Faerie Tale Theatre Reviews: The Pied Piper of Hamelin

Tags

80's fantasy, 80s, blog, blog post, boy, charm, child, children, children's story, corrupt, crutches, disabled, enchanted, enchantment, eric idle, Faerie Tale Theatre, faerie tale theatre reviews, flute, Hamlin, Jan Brueghel, keram malicki-sanchez, lame, lame boy, magic, magic spell, mayor, nicholas meyer, pied piper, pipe, poem, rat, rats, review, review series, rhyme, rhyming, robert browning, scary 80s, series review, shelley duvall, spell, the pied piper, the pied piper of hamelin, tony van bridge, tv review

“‘Please your honors,’ said he, ‘I’m able, by means of a secret charm, to draw all creatures living beneath the sun that creep, or swim, or fly, or run, after me so as you never saw! And I chiefly use my charm on creatures that do people harm: the mole, and toad, and newt, and viper; And people call me the Pied Piper.’”
-An introduction to a character that needs no introduction

For 300 years, a stained glass window depicting a colorfully dressed piper stood in the church of the German town of Hamelin. Although the window was destroyed in 1660, records detail the message enshrined upon it:

In the year of 1284, on the day of Saints John and Paul on June 26, by a piper, clothed in many kinds of colors, 130 born in Hamlin were seduced and lost at the place of execution near the koppen.

Another entry in Hamelin’s town records dating from 1384 follows up with a grim assessment:

It has been 100 years since our children left.

It’s said that every folk story and fairy tale has a grain of truth to them…which can make the tale in question even more disturbing when there are written accounts to back it up. Such is the case with The Pied Piper of Hamelin. We know something terrible right out of a fantasy story did indeed happen, but the details and reasoning behind it are lost to time. From there the human imagination takes over and fills in the spaces with dark suppositions. What of this enigmatic Piper who lured so many victims to an unknown fate? Is he Death personified? One of the fae? A remnant of the mysterious dancing plague that struck 14th century Europe? Was he a colorful recruiter of German colonizers looking to settle further east? A metaphor for the Children’s Crusade, where thousands of children were rounded up to take the Holy Land only to never return? Or, perhaps, a dark manifestation of the fear of child predators?

Curiously, neither the window nor documents make any mention of a rat plague that so often accompanies retellings of the Pied Piper story. That aspect didn’t appear until the 16th century. The wonder and terror surrounding the Piper’s doings have inspired one interpretation after another. Can Faerie Tale Theatre recapture the magic, or is it full of sour notes?

Faerie Tale Theatre Reviews: The Boy Who Left Home to Find Out About the Shivers

Tags

1980's, 80's fantasy, 80s, anthology series, archetype, christopher lee, Dana Hill, David Warner, dracula, Faerie Tale Theatre, faerie tale theatre reviews, fairy tale, fairy tale adaptation, fairy tale origins, fairytale, folklore, folkloric archetype, fool, Frank Zappa, ghost, ghosts, ghoul, ghouls, Halloween, Hammer Horror, haunted, haunted castle, King, King Lear, Peter MacNicol, scary, scary 80s, scary 80s movie, scary kids movie, scary moments, scary movie for kids, scary scenes, series, series review, Shakespeare, shakesperean play, spooky, television series, the fool, the fool of the world, the six servants, Transylvania, tv, tv review, tv series, twelfth night, vampire, Vincent Price, Vlad The Impaler, zombie, zombies

“I’ve got to learn about the shivers, and this seems like such a sure thing.”
“Do you not want the treasure?”
“Treasure? What would I do with treasure?”
– Our protagonist’s reasons for seeking danger

I usually begin these reviews with a brief discussion of each fairy tale’s origin and history. This time, however, let’s talk a bit about a certain folkloric archetype: The Fool.

When I first started writing these reviews, I considered combining this episode with a later one, The Princess Who Never Laughed, because both have fools at the heart of their story. A fool’s true purpose is to provide more than just comic relief. They are uninhibited by social conventions and often maintain a childlike innocence towards the world. Through their ridiculous words and actions – or the appearance of such – they reveal truths that the characters and audience might not have discovered otherwise.

The most notable example is in Shakespeare’s King Lear. Lear’s Fool is the only one allowed to openly criticize him without repercussion thanks to phrasing his jibes to sound like harmless jokes. Perhaps if the mad monarch listened to him, his story wouldn’t have ended so tragically. Likewise, Lady Olivia’s fool Feste in the play Twelfth Night is quick to snap her out of her melancholy by pointing out the folly of grieving her late brother: “The more fool, madonna, to mourn for your brother’s soul being in heaven.” (Act One, Scene Five)

In other cases, the Fool demonstrates how selflessness and kindness will always outweigh strength and wit, like in the Russian folktale The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship. The story even contains the line “God loves a fool, and will turn things to their advantage in the end.” Though denigrated by his own family for his perceived simple-mindedness, this Fool is a caring soul to everyone he meets, and hits the karmic jackpot as a result: a cabal of super-powered friends, the hand of a princess, the adulation of his fellow countrymen, and of course, the only airborne schooner known to man.

The Fool archetype has gone even beyond the written word. In the tarot Major Arcana, The Fool is the first numbered card in the pack. He’s often depicted as a cheerful youth, sometimes accompanied by a dog, making his way down a sunny path without really looking where he’s going. Should The Fool wander into your tarot reading, it signifies the start of an exciting new journey in your future…or, perhaps, a fool’s errand.

This all ties into today’s episode and the story it entails. It’s another tale brought to us by the Brothers Grimm. Though there were a few variants beforehand, this iteration was directly influenced by an Arthurian story of Sir Lancelot spending a night in a haunted castle. Alternate titles in various fairy tale collections replace the word “Boy” with “Youth” or “Fool”; no matter the difference in sobriquet, it’s the same main character with the same foolish attributes. In keeping with both themes, this fool teaches us that some common fears might not be as terrible as they seem, and other things that are actually worth fearing may never have crossed our minds before…

Faerie Tale Theatre Reviews: Rapunzel

Tags

80s, abandonment, abusive parent, abusive relationships, bargain, blinded, brothers grimm, controlling parent, Faerie Tale Theatre, fairy tale, fairy tale adaptation, fairy tale creatures, fairy tales, fairytale, giambattista basile, gilbert cates, golden hair, grimm, grimms fairy tale, gustav klimt, haircut, let down your hair, lettuce, long hair, magic teardrop, metaphor, mockingbird, munchkins, parsley, persinette, petrosinella, pregnant, prince henry, puppets, radishes, rampion, Rapunzel, Roddy McDowell, scary 80s, shelley duvall, television review, television series, the brothers grimm, the dude, tower, tv, tv review, witch, woman in tower, womanhood

“You’ll be safe up in the tower, Rapunzel. No man can ever touch you.” “But I don’t want to be safe. I want to be free!”
– Our villainess and heroine lay out the theme in the middle of a mother-daughter argument

Ah, back to fairy tales. Hopefully it won’t be anything as nightmarish as Meets Frankenstein.

(looks at schedule)

…aw, crap. It’s worse.

I won’t beat around the bush, this episode is pretty infamous for having some freaky imagery that’s forever burned into the nightmares of kids who’ve watched it. I may have been spared from it in my childhood, but watching it through the eyes of a fully-grown adult doesn’t make it any less disturbing (and that’s before we get to the horrifying realistic show of physical and psychological abuse the titular character endures at the hands of her “mother”). Rapunzel is a fucked-up episode – and kind of a fucked-up story when you stop and think about it.

This wasn’t my favorite fairytale to begin with but I see the appeal in it; a woman with impossibly long, beautiful hair rescued by a dashing prince after being held prisoner by an evil overbearing parental figure oozes classic storybook romance. It wasn’t until I saw Into The Woods for the first time that it really gave me pause. The first act of the show ends with everyone celebrating their hard-earned happily ever after, only for it to come crashing down in the second act as the consequences of their actions catch up to them. Rapunzel is no exception, even though she’s the most innocent character throughout all this. She’s out in a world she’s never known with no social skills, family, friends, or any idea how to cope with change; she’s clearly showing signs of post-partum depression, the prince who fathered her children and got her banished from her home in the first place brushes her off as a nuisance and joins his odious brother in ogling other women, and when she confronts her mother for abusing her all her life, the woman tries to justify her actions and drives her under the feet of an angry giant. All I’m saying is thank God for Tangled rewriting the story to give the main character a chance to actually affect things in her own story and create her happy ending; hell, thank God for the Barbie version of Rapunzel doing that as well – both of them!

Anyway, tales of beautiful women trapped in towers go back as far as ancient Greece with Danaë, mother of Perseus, locked up by her dad so she wouldn’t get knocked up. There’s also the Persian myth of Rudāba, whose lover climbed her hair (sound familiar?) and even the myth of St. Barbara, whose father shut her in a tower to stop her from marrying beneath her station. The earliest version of the Rapunzel story we know, however, comes 178 years before the Brothers Grimm penned their take on it. In “Petrosinella”, a Neopolitan folktale collected by Italian author Giambattista Basile, a mother sells out her daughter (the titular character) to an ogress to save her own life after she’s caught stealing her parsley. Petrosinella is seven years old when she’s taken away from her mother and locked in a tower as opposed to being raised from birth by her captor. The usual bit with the prince showing up and falling in love happens, but this time they make their escape using magical means she picked up from the ogress, ultimately defeating her to earn their happily ever after. This tale was later retold in France as “Persinette”, then ambled on over to Germany in Friedrich Schulz’s fairy tale collection, before finally being picked up and rewritten into the Rapunzel story we know today by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.

If there’s a running theme throughout all of them, it’s the futility of trying to keep girls from reaching the inevitable – no, not men, womanhood. The tower is the means in which the parental figures try to keep their daughters innocent and childlike forever instead of letting them flourish and learn out in the world. It never works, obviously, since knowledge and arguably temptation comes in the form of the prince. Whoever’s holding Rapunzel prisoner, be it witch or ogre, is furious that their daughter is “tainted” by the outside world and “ungrateful” for all that they have given her to keep her happy (barring the one thing she does want, real freedom). It’s an ugly but honest reflection of how society views girls through the Madonna-Whore dichotomy; if they can’t be sweet and pure forever, then they’re sullied and to blame for the mishaps they face when trying to grow up, things they should have been able to endure if the parents in question had helped them to understand instead of smothering them out of their own selfishness. Rapunzel does get her wish for freedom, but at the cost of being cast out of her childhood home – it was an entrapment, yes, but also the only world she’s ever known up until then; though ultimately the power of love comes through because fairy tales (at least in anything that isn’t Into The Woods).

So knowing all this, how well does Faerie Tale Theatre tell the story of Rapunzel?

Well, you already read this far…