Once Upon a Time: New Fairy Tales Paperback

And that’s just one fairy tale, not even a story considered among the very best known, most popular, or most beloved.

Fairy tales evolve. This mutability is one of the many reasons fairy tales have endured and continue to both reflect and effect culture.

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? Paula Guran ?

In the last few years, the idea of fairy tales being more than “kid’s stuff” has found a broader audience. What had been (re)established among scholars and in genre and mainstream literature for decades has, through television and film, now truly reached the masses.

Although far from the first fairytale-based television series, Grimm debuted on NBC in fall 2011. The premise: dangerous fairytale creatures exist in the “real” world; only a cop descended from a line of “guardians,” the “Grimms,” can defeat the monsters. ABC introduced series Once Upon a Time in October 2011. In it, fairytale characters have been brought into “our” world by a curse. A spin-off, Once Upon a Time in Wonderland will hit small screens fall 2013. The CW

premiered Beauty and the Beas t on October 11, 2012—loosely based on the Ron Koslow-created 1987-1990 CBS series—which was, of course, an updating of the fairy tale.

In 2012 there were two Hollywood versions of Snow White’s

story: Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman. This year, 2013, has already seen releases of Jack the Giant Slayer, Oz the Great and Powerful, and Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters—none of which were spectacular successes. Will that stem the cinematic tide?

Probably not. You can still expect Frozen, a Disney-animated film of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen,” to open late in 2013.

Maleficent, starring Angelina Jolie as the villainess from Disney’s Sleeping Beauty is due out 2014, as is a live-action Cinderella directed by Kenneth Branagh. Also scheduled for 2014: a film version of Steven Sondheim’s fairy tale mash-up musical Into the Woods. In March 2013, the Boston Globe estimated the number of fairytale slated to be released between 2012 and 2014 at twenty.

Unless intended specifically for children, these twenty-first century revampings often go back to the darker roots of the stories. Heroines are seldom passive victims and inequality in general is often battled along with other evils; some are extremely violent and overtly sexual.

There are probably more theories of why fairy tales are enjoying their current resurgence as there are fairy tales resurging: it’s merely a public-domain path for the entertainment industry to capitalize ? 13 ?

? Introduction: Ever After ?

on the post-Harry Potter boom in fantasy; fairy tales offer an escape from our economic doldrums and unsettled times; they aren’t an escape at all, but horrific confrontations; most movies are reworkings of fairytale tropes anyway, so this is really nothing new; pop culture has a tendency to infantilize (as with superheroes), this is another way to do it; fairy tales provide both heroes and heroines, villains and villainesses and provide a focus on a female, but with plenty of room for violence and SFX that appeals to the male demographic; they are iconic, we have a built-in nostalgia for them, and familiarity breeds easy marketability; when Disney played with and cleverly twisted its own concept with Enchanted, it made Hollywood reconsider the trope (and, yes, there are rumors of an Enchanted 2) . . .

Who knows what makes a trend? After all, for the last four decades or so there have been myriad academic theories, explanations, and not always civil debate about fairy tales themselves.