The original stories of Little Red Riding Hood and Snow White, despite their Disney adaptations and being fairy tales largely told to children, are incredibly violent and gruesome. They have murder, kidnapping, and, of course, hot dance moves. Bluebeard is, unsurprisingly, a man with a beard that is blue. What is surprising is what you'll find in his basement.
The creature is from West Africa and will either sit you down for a months-long compulsory lecture on folklore...or drain your blood with its feet and eat you. I'm not sure which is worse.
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Music:
"Time Waste" by Podington Bear
"Kingbeat 9" by Podington Bear
"I Noticed You" by Blanket Music
"Dizzy Spells - Instrumental" by Josh Woodward
"Leave Me on the Subs Bench" by Keshco
Disclaimer - warning, spoilers ahead:
Talks (nothing graphic) of sexual predators
Grandma is murdered and mutilated by the bad guy. Red then unwittingly eats parts of grandma. I tried to be as clean as I could, but it was difficult.
Room full of corpses. Too many corpses.
A woman dances to death in red-hot iron shoes.
Bluebeard bothers me. So he killed the wife because she went into the closet and saw the bodies of his previous wives that he murdered, right? Pretty straight forward so far. Presumably he killed his previous wife for the same reason, because these stories have a thing for repetition (and in some versions we actually hear about him killing two wives for the same reasons before we get to the one who gets rescued or whatever). Still fine. I mean, horrible, but not what bothers me.
However many dead wives are in there, we can assume they too were killed because they went into the closet and saw n minus one dead wives. Which brings us to what bothers me. The obvious question nobody ever seems to ask:
What did Bluebeard’s FIRST wife see?
I think there’s a reason the moral is “don’t be curious”, and it ain’t because it’s good advice. There’s a whole, horrible story here they’re not telling us, and I want to know why.
great stories
Just listened to this, and as a French major, I had to comment. Perrault (pronounced Peroh) placed morals at the end of all his stories. They were kinda his thing and they made the stories eductional. Anything that makes a story ‘educational material’ tends to be heavy handed, even today.
The Grimm brothers borrowed liberally from Perrault in their first edition of stories, as did Walt Disney. Lots of the Disney movies were actually based on Perrault’s versions, which are kinder, rather than the darker versions the Grimm brothers put to paper later. Disney’s Cinderella, in particular, sticks pretty close to the Perrault script.
So, I had an idea about the Bluebeard story. Perhaps Bluebeard only killed the wives who disobeyed him and looked in the room. The moral would make more sense if that were the case. Wives die when they get in their husbands business, instead of they’re going to die anyways but they really shouldn’t be nosy while they’re alive.
You said ‘wolf’ instead of ‘ogre’ in the first story ;-)
What’s your source for the Red Cap story? I always assumed Perrault’s version was the first to mention a red headpiece.
Btw, you might be working with a Grimm translation that is not entirely true to the original text. While the Grimms mention other versions of the tale in which Snow White is abandoned in their annotations, the hunter episode and the attempted cannibalism are in every edition of the Children’s and Household Tales.
1857 edition:
“Then she summoned a huntsman and said to him, ‘Take Snow-White out into the woods. I never want to see her again. Kill her, and as proof that she is dead bring her lungs and her liver back to me.’The huntsman obeyed and took Snow-White into the woods. He took out his hunting knife and was about to stab it into her innocent heart when she began to cry, saying, ‘Oh, dear huntsman, let me live. I will run into the wild woods and never come back.’ Because she was so beautiful the huntsman took pity on her, and he said, ‘Run away, you poor child.’ He thought, ‘The wild animals will soon devour you anyway,’ but still it was as if a stone had fallen from his heart, for he would not have to kill her. Just then a young boar came running by. He killed it, cut out its lungs and liver, and took them back to the queen as proof of Snow-White’s death. The cook had to boil them with salt, and the wicked woman ate them, supposing that she had eaten Snow-White’s lungs and liver.” (Translation by D.L. Alishman: http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm053.html)