“Who’s got the power? Super why!, Viewer agency, and traditional narrative”

Abstract

Channeling wonder : fairy tales, television, and intermediality / Who's got the power? : Super Why!, viewer agency, and traditional narrative / Merlin as initiation tale : a contemporary fairy-tale manual for adolescent relationships / Lost in the woods : adapting "Hansel and Gretel" for television / Things Jim Henson showed us : intermediality and the artistic making of Jim Henson's The storyteller / Things Walt Disney didn't tell us (but at which Rodgers and Hammerstein at least hinted) : the 1965 made-for-TV musical of Cinderella / "Appearance does not make the man" : masculinities in Japanese television retellings of "Cinderella" / Molding messages : analyzing the reworking of "Sleeping Beauty" in Grimm's Fairy Tale Classics and Dollhouse / The power to revolutionize the world, or absolute gender apocalypse? : queering the new fairy-tale feminine in Revolutionary Girl Utena / Criminal beasts and swan girls : the Red Riding trilogy and Little Red Riding Hood on television / New fairy tales are old again : Grimm and the Brothers Grimm / A dark story retold : adaptation, representation, and design in Snow White : a tale of terror / Judith or Salome? Holofernes or John the Baptist? Catherine Breillat's rescripting of Charles Perrault's "Bluebeard" / Ugly stepsisters and unkind girls : reality TV's repurposed fairy tales / Getting real with fairy tales : magic realism in Grimm and Once Upon a Time / Happily never after : the commodification and critique of fairy tale in ABC's Once Upon a Time / The fairy tale and the commercial in Carosello and Fractured Fairy Tales / A critical introduction ot the fairy tale teleography / Television has long been a familiar vehicle for fairy tales and is, in some ways, an ideal medium for the genre. Both more mundane and more wondrous than cinema, TV magically captures sounds and images that float through the air to bring them into homes, schools, and workplaces. Even apparently realistic forms, like the nightly news, routinely employ discourses of "once upon a time," "happily ever after," and "a Cinderella story." In Channeling Wonder: Fairy Tales on Television, Pauline Greenhill and Jill Terry Rudy offer contributions that invite readers to consider what happens when fairy tale, a narrative genre that revels in variation, joins the flow of television experience. Looking in detail at programs from Canada, France, Italy, Japan, the UK, and the U.S., this volume's twenty-three international contributors demonstrate the wide range of fairy tales that make their way into televisual forms. The writers look at fairy-tale adaptations in musicals like Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella, anthologies like Jim Henson's The Storyteller, made-for-TV movies like Snow White: A Tale of Terror, Bluebeard, and the Red Riding Trilogy, and drama serials like Grimm and Once Upon a Time. Contributors also explore more unexpected representations in the Carosello commercial series, the children's show Super Why!, the anime series Revolutionary Girl Utena, and the live-action dramas Train Man and Rich Man Poor Woman. In addition, they consider how elements from familiar tales, including "Hansel and Gretel," "Little Red Riding Hood," "Beauty and the Beast," "Snow White," and "Cinderella" appear in the long arc serials Merlin, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Dollhouse, and in a range of television formats including variety shows, situation comedies, and reality TV. Channeling Wonder demonstrates that fairy tales remain ubiquitous on TV, allowing for variations but still resonating with the wonder tale's familiarity. Scholars of cultural studies, fairy-tale studies, folklore, and television studies will enjoy this first-of-its-kind volume.