Fairy Tales….what else can you call the media? There’s certainly enough sleight of hand, misdirection, smoke and mirrors to call it magic. What’s missing is the message, the meaning. Our folklore is the urban legend, the third hand tale of horror that reveals our fears.

What we call fairy tales are fragments of earlier myths, cautionary teaching narratives told to lighten the day’s work or make the dark seem farther away in the time before utlitities. As cities, the enlightenment and the middle class evolved in Europe, the folk tales were reworked as literary games for the soirees of the elite, and as morality stories for children, heavily overlaid with Christian motifs. They have lost their relevance to our manufactured environment, yet the themes still call to us, invoking our inner child and our dreams

Who does not want to be freed from unappreciated, mundane busy work, no matter how valuable, to be elevated to higher status (CInderella) or to be released from paralysis and somnolescence (Sleeping Beauty) or taken from ones own place to another of luxury to learn about love (Beauty and the Beast)? Who does not want to be rescued?

Who does not want to be the rescuer? The one who returns the stolen gifts (Jack and the Beanstalk), who outwits the giants (The Brave Little Taylor) , the one who marries the princess because he can find the magical helpers even though he is a miunderstood third son, thought to be an idiot?

With the open maw of media needing to be fed every minute, every hour, every day with something that will catch our attention long enough to be mesmerized for the advertisers, content producers rely on archetype, on formula, on the tried and true, in short, on fairy tales in their various period costumes.

What would happen if someone changed the stories? Let’s find out together.