did you have a favorite book when you were a child? i remember when i was young, my parents bought a readers' digest collection entitled World's Best Fairy Tales. i really loved that book. see here below.
it's super thick. it had all these amazing stories (very grimm brothers and hans christian andersenish) that i really loved, like The Little Mermaid, The Bremen Town Musician, Doctor Know-it-All, The Sorcerer's Apprentice, Rapunzel, The Adventures of Sinbad, among others. most of the stories were several pages (about 10-20 pages) except for the Sinbad adventures which was really, really long. and there were illustrations so that kids like me could somehow picture the characters in the stories (hahaha, i love the picture for The Emperor's New Clothes). well, we had no disney films back then, or dreamworks, so you see, our appreciation of the fairy tales and magical stories depends on how well we let our imagination run wild.
so i was able to read the original versions of famous children's stories pretty early and therefore i was quite confused and disappointed when the walt disney and other films' versions didn't quite add up.... i mean, see: the little mermaid ending was different, i didn't read about aliens in chicken little's town, rapunzel's hair was not really tangled, the snow queen original version was simpler, jack went up the beanstalk to get the goose that lays the golden eggs in a castle manned by an ogre (like shrek! but i haven't read about shrek yet). and it was only later (much, much later in old age) that i was able to accept that that's the way things are. stories change in the re-telling. and commercial value soars if you give people happy endings. i only hope kids learn the moral lessons that they're supposed to get with the original stories.
1 comment:
this reminds me to push Mikel to read the classic book I got in second hand store! it's the classic tales!
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