I have been performing as a puppeteer and storyteller on a regular basis for about six years. I love children’s stories and spend a lot of time think about them and adapting them into puppet scripts for our shows. I am concerned about the stories we, as a society, are telling our children and I want to make some observations about content.
We once performed an adaptation of a traditional children’s song about monkeys who taunt and are subsequently eaten by an alligator. It goes like this:
Three little monkeys swingin’ in a tree
Teasing Mr. Alligator:”You can’t catch me!””You can’t catch me!”
Along comes Mr. Alligator quiet as can be
And snaps that monkey right out of that tree.
This lyric is repeated with decrementing numbers of monkeys until all of the monkeys have been eaten.
Puppetry is a very visual medium and the alligator puppet snapped the monkey puppets in his jaws one by one and swallowed them down as the monkeys cried out in distress. After the performance we had a few audience members express concern about the violence of this particular part of the show. Since then I have thought a lot about violence in children’s entertainment. I can understand being concerned about senseless violence, but the trend I see among parents is that they are now opposed to all violence. Violence has a place and important function in stories.
I remember when I first read the original Grimm’s tales and discovered the violence that has since been excised. The frog prince is changed back into human form by being thrown against the wall, not kissed. Snow White is awakened not by a kiss, but because they accidentally drop her glass coffin and the impact causes the enchanted apple to become dislodged from her throat. They punish the wicked queen who gave her the apple by making her dance in red-hot iron shoes until she dies. The stories were horrifying, but enchanting and powerful.
I have become an opponent of traditional and fairy tale “sanitation.” Sanitized tales, to me, come across as impotent and sterile in comparison to the originals. When we modify the original tales for the sake of making them less violent, something is lost–and often it is the Moral of the Story.
Modern sanitized tales often present a falsehood. Animals that are naturally enemies, or have a natural predator-prey relationship are presented as being able to get along. While in an anthropomorphic sense it may encourage people to reconcile differences and live peacefully, as an analogy it is wrong because the alligator is not merely a perceived danger that upon the closer inspection turns out to be just another misunderstood social outcast in need of love-the alligator really is dangerous to smaller animals; one party’s objective is really incompatible with the other’s; the alligator will eat animals like monkeys because that is what alligator really do.
The danger of sanitation in this sense is that children are taught a false view of reality that may affect their decision making process. If we were to sanitize our rendition of the Alligator and Monkey song so that, in the end, despite appearances, the monkeys escape, or the alligator ends up being friendly, we would be teaching a false moral. The Alligator & Monkeys song teaches an important lesson: that flirting with danger is (gasp!) dangerous. It also teaches that some actions have undesirable consequences. For the message to be effective, the danger must be real.
When the Disney machine changed the end of The Little Mermaid so that the movie could have a happy ending, I considered it a moral travesty. Disney changed the moral dynamics of the story. Their version suggests that that you can disobey your parents (and by analogy God) and make a deal with a witch (the devil or power of evil) and in the end you can win, gaining the benefits of the deal with the devil while escaping the consequences and retaining the approbation of parents or God. It teaches the falsehood that you can break the moral law and avoid the consequences; that you can rebel against God, deal with the devil, and still come out on top.
I also disliked the message of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. All of the male characters were portrayed as bad, as bumbling idiots, or both. There was not a single praiseworthy male in the whole film. When the beast ceases to practice beastly behavior and wins the love of Belle, he ceases not only to be a beast, but masculine. The prince at the end is emasculated and silent. The film was well done, but, to me, the content seemed to be little more than a feminist diatribe.
Now I’m not as extreme as all this makes me sound. I am not completely against modifying or even “sanitizing” traditional tales or rhymes. I just think that we should be very cautious of how our modifications influence or change the message of the story, and what undesirable messages we may be introducing through our changes. If we do change the message, we should be concerned that the new message is true.
One traditional tale that we have “sanitized” as we adapted it for our puppetry is Kipling’s “The Elephant’s Child” about how the elephant got his trunk. In the original, the young elephant asks his mother what crocodiles–there is that danger symbol again–eat. His mother scolds him for his curiosity and doesn’t tell him. He then asks his animal friends, all of whom give incorrect and ignorant answers. Finally he goes to ask the crocodile himself, and when he approaches, the crocodile feigns partial deafness. The elephant is tricked into approaching closer so that the crocodile can hear the question. Once he is close, the crocodile answers “I eat curious baby elephants” and snaps onto his nose and tries to drag him into the water to eat him. The elephant escapes, barely, but his nose has become all stretched out. He then goes home and uses his new trunk to beat up his family.
We replaced the end where he beats up his family with the elephant turning his misfortune into an asset by starting a band with his trunk as an instrument. We thought the original end would be perceived as too objectionable by the parents. In the process we destroyed the tale’s important symbolism and moral.
The original tale is a warning to parents. If the parents do not teach their children about moral dangers about which they are naturally curious (the nature of crocodiles-i.e. drugs, extra marital sexual activity, sin) their children will first try to learn about it from their equally curious and inexperienced friends, and then turn to experimentation with the danger itself. The consequences of their experimentation will not only change them, those changes will harm the whole family.
While our new message does teach the valuable moral of “making lemonade from lemons” and learning to overcome the consequences of our sins and mistakes, I still like the original moral best and can’t help but feel like we’ve caved into the pressures of a questionable social fad.