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“I only know that I fell asleep last night, and when I woke up, everything has changed.”
– Rip’s rude awakening shortly after his actual awakening
So here’s a question for you all: what counts as a fairy tale? A fairy tale (or “wonder tale” as the highfalutin folklorists call ‘em), is, by standard definition, a short story that’s part of the folklore genre where fantastical things happen that are 100% fictional. Snow White, for example, is a fairy tale. It takes place in an unspecified time and place long ago and far away, and is full of dwarfs, witches, magic, all that good stuff. Pinocchio, despite its inclusion in Faerie Tale Theatre and in the standard children’s fantasy pantheon, is NOT a fairy tale. It’s a novel comprised of episodic writings originally published in a magazine.
Likewise, today’s subject isn’t a fairy tale, but a short story set in late eighteenth century America that draws on some legends and fantasy tropes. My guess is as good as yours as to why Shelley Duvall thought to feature Rip Van Winkle in in this series if that’s the case. Maybe its fantasy elements made it easy to mistake for a fairy tale. Maybe they were running out of stories to adapt. Or maybe, and this is wholly speculation on my part, this episode was meant to be a back door pilot for Shelley Duvall’s Tall Tales & Legends (basically Faerie Tale Theatre but with American folktales such as Pecos Bill).
Rip Van Winkle came about thanks to a conversation between writer Washington Irving and his brother-in-law Henry Van Wart. While he was trying to come up with ideas, the two reminisced about the past. They got so wrapped up in nostalgia that Irving felt as those he was back home in the Hudson Highlands. Inspired, he overcame his writer’s block and penned the first draft in a single night. Irving described the experience, appropriately enough, as “feeling like a man awakened from a long sleep”. Rip Van Winkle was included in Irving’s 1819 anthology The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent and was a huge success. Over two-hundred years later and “Rip Van Winkle” is still a shorthand term for one who sleeps well past their time into a strange new era.
There are a handful of fairy tales worldwide that bear similarities to Rip Van Winkle, from Germany’s Peter Klaus to Japan’s Urashima Tarō, but what surprised me while doing research was that this story has some deep biblical roots. There are several tales in Jewish, Christian and Islamic tradition involving prophets who miss out on persecution and the destruction of their homelands thanks to God turning them into extremely late sleepers. The dramatic theme of a man lost in time has also branched out into the realm of sci-fi thanks to H.G. Wells, Ursula K. LeGuin, Robert Heinlein, Matt Groening and David X. Cohen, and Rob Grant and Doug Naylor (yes, Futurama and Red Dwarf count as Rip Van Winkle stories. This is a hill I will sleep for twenty years on).
But since I can tell some of you are already starting to fall asleep too –
Let’s get this review started, shall we?
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