Monday, January 20, 2014

Family Guy's Grimm Job

If Family Guy is up your alley, you should check out the episode that just became available on regular hulu, Grimm Job. It's a fairy tale mashup that, while humorous, is also irreverent and inappropriate at times. Definitely not child appropriate.
 
They interpret Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood, and Cinderella, with some other fairy tale characters thrown in for good measure. The characters sometimes speak with the irony of those who are aware that they're in a fairy tale and what's going to happen, which adds some funny lines. And while mainly just being goofy, they do sort of touch on some issues such as violence (at the end of LRRH) or how certain famous scenes are less than believable, if you were to take the story seriously (Stewie/Little Red refuses to act out the "my what big ___ you have, Grandmother" because, as he says, it's obvious the wolf is not a human woman and it's insulting.) That's one big question people have about fairy tales, is what attitude are we supposed to read them with? Suspension of disbelief/the innocence of a child? Or just accepting that it's unrealistic? Can we read into subtle things if there also appear to be glaring plot errors? Were people "back then" really that gullible?

So it's not groundbreaking in the realm of fairy tale interpretations, many of the jokes have been make before, but still pretty funny, in my opinion. For example, Cinderella ends: "And so, two people who danced together one time, entered together into an ill-advised, long term relationship. And they lived happily ever after for seven months..."

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