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Ways to tell stories
Mar. 12th, 2010 07:49 amComplaining will get you somewhere: SyFy has rewritten, or rather, edited, the offending character description for Gwen. (I.e. they took out the paragraph about her looks and the "most notorious adulteress in history" nominer). Meanwhile, this and the rest of the cast character descriptions still seem to be from another show ("If the world only knew what Merlin could do he'd be popular, rich....and dead. So he has to watch Arthur get the credit and the girls"), so much so that they scream for parody. I'm really tempted to write a character breakdown for, say, Blake's7 a la SyFy. Which would go something like this:
Avon: Avon is played by Paul Darrow. Wrecked with insecurity and shyness due to his unassuming looks, Avon is a man of few words who hides his formidable intellect and never gets the credit he deserves. Will he ever find friends or true love on the Liberator?
Jenna: Jenna is played by Sally Knyvette. A kind, gentle soul, uninterested in worldly gain, she has consistently managed to dissuade the harsh Blake from his more dire plans of action. She pretends not to get along with Avon, but in reality everyone can see these two are made for each other. Will they at last open their eyes?
...but eventually I'd get to Dayna and I can't bring myself to write dumb racist descriptions, even as a parody, so that is that.
Meanwhile, the Disney Company, who last year actually did good with the charming Princess and Frog - Tiana is my favourite Disney heroine in a long time - has decided that boys think films with girls' names on it are icky, icky, icky, so they'll rename their next effort from Rapunzel to Tangled and make the prince into a dashing bandit named Flynn Rider who is really the main character. You know, considering Rapunzel is actually a salad's name (which is a plot point in the story), you'd think if there was any renaming to be done, they'd call him Cucumber, which even has the manly association they're obviously going for, but hey.
I can't really get riled up about this, though, because my inner geek kicks in and reminds me of the tangled, no pun intended, history of this particular fairy tale. You can trace the whole princess-in-a-tower thing back to the Greek myths (Danae), but the first version resembling the one eventually destined to become definite was crafted by Charlotte Rose de Caumont de la Force in 1698 for her book Cabinet des Fees, and it was called Persinette (aka Little Parsley - the salad thing really is crucial). The Grimms, Jakob and Wilhelm, later heard the story via one of their acquaintaces among the French Huguenot circles who had ended up in the German states after the edict of Nantes was lifted, and made it into Rapunzel. Wilhelm Grimm had to rewrite it after the first edition of Grimm's Fairytales, however, because reviewers complained "Which decent mother or guardian would be able to tell the tale of Rapunzel to their innocent daughters without blushing?"
Why? Because in both the French and the first Grimm version, the way the sorceress finds out Rapunzel has been seeing someone behind her back is because the girl gets pregnant. So there was a rewrite in which Rapunzel gives herself away in another way. If you want to compare and contrast both versions, they're here. You'll notice the prince is pretty useless in either one; the escape plan in the second one is Rapunzel's. But at least the prince isn't a cad, which he was in Persinette, where the whole pregnancy thing went down thusly: "The prince was happy, and Persinette loved him more and more; they met each day, and soon she discovered she was pregnant. This new state disturbed her, as she did not know anything about it; the prince did know what happened but did not explain it to her, as he was afraid to cause her distress."
....Aaanyway. Rapunzel, as Grimm tales go, goes pretty dark (the prince gets blinded), notably doesn't kill off the sorceress, not to mention that it starts out with parents trading off their unborn offspring because the wife has pregnancy cravings for a salad, so why Disney decided to make it in the first place, I don't know - not their stort of story. Stephen Sondheim, on the other hand, used it rather well in Into the Woods, honing in to the fact the crucial relationship in the story isn't between Rapunzel and the prince, but rather between Rapunzel and the sorceress who "adopted" her. So I'll end with links to two songs from Into the Woods, sung by Bernadette Peters, who was one of the most popular Witches in this musical: No one is alone and Children will listen.
Avon: Avon is played by Paul Darrow. Wrecked with insecurity and shyness due to his unassuming looks, Avon is a man of few words who hides his formidable intellect and never gets the credit he deserves. Will he ever find friends or true love on the Liberator?
Jenna: Jenna is played by Sally Knyvette. A kind, gentle soul, uninterested in worldly gain, she has consistently managed to dissuade the harsh Blake from his more dire plans of action. She pretends not to get along with Avon, but in reality everyone can see these two are made for each other. Will they at last open their eyes?
...but eventually I'd get to Dayna and I can't bring myself to write dumb racist descriptions, even as a parody, so that is that.
Meanwhile, the Disney Company, who last year actually did good with the charming Princess and Frog - Tiana is my favourite Disney heroine in a long time - has decided that boys think films with girls' names on it are icky, icky, icky, so they'll rename their next effort from Rapunzel to Tangled and make the prince into a dashing bandit named Flynn Rider who is really the main character. You know, considering Rapunzel is actually a salad's name (which is a plot point in the story), you'd think if there was any renaming to be done, they'd call him Cucumber, which even has the manly association they're obviously going for, but hey.
I can't really get riled up about this, though, because my inner geek kicks in and reminds me of the tangled, no pun intended, history of this particular fairy tale. You can trace the whole princess-in-a-tower thing back to the Greek myths (Danae), but the first version resembling the one eventually destined to become definite was crafted by Charlotte Rose de Caumont de la Force in 1698 for her book Cabinet des Fees, and it was called Persinette (aka Little Parsley - the salad thing really is crucial). The Grimms, Jakob and Wilhelm, later heard the story via one of their acquaintaces among the French Huguenot circles who had ended up in the German states after the edict of Nantes was lifted, and made it into Rapunzel. Wilhelm Grimm had to rewrite it after the first edition of Grimm's Fairytales, however, because reviewers complained "Which decent mother or guardian would be able to tell the tale of Rapunzel to their innocent daughters without blushing?"
Why? Because in both the French and the first Grimm version, the way the sorceress finds out Rapunzel has been seeing someone behind her back is because the girl gets pregnant. So there was a rewrite in which Rapunzel gives herself away in another way. If you want to compare and contrast both versions, they're here. You'll notice the prince is pretty useless in either one; the escape plan in the second one is Rapunzel's. But at least the prince isn't a cad, which he was in Persinette, where the whole pregnancy thing went down thusly: "The prince was happy, and Persinette loved him more and more; they met each day, and soon she discovered she was pregnant. This new state disturbed her, as she did not know anything about it; the prince did know what happened but did not explain it to her, as he was afraid to cause her distress."
....Aaanyway. Rapunzel, as Grimm tales go, goes pretty dark (the prince gets blinded), notably doesn't kill off the sorceress, not to mention that it starts out with parents trading off their unborn offspring because the wife has pregnancy cravings for a salad, so why Disney decided to make it in the first place, I don't know - not their stort of story. Stephen Sondheim, on the other hand, used it rather well in Into the Woods, honing in to the fact the crucial relationship in the story isn't between Rapunzel and the prince, but rather between Rapunzel and the sorceress who "adopted" her. So I'll end with links to two songs from Into the Woods, sung by Bernadette Peters, who was one of the most popular Witches in this musical: No one is alone and Children will listen.
