Tweaking Fairy Tales to Suit Our Troubled Times

Here's a fun exercise: what fairy tale would you like to see re-made, and what would you change? I'd personally like to see some of the stories from The Bloody Chamber brought to life on the screen!

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2011/10/ ... t-century/
Tweaking Fairy Tales to Suit Our Troubled Times
By Hugh Hart
October 21, 2011

Lana Parrilla plays the Evil Queen in Once Upon a Time. Ginnifer Goodwin plays Snow White, aka Mary Margaret.

During the seven years they spent crafting episodes of Lost, writers Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz obsessed over string theory, a mysterious hatch and the karmic implications of black holes, wormholes and limbo. Now they’ve shifted their focus from quantum mechanics to poison apples for Once Upon a Time, a new show that gives fairy tales a modern spin.

The series, which premieres Sunday on ABC, catapults Snow White (played by Ginnifer Goodwin), Rumpelstiltskin (Robert Carlyle) and an array of princes, dwarves and evil queens from 19th-century fairy tale land to a small Maine town called Storybrooke. Stripped of their happy endings and quaint costumes, the characters plod through ordinary lives without any memory of their extraordinary true identities.

“For Once Upon a Time, we want to make these icons into flesh-and-blood characters,” Kitsis continued. “We want to investigate: Why does the queen hate Snow White? Why is Grumpy so grumpy? Why is Geppetto so lonely that he carved a boy out of wood? The plus for us is that everybody conjures up an image of Snow White. Our job then is to say ‘Well, here’s what you didn’t know.’ That’s the sandbox we’re trying to play in.”

That sandbox has suddenly become awfully crowded. Filmmakers, TV auteurs and other artists with an itch to get beyond the current glut of vampires, zombies and comic book characters are ransacking fairy tales to create updated takes on mythic heroes and villains. Why have 200-year-old stories suddenly become hip again? Kitsis said fairy tales cast an especially strong spell over the public imagination these days because of one ogre that just won’t go away: the floundering economy.

“Disney’s Snow White originally came out in 1937 during the height of the Depression,” he said. “It’s no coincidence that during this recession, three Snow White movies are coming out and we’re doing a fairy tale show.

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