Least favourite fairy tale

As a bona fide princess who could no more sleep on a pea than burp the National Anthem, I have to disagree. All Hans Andersen fairy tales are great, you infidel.

Snow White and Rose Red was pretty crap though. As was the Gingerbread Man.

That one about the little princess whose serving girl usurped her place, and then when her talking horse started outing her, she had its head cut off and placed over the stable doors. Except it carried on talking. Honestly... it was freaking creepy. All Bros. Grimm fairy tales were freaking creepy. All about the divine right of kings and all that.

_A.I._ was a goddamn fairy tale. And a shitty one, too. God damn it. Yeah, I got yer Blue Fairy right here, buddy.

Do Aesop's Fables count? Or are those (well, duh) fables? If they're included, I vote for "The Fox & the Grapes".

Best fairy tales = anything touched by the magic of Bullwinkle.

The Pied Piper. That's horrid shit.

Do ANY fairy tales actually have fairies in them?

Fairy Godmothers, yes. I like the old style fairy tales the best, before they got rid of the blood and guts and niced them up. Cinderella's ugly sister cutting off her toes to make the glass slipper fit = classic.

I think the worst ones were the ones I can't remember, because that means no impact either way. I seem to recall something about a cow made of straw and some flax in one -- and that's it.

For my sins, I have on tape an edited version of the seventies live-action musical porn version of _Cinderella_. It does indeed feature a fairy godmother -- and he's the best actor in the whole damn movie, unsurprisingly.

So there was this story in this big book of (possibly eastern european) tales we got from the library. It was about this cat that couldn't stop eating, and he goes around eating loads and loads of stuff and ends up eating a hearse and all the mourners!!!

Frankly this scared the crap out of me and my little sis, but i've never come across the story again, has anyone else heard of this?

Hansel and Gretal, that witch is EVIL, building her house of sweets, then capturing children and fattening them up for her dinner. It terrified me as a kid.

You are all on crack, and have read cheap cut-out disneyfied versions of grate stories on the books your skinflint maw and paw bought you at the supermarket check-out instead of PROPER BRILLIANT SCARY ORIGINALS with ILLUSTRATIONS FROM A HUNDRED YEARS AGO. viz
THE YELLOW FAIRY BOOK collected by Andrew Lang (also Green, Violet, Red, Blue, Brown and Orange: but Yellow is the best), reprinted by the estimable DOVER. My nightmares are still often set-designed by H.J.Ford, as was my saddest and most prophetic dream abt me and [xXx], set as it was in the labyrinth where the failed suitor- princes garrot one another...
Better yet, however, is FAIRYTALES FROM THE BRITISH ISLES, collected by Amabel Williams-Ellis (pub. Blackie, who don't I think exist any more), with illustrations by Pauline Baynes of Narnia fame. (AWE is also poss.related to the geezer who built Portmeirion, where The Prisoner was filmed...) FftBI has not a bad story in it 50- odd tales, and only abt five you have heard before. To list my faves is to copy the contents page: but the supertop stories = Tom Tit Tot; Happy Boz'll; Clever Oonagh; The Hairy Boggart; The King of the Cats; Hardy Hardback; the Fairy Child; Pengersec and the Witch of Fraddom; the Head of Brass; Childe Rowland; The Giants of Towednac; Finlay the Hunter; the Red Ettin; and the Laidly Worm of Spindlestone Heugh...

Most rubbish fairy story by a city league = The Emperor's New Clothes, for providing fools everywhere with a use-other-Mother- of-All-Clichés to slap at anything beyond their crap ken. Pah!!

"Strike then, Bogle, if you dare!" he shouted and rushed to meet the Elf King.

No, I had the crazy, scary old compendiums that I inherited from my grandparents- one volume of Hans Christian Anderson (cute, nice, with occasional scary bits) and one Brothers Grimm (which were SCARY AS FUCKING HELL). They were the real, grandmother-slaughtering, blood-spattering, troll-exploding, eyes-as-big-as-saucers deal.

The worst fairy tale is The Landowner and the Ayatolla Khomeni Impersonator

I know the one Kate is talking about! The horse on the gate, and she sang a rhyme to it every day. In the end, didn't they take the wicked woman and put her in a wheelbarrow, hammer nails into it, and then attached it to a horse and run it around town. That was a great ending.

I didn't like the one about the brother's who turned into swans and the princess who couldn't talk, but had to knit shirts for her brothers so they could become human again. How boring.

The fucking little red hen . I loved fairy tales but i got the Grimm ones from birth .

But the Grimm ones are great! Everyone dies horribly!! The third dog's eyes are so big there isn't even a picture!!! They weren't collected for children anyway: let alone written for them, like Hans Xtian Andersen's.

I have a record – actually it's at my mum and dad's house — in which Bing Crosby reads Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince: "Swallow, swallow, liddle swallow..." It all ends badly.

"Where the pygies are at war with the budderflies..."

Aaargh, not that dog. That terrified me then, and is freaking me out quite badly even now.

I don't like any of them really, but I have to say I do agree about the Princess and the Pea. I mean, if someone is forcing me to climb on top of like 400 mattresses just to go to bed, I'd tell them to fuck off and sleep on the floor.

Said the Red Ettin:
Snouk but and snouk ben
I find the smell of an earthly man
Be he living or be he dead
His heart shall be kitchen to my bread

I like the tale of rumplystiltskin. But not that much

I know before i was 6 i got incest,rape,infanticide,canniblaism, torture. I cannot belive what people read to their kids.

Least fav = "Stairway to Heaven". Most fav = "Fairies Wear Boots".

one of my ex boys had a stink ass - does that coount as a fairy tale?

I had the Blue and Crimson Andrew Lang Fairy Tale books and they did indeed rock. They had very weird violent stories in them and even required footnotes which impressed me greatly as a child.

The worst one in, I think, the Blue, was a version of Little Red Riding Hood which ended up with her being eaten by the wolf. I turned the page expecting the wood cutter to rescue her by the unlikely means of chopping open the wolf, but no! It was the next story! I spent ages pulling at the page convinced 2 were stuck together. Poor Red. Although it serves her right, dopey bint.

The Happy Prince and offshore UK pirate radio: the connection, anyone?

I know there were a few that I didn't care for, but can't currently think of one specifically - Rumplestiltskin maybe, it *is* quite dull.

The best one tho, has to be the Snow Queen. It seemed so unusually epic for a children's story. I had a soft spot for the Little Mermaid too. That semi-tragic ending really *hurt*. I think children now really are missing out on that sort of thing what with all these omnipresent, Disney reprised, happy endings.

Did anyone else have that twelve volume set of story books, called My Book House, that 'grew' with you? I inherited them from my mother (her favourites) and they were absolutely incredible. Volume one had simple nursery rhymes and pictures but the stories became more advanced and less illustrated with each succesive volume. I've lost them now, and unfortunately they're out of print. I'm actually considering spending a few hundred USD to buy them on Ebay.

I know without a doubt that the scariest, most psychologically scarring fairy tale you could ever read to a kid is "The Red Shoes" by H.C. Anderson. Some poor little girl is adopted by a rich old lady, gets some nice new shoes and takes pride in them. Then because she thinks about them in church, she is cursed by one of God's angels to dance until she drops dead, never able to stop or get the shoes off. Some wood-cutter or executioner hacks her feet off with an axe and she thanks him and "kisses the hand that wielded the axe". How twisted is that? In the end she repents her evil ways and is granted one last vision of the Holy Church before she is taken up to heaven. I'm telling you, this story is severely f*cked up and gave me nightmares for years. Years!!! It's like a kid's version of Dante's Inferno. All those sadistic stories the Victorians told their kids to terrify them into submission. No wonder we're still messed up.

all yall suck!!~!

Rumplestiltskin, I hated, and the Hans Anderson one about the dog with eyes as big as cartwheels and the tinderbox; also the sentimental and whimsical Steadfast Tin Soldier by Han Anderson. In fact I hate Hans Andreson. Apart from the Little Mermaid.

OscarWilde's The Happy Prince,and the Nightinglae and the Rose are dead sad. Don't like mawkish Christian refs though.

How many fairy stories involve:
1) Red
2) girls getting to a particular age
3) Curse?
4) or 'strange animals' about to eat the girl (but have to manoeuvre them into a house first!)

I mean, Sleeping Beauty 'pricked' her finger on a spindle on her 14th birthday...

Oh wow. I actually did buy those books on ebay later on. But I was patient and eventually only had to pay about 80 bucks.

fucking beauty and the best was the one that scared me the most. And also the one where a woman wants a child so badly, she gives birth to a hedgehog boy - they had it on "the storyteller" and it really was the creepiest bit of tv in the history of creepy tv.

I have a record – actually it's at my mum and dad's house — in which Bing Crosby reads Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince: "Swallow, swallow, liddle swallow..." It all ends badly.

So is this available on some gargantuan Bear Family box set or somesuch?

The only fairy tale that ever actually really scared me was the Tin Soldier, and that was only because I saw a film version with a FUCKED UP giggling dwarf/goblin creature. All the violence in all the Grimm stories and such never much phased me - I think I consumed it kinda like a Tom&Jerry type thing.

The talking-horse's-head one is The Goose Girl and I like it, for some reason. Oh, that's right -- I like it because in the end the faithless lady-in-waiting is bundled naked into a barrel with nails driven into it (pointy bits IN) and rolled through the city until DED.

Ditto the orig end of Snow White in which Snowy & Prince Charming invite the evil queen to their wedding and when she gets there, they make her put on a pair of iron shoes heated to white-hot and dance until she falls down DED.

I'm sensing a theme, yes.

The Little Match Girl is pretty pathetic—all she does is freeze to death. My kids loved all the gore.
Today I was driving behind a van that had "US GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL BUSINESS ONLY" plates. The back doors were open, and inside was a bedframe topped by about eight mattresses. I thought wow! They've finally realized W is a failure and we're reverting to MONARCHY!!! They're searching for the true PRINCESS OF AMERICA!!!

Yeah, Little Match Girl is all about earthly suffering Xed out by "hope of heavenly reward" bullshit. I have no interest in that kind of deferred gratification, I like my villians to get theirs right here on God's green earth.

Pinnochio was pretty weak and so was rapunzel.

Peter Pan for me. I always a thought Peter was too much of an overconfident show-off and he got right on my tits.
"The boy who never grew up" yeah, got that right, the ADD little shit.

Hansel & Gretel. Idiots. And then we had to listen to that horrible children's opera in school by ENGELBERT HUMBERDINCK.

i dunno why but rapunzel always bummed me out

I remember that the ending of "Max and Moritz" used to gross me out as a kid - the two rascals were grinded into grain, and there was even a graphic illustration to show how what came of them. Here's a link to an online version the final chapter:

http://www.fln.vcu.edu/mm/mm7_dual.html

I didn't think of it as a kid, but later on I've started to hate the ending of "Beauty and Beast". It's an otherwise beautiful fairy tale, but if the point of it is that appearances don't really matter, why does the Beast still have turn into a handsome prince in the end? Ditto for the Uckly Duckling turning into a swan; "looks shouldn't matter, but ha ha! now I'm more beautiful than all those who used to mock me!".

OH yeah, and some of them are so politically regressive, too—like the little shepherd's daughter who's so virtuous because she's REALLY A PRINCESS! But we all turned out okay despite all these bad teachings, right?

I don't think the orig point of BEAUTY is that looks don't matter, I think it's more that appearances can be deceiving. And in a culture where merchants' daughters were married off for fun & profit, I can imagine the appeal of a story in which the obedient daughter is married to a seeming monster who turns out to be all her heart desires. Sure, it's FUCKED UP, but it makes a certain kind of sense.

Beauty's love heals the beast—it's not until she fears his death and openly shows her love that he is restored to his princely handsomeness. She had to love him ugly and angry. Merchants' daughters still hook up with beasts, and still hope that their love will turn them princely. Funny how rarely it works out. But I don't think these stories set women up to be battered wives of alkie brutes. Statistically, I bet the daughters who were read fairy tales make better matches than the daughters whose parents sit them in front of the TV. Education, opportunity, blah blah blah.
There's a huge and erroneous belief in the transformational power of love. Newsflash: what you see is what you get, babe. Potential schmotential. It makes a nice story, though, and on a symbolic, Jungian level, it's all about you, right? Beauty IS the beast.
Boy am I rambling. Sorry.

I highly recommend reading Italo Calvino's collection of Italian Folktales - they are some of the most joyously naughty, silly, curious things ever. Lots of farting and dying and revenge and drunkenness.