Great Adaptations by Alexis Krasilovsky

Author:Alexis Krasilovsky
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781138949171
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2017-10-02T04:00:00+00:00

Part IV

Renewing the Spirit in Myths and Fairy Tales

TEN

Fairy Tale Factors

From Spindle to Kindle

Writers for film and television have made use of free, public-domain myths and fairy tales in their work both as loose and faithful adaptations, as well as an endless source of influence for otherwise original storytelling. Although the sci-fi action adventure film Aliens (USA/UK, 1986)1 credits twentieth-century writers James Cameron, David Giler, and Walter Hill for its story and Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett for its characters, omitting the nineteenth-century Grimm Brothers and the seventeenth-century Charles Perrault and Giambattista Basile from its credit list, Walter Rankin points out numerous tie-ins of fairy tales to the film:

As the film opens, the camera pans to the lone survivor of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), a sleeping beauty in a glass case who is awakened from hypersleep 57 years following her first encounter with the lethal alien being. With her dark hair, white skin, and red lips, she is later compared directly to Snow White … And in the film’s conclusion, Ripley leaves flares to find her way out of the unfamiliar darkness, much like Hansel and Gretel do in the forest with shiny pebbles and breadcrumbs. Yet the film’s narrative structure and themes most closely parallel those of “Cinderella,” in which a young girl loses her family and must struggle to survive on her own when a new mother arrives with her own threatening, self-serving family.2

As entertaining as these outer space versions of fairy tales such as “Sleeping Beauty” and “Hansel and Gretel” may be, when these classic European fairy tales were put into a U.S. setting for the first time, librarians were outraged at the travesty of someone modernizing them – although, as Michael Patrick Hearn points out, L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz shares more with Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels than fairy tales.3 With its non-European setting, the book was banned by libraries for many years, even though it was the bestselling children’s book of the year when it came out in 1900 to great reviews, was turned into the most successful Broadway play of its time in 1902, and was made into a silent film called The Wizard of Oz in 1910. The Oz series was so successful that Baum started a film company called Oz Film Manufacturing Company, producing several features. By 1934, one critic wrote, “Good heavens! The land of Oz is a fairyland run on Communistic lines, and is perhaps the only Communistic fairyland in all of children’s literature.”4 Even when the MGM musical film came out in 1939 and took the nation by storm, the book was still being banned: librarians hated Hollywood as much as they hated so-called Communists.5 But the books continued to sell:6 the publisher hired other writers to continue writing the Oz books beyond Baum’s death in 1919,7 all the way up until the 40th book of the series came out in 1963.8

In the novel Push, when Precious mentions “The Wizard of Oz,”

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