#197 – Push
Posted on September 18, 2012 at 12:00 am by Chris
Chapter: Comic
It’s weird now looking back at how violent a lot of children’s stories are. Grandma eaten by a wolf, a witch that eats children, the severed head of a rabbit under your pillow. Weird images to put into a child’s brain right before they close their eyes and cry themselves to sleep.
Tags: egg, humpty dumpty, nursery rhymes
Eye-gouging was kinda popular, too: Cinderella, Rapunzel. Also, Racism. Class-warfare. Getting murdered by your parents (or traded into slavery at birth).
the severed head of a rabbit..?! what is this one?
Then there’s kids songs. I remember some comedian talking about Three Blind Mice: we teach our kids to sing about a woman mutilating handicapped animals? How sick is that?
OH gee… All I remember from that song was just “Three blind mice, three blind mice, see how they run.” and that’s it.
Actually it’s worse, mice are blind for about 2 weeks after they’re born, so the farmer’s wife was mutilating baby mice.
I remember when I heard the more Grimm-like variation of Rumplestiltskin, where he tears himself in half at the end, and my little brain was like “…the hell?!”
it was a different time then.the point of those stories centuries ago was to tell children “shut up! obey your parents! or you will die!”
More like, “Hey, the entire world wants to kill you. Figure it out early and you might survive being a child!”
there’s a reason why “the brothers Grimm” eventually came to mean “creepy”
But the Grimm brothers put a happy ending to many of the fairy tales!
(Often a deus ex machina type one.)
Alice In Wonderland has been re-made creepier by American McGee, Disney(Twice!), and several Japanese companies.
Fairy tales aren’t as popular for a reason.
We got our third daughter the full-dress Grimm’s early on; all the Bowdlerized and Disneyfied versions were so sappy they lost all the spice of the original (often cautionary) tales.
Now she loves the Tim Burton ouvre, and does her own comics…
If I’m not mistaken, Ashes to Ashes is about the “Black Plague” right?
People were brought up to be more responsible and less spoiled in the past. Bring back the fairy murder tales, I say!