Unbirthday Tea Party: “We’re All Mad Here” Event Recap

Our 4th annual Unbirthday Tea Party brought in a wide variety of Alice fans and fairy tale fans alike. Everyone knows that our research team is mad about fairy tales, and we wanted to share that passion by discussing the portrayal of madness in Alice in Wonderland adaptations across time. As the audience enjoyed tea and cookies, Erica and Lauren tag-teamed their way through a discussion of the original novel and early film adaptations, then followed up with an overview …

Who am I?: Anime in Wonderland

This guest post is by Monica Allen of the Winter 2017 394r class.   We all love fairy tales, whether they be old or new, and one fairy tale that is fairly easy to find within TV is Alice in Wonderland, which is especially prominent in Japanese anime. It appears in single episodes and “omakes” (extra non-canon episodes) to complete series. Just a few examples can be seen in the screenshot of the FTTV Database. One series is Pandora Hearts. Pandora …

Do Blondes Really Have More Agency?: A Cinderella Case Study

The following is a guest post written by Hannah Earl, a freshman in the English Department. This was a final writing assignment for Dr. Rudy’s Late Summer Honors course entitled Agency, Media, and “Tale As Old As Time,” then was workshopped with the FTTV team for publication on the blog. We hope you enjoy! Blonde hair, blue eyes, a blue dress – these words describe millions of girls all over the world. This description also typically calls to mind the …

When is a Tale not a Fairy Tale?: “OUAT” 5.1 Review PART 1

  Season five is now upon us! The glitzy, cringe-fest, character-studded opera that we love, hate, and hate to admit we love, is back. ABC’s Once Upon a Time (OUAT) opened its season five with “The Dark Swan,” returning to the dilemma we last left: will Emma be more Savior or Dark One? MINING WHAT MATTERED That said, in an episode filled with Saviors and Dark Ones and Tilda Swinton-esque hairdos, what sparked my fascination most was a side character, surprisingly. Ladies and …

What Shakespeare and Screenwriters Have in Common

Question #2 in the Tea Party Question List: How does Shakespeare’s drawing on his “fairy tales” (i.e. Hamlet) compare to the modern synthesis of fairytales into popular entertainment? This is a difficult question to answer, mostly because of how little information we have about local lore in the time of Shakespeare and about his writing process. There are also significant differences in the way fairy tales were passed among audience members in Shakespeare’s time: for example, many of his audience members had …

How Alice Became a Fairy Tale. Sort of.

  In these posts we will be doing our best to provide a preliminary answer to some of the questions asked at last week’s Mad Hatter Tea Party. Please note that these answers are not intended to be exhaustive: rather, they are an illustration of how someone might start to research using the database, and we hope that they will encourage and enable readers to continue the process on their own. Question # 1 – How does war or international emergencies in …