Faerie Tale Theatre: Hansel and Gretal

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 Gretal.”

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 Gretal” 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 Gretal, 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.

Reading/Watching Log #129

It is finally SPRING. I’m sure we’ll manage a few more miserable days before summer kicks in, but thank goodness we made it through another winter down here in the southern hemisphere. It’s our turn for that heat wave… though I obviously don’t want things to get too dire. (Who am I kidding? I love the sun and we haven’t had a decent summer for the last two years. Bring it on).

The third season of House of the Dragon has recently wrapped up, and it served as an interesting reminder that I’ve spend the last decade or so experiencing Game of Thrones through pop-culture osmosis: never really getting involved, but being interested in how other people respond to the story – a story which in many ways is completely counterintuitive to how fandom operates these days.

One day I’ll hopefully write a longer post about my hypothesis that modern fandom is less interested in a compelling, thought-provoking story as it is about picking a character (or a ship, or a theory) and then gunning for it to “win,” either on moral or aesthetic or “just cos I want it to” grounds. In that sense, it’s understandable why House of the Dragon might be regarded as compatible with fandom, as it quite literally revolves around a competition between two factions (the Blacks and the Greens) to gain control over the Seven Kingdoms.

And yet for anyone actually paying attention, it’s clear the point George R.R. Martin is trying to make is that monarchy is bad, and that everything about it should be burnt down (not literally of course, despite the presence of dragons) in favour of a fairer, more egalitarian system.

The civil war is between a family of inbred, imperial conquerors that nobody actually likes. They’ve just got the equivalent of nuclear weapons, so there’s not a lot the smallfolk can actually do about them (yet – we’ve still got season four to go, wherein the smallfolk do start making some political moves of their own). But this is lost on fandom, who are still arguing about what backside should be sitting on the Iron Throne, as though that’s anything even close to the point that Martin is trying to make.

In the clips I’ve seen, the show is finally starting to lean into the physical and mental toll this is taking on its erstwhile protagonist and queen, Rhaenyra. Having lost two of her sons, struggling with the day-to-day requirements of running a kingdom, and growing increasingly paranoid about the movements of her enemies, her seasonal arc culminates in a scene in which she declares herself “the Prince Who Was Promised,” to a crowd of people who don’t understand what she’s saying, and wouldn’t care in the slightest even if they did.

As usual, great swaths of fandom are focused on the aesthetics of the whole thing – the coolness of her armour, how great she sounds speaking Old Valyrian – without grasping in the slightest what is actually happening here. For the record, I’m not thrilled with yet another story about a woman going mad with power. It’s not off the table when it comes to storytelling choices, as there’s nothing stopping it from being compelling, and it’s clearly being written with more nuance than what happened to Daenerys, but in the broader scheme of things – I’ve had enough of crazy power-hungry women who need to be put down for their own good. The concept just isn’t contributing anything to the growing good of the world, you know?

But what struck me as interesting (and important) about the scene is that Rhaenyra calls upon her knowledge of the Prince Who Was Promised prophecy to justify her claim to the throne. This brought to mind the events of The Mad King, the stage play currently being performed by the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. A huge theme of that production seems to be that those who buy into the prophecy about the Prince (or Azoi Ahai) come to bitterly regret it. Lyanna for example, goes all-in on the prophecy that she interprets as carrying Rhaegar’s child to provide “a third head” for the three-headed dragon – something that starts a civil war, takes the life of her brothers, and eventually claims hers as well.

(Heck, we’ve already seen this theme play out in Game of Thrones, in which Melisandre’s insistence that Stannis is the Chosen One only leads him into darkness and despair).

It’s a fascinating similar note between the two stories despite each playing out in very different mediums, but one that fits with Martin’s general sense of contempt for those that base their decision-making on the amorphous words of prophecy. As Jaime Lannister says: “prophecy is like a half-trained mule. It looks as though it might be useful, but the moment you trust in it, it kicks you in the head.”

Yet muddying the waters is that prophecy and visions and “true dreaming” does have some veracity in the world of Westeros. Various characters have seen glimpses of the future that turn out to be real, not to mention the existence of undead warriors and other mystical creatures. And of course, people who command dragons that can burn down entire settlements with a single word are inevitably going to have dangerous superiority complexes. By simple dint of the fact they can do such things while others cannot indicate there must be SOMETHING special about the Targaryens.

That the theme of “don’t trust prophecy” is mingled with genuine displays of mystical power is confusing, as is the question of where exactly their prophetic dreams and visions originate from. Who or what is pulling the strings here? It’s here of course, we all walk into a brick wall, because we cannot properly examine this theme or what it means or how it’s going to play out without having access to the end of the story to lend it clarity. And George R.R. Martin certainly isn’t in a hurry to tell us.

The simple point I’m trying to make is that I found it immensely interesting that the stage play and the prequel series would strike a similar note on this issue, as (presuming that they have added intel provided by George R.R. Martin himself – which we know they do, as House of the Dragon revealed that Aegon’s Conquest was instigated by a dream that foretold of the Long Night and the coming of the White Walkers) provides direction on how A Song of Fire and Ice might conclude.

If, of course, it ever gets finished. Which it won’t.

Okay, so getting back to the reading/watching log… it seems like rather slim pickings this month, but I’ve got three weeks of leave coming up, so you can bet I’m going to be filling it with as many books and films as I can.

Angela Barrett: The Random House Book of Shakespeare Stories

I’ve had this book since 2014, but only just this month found the time to sit down and enjoy it properly. Written by Andrew Matthews and released for Shakespeare’s 450th anniversary (though whether this was of his birth or the staging of his first play is unclear) this retells eight of his plays: four tragedies, three comedies and one history. This gives Angela Barrett a lot of scope, not only in tone and theme, but size as well. Some of her illustrations are full-page spreads, while others are just tiny vignettes.

The unique thing about this book is that Barrett provides some insight into her work at the back of the book, going through each story and her creative decisions in illustrating each one. For Romeo and Juliet, she notes that certain outfits and settings were based on real costumes and places, and that the clothes of the lovers were deliberately made bright in contrast to their dark and sad surroundings: “as befits their story.”

At one point she mentions trying to capture: “the oppressive heat of the sun and the cold feel of the stone,” and even though she’s talking about a different picture than the one I’ve chosen to discuss, it’s also a reasonable description of the below image.

Links and Updates

Another Links and Updates post with another sad passing to acknowledge: Sam Neill, one of the greats. This one was awful on a number of levels: that he had beaten cancer, that he was a national treasure, that it seemed as though he still had a lot of zest for life left in him.

Obviously Jurassic Park has come up frequently in the conversations around his death (and despite its many faults, at least Dominion did the right thing in reuniting him with Ellie), but I will always remember him best and most fondly as Uncle Hector from Hunt for the Wilderpeople and the titular character in the Merlin miniseries. That last one in particular was event viewing when I was a kid. My aunt worked at Blockbuster at the time and got sick to death of us nagging her to bring us a copy.

Dear universe, stop taking all the good men! We need them down on Earth more than ever!

Here in New Zealand we’re in the final month of winter, which comes as a great relief to me. I hate the dark and the cold, though it’s been a surprisingly mild three months with only one snowfall that didn’t even settle (and I’m aware that deadly heat waves in other parts of the world are definitely not preferable). But I still prefer light and warmth and long summer evenings, and now that we’re halfway through the year, Christmas is just around the corner.

Woman of the Month: Amelia Rojas

Pickings are slim when it comes to choosing a female character from the Sherlock Holmes canon – in fact, there are only three of any great note: Mary Morstan, Irene Adler and Mrs Hudson.

Yet that hasn’t stopped other writers from finding all sorts of ways to add more, whether it’s giving Sherlock a Lost Lenore (Elizabeth in Young Sherlock Holmes), a little sister (Enola Holmes, Beatrice in Young Sherlock) or a daughter (Amelia Rojas in Sherlock & Daughter). Some adaptations gender-flip preexisting characters (Joan Watson in Elementary) or expand the roles of minor characters (there are female Irregulars in both Netflix’s The Irregulars and Sherlock Holmes and the Baker Street Irregulars), while Irene Adler has been reimagined as anything from a master thief to a criminal mastermind. And sometimes they simply make up female characters wholesale (Jennifer Vandeleur in The Case of the Silk Stocking or Xiao Wei in Young Sherlock).

In a way it’s rather heartening that so many writers want to include more women, giving me plenty to choose from this month. Though the obvious pick would be Irene Adler, I’ve already discussed her extensively in the past, and a hot contender was the aforementioned Xiao Wei, who reminded me a lot of Sara Lance in just how cool she was. There are very few female characters out there who are allowed to simply luxuriate in how cool they are.

But I’m going with Amelia Rojas from Sherlock & Daughter, because who doesn’t love a Spirited Young Lady living in the Victorian Era? That time of restrictiveness and societal disapproval is the perfect setting for a headstrong girl to come along and upset the apple cart.

Sherlock & Daughter puts Amelia Rojas at its centre; a Native American girl who has travelled from California to London in search of Sherlock Holmes in a bid to solve her mother’s murder. She’s determined and resourceful, but also far more vulnerable than she’d like to admit and leery about the veracity of her mother’s final message to her: that Sherlock is her father.

He denies this revelation, but also sees an opportunity to use her as an investigative proxy in a particularly difficult case: and so her education in deduction begins.

I’d never seen actress Blu Hunt before this series, but she’s a real find. Equal parts cunning and naïve, Amelia takes to mystery-solving like a duck to water, driven not only by personal reasons but a growing sense of duty and justice. As she tentatively begins to form a relationship with her would-be father, she also becomes aware of the greater plots and schemes swirling around her, and rises to meet them – not without a few mistakes at first, but steadily improving as she goes. It was a great first season for her, and I’m glad a second has already been greenlit.