meganbmoore | Shelley Duvall's Faerie Tale Theatre (Reply)

Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre (which shall now be referred to as FTT) was one of the earlier cable successes. It’s a collection of 26 fairy tales, many of which started then-big names(and some still are) Robin Williams, Teri Garr, Liza Minelli, Mick Jagger, Barbara Hershey, Bernadette Peters, Susan Sarandon, Mary Steenbergen, and Christopher Reaves were in it off the top of my head. The stories themselves range from tongue in cheek to close retellings of the original to Disney-like versions to a happy middle ground, whatever suited each tale and actors best, and they’re all self-contained, and range from about 40 minutes to an hour each.

My parents had copies of about half of them, so I got to watch them a lot when I was a teenager (up until my brother recorded over several…bah) And I had just started working my way through them when I got sidetracked by doramas last year(the fact that I had seen 4 of the 6 I watched multiple times growing up didn’t help, as it gave it a “comfy rewatch” status, as opposed to “new viewing” even though I hadn’t seen them in a long time and there are a lot of stories I haven’t seen yet)

As an aside, when I first learned that the series had been released on DVD and was reading Amazon reviews, and someone tore into this version of the Little Mermaid for “ruining” a beautiful romance…the Little Mermaid in FTT is almost word-for-word Andersen’s story…

Anyway, the ones I watched before getting sidetracked…

The Tale of the Frog Prince: This one keeps to the “faithful retelling,” but as it would only take about 5-10 minutes to redo-“witch turns Prince into from, princess loses ball in pond, frog gets ball back with kiss as payment, kiss, back to prince, marriage”-it does some fleshing out and a little parody. The princess here is nice enough, but rather spoiled and used to getting gifts. She’s exceptionally picky about her suitors, but keeps getting courted by heroic dragon and monster slayers. Most princesses would like that, but as far as she’s concerned, they’re dirty, smelly braggarts who should be ashamed of going around and creating endangered species(it’s quite the good tirade) When the frog rescues her ball, she tries to renege on the deal(kissing a frog? Eeeewwwww) and he moves into her room and sleeps on her pillow and absolutely will not leave until she keeps her word. They become friends, of course, and she grows up, and he finally gets his kiss(hey, he dueled with a scorpion to save her…he earned it)

Rumpelstiltskin & Rapunzel: Lumping them together because they both star Shelley Duvall as the heroine(off the top of my head, the only other one where she plays a character is in Snow Queen, where she plays one of the seasons…I think) Both of these keep the darker elements of the story. In Rumpelstiltskin, her father’s bragging ended up with the girl in the dungeon facing death if she doesn’t turn straw into gold, and after she makes the kingdom filthy rich, he marries her. As good as this episode is, I’ve never really been a big fan of the Rumpelstiltskin story because of the set up…I mean, yeah, sure, becoming the queen is all well and good, but marrying the guy all gung ho for killing you just a few days before? Not my idea of a match made in heaven. Rapunzel also has a stupid father(a common trend for fairy tale heroines, it seems) who ends up promising his unborn daughter to a witch so he can get his pregnant wife the radishes she craves. As the story goes, the witch takes the daughter and locks her in a tower only she can enter so she won’t have to share the girl and never allows her to cut her hair, which the witch uses as a rope to climb the tower(OUCH!) Of course, eventually a handsome prince stumbles across Rapunzel’s tower and they fall in love and plan to run away together, only the prince is discovered nearby by the witch, who blinds him and banishes him to a desert(incidentally, I remember watching this scene when I was 12 and my babysitter was on the phone with her boyfriend and was talking about how Myles was outside and I was “just watching some fairy tale movie…and blood is…oozing out of this guy’s eyes…”) and, when she learns Rapunzel plans to leave her, sends her elsewhere in the desert. Eventually(after she’s given birth to their twins…*hem*) the prince finds Rapunzel and her tears heal his eyes and they go to his kingdom to live happily ever after. Which? Much better than marrying the guy who was going to execute you if you didn’t make him rich…

The Nightingale: This and Frog Prince were the two I hadn’t seen yet. As indicated, this is the tale of the bored emperor who eventually couldn’t find a good enough entertainment, but a servant girl brought him a nightingale whose song made him happy. Eventually, the story of how much he loved the nightingale spread, and he’s sent a clockwork nightingale, and since it plays a better tune, his advisors persuade him to send the real one away. Of course, the fake never makes him as happy as the real thing did, and it eventually breaks, causing the emperor to sink into a depression and become deathly ill, so the servant girl persuades the nightingale to return and he’s is cured and the three live happily ever after. Like the original story, this is set in China, ad the sets are lovely but the cast is(mostly) very much not asian. Doesn’t stop it from being fun, though.

Sleeping Beauty: Now this one I’ve seen about a hundred times. Like Frog Prince, it follows the original(except the part where the princess wakes up pregnant with twins) but adds to it, showing the prince’s adventures before finding Briar Rose. As the story starts, a nice looking but not devastatingly handsome prince rides up to a woodsman and the narrator accounts his glories, and then mentions his “slightly less handsome” squire, who is Christopher Reaves in a rather tight tunic. See, in his travels to find a good wife, the prince came across a few too many seductresses after his chaste body and family coffers, and since he tends to be sucked in by…uhm…their tendencies to swear that they, too, have nothing but the good of the poor in mind and often barely escaped with his virtue intact, so he had his squire pretend to be him so that they’d work their wiles on his squire and he could observe them and see what they were really like. Of course, the second he hears the words “damsel in distress” he’s swearing that “The prince” will save her (poor squire) This one is extremely fun and one of my favorites of the ones I’ve seen.

Jack and the Beanstalk: I have a confession: I’ve really never cared for the Jack and the Beanstalk story. Let’s face it, the boy is nothing more than a worthless scalawag, scammer, thief and murderer(though some versions-like this-try to justify it by tacking on the giant having killed Jack’s father) yet he’s supposed to be the hero. Bah. The only versions of Jack I’ve ever liked are Jack in Fables and the mini-series with Mia Sara and Matthew Modine, because they both portray him the way I see him, as opposed to as the hero. As a result, while this is a good version of Jack and the Beanstalk, I don’t really care, as I don’t like Jack.