’s what’s known as Xenafication, and it’s generally not a good thing). In the case of Webby, it’s safe to assume that retaining her pink outfit was a very deliberate decision to demonstrate that “girliness” isn’t inherently bad.

But on a Doylist level, there’s no doubt that the latter incarnations of these female characters are far more dynamic and interesting to watch than their predecessors. Though there might be a bit of pushback from audiences, they’ve got more personality, more agency, and far more relevance to any given story than simply filling the role of The Smurfette.

Other examples that spring to mind are Kayo from Thunderbirds Are Go, Arwen in The Fellowship of the Ring (though they tamped down on it in the next two films) and the collective development of the Disney Princess line-up (just compare Snow White and Aurora to the likes of Moana and Merida!) Heck, even Webby’s own grandmother Mrs Beakley has been upgraded from a housekeeper to a former spy in the 2017 remake. This post exists as much to draw attention to this phenomenon as it is to commend Webby herself, though I definitely think she’s one of the most pronounced examples.

Can you think of any others? Because the reverse is also true: nobody has ever adapted Mina Murray or Irene Adler as well their original authors wrote them in the first place.