Introduction: Transcultural and Intermedial Fairy Tales and Television

Abstract

Tales move. Their portability has been so ubiquitous as to be occasionally imperceptible. Their motivations so apparently mundane as to be regularly overlooked. Like tales' protagonists, form's fortunes rise and fall and rise. For example, in his foreword to Pauline Greenhill and Sidney Eve Matrix's Fairy Tale Films, Jack Zipes observes that fairy tale is not referenced in 1996 Oxford History of World Cinema (ix). Greenhill and Matrix acknowledge that some may see study of fairy-tale film to be associated with diversionary kid stuff, or at worst, [the] utterly facile, predictable, disposable (Introduction, 22). Yet fall is never long or far because keep moving. Because people keep telling them. Because people keep wondering about them. And they rise once more, as with current vogue for fairy-tale film and TVFascination with these always-transforming traditional forms inspires questions and sparks scholarship. Such explorations have fostered methodologies and theories from field collecting and archiving to historic-geographic tracing and motif indexes to sociohistorical and ideological critique. Yet what remains at stake in consideration of fairy-tale transmission and concept of transcultural is what Donald Haase refers to in his crucial essay Yours, Mine, or Ours as ownership of fairy tales (353). Do individuals or groups own tales? face-to-face communal groups? lower, middle, or upper classes? nationstates? globalized media conglomerates? YouTubers? tellers, authors, producers, listeners, readers, viewers, fans? Can anyone own such familiar shape-shifters? Or, as Arthur Frank asks, could stories own people-emplot their lives, capture their actions as well as their imaginations? These are questions explored implicitly and sometimes explicitly in this special issue.The powers and possibilities of communication also remain at stake in consideration of fairy-tale transmission and concept of intermediality. Ten years ago a 2007 Marvels & Tales special issue focused on origins and transmission through theme of fairy tales, printed texts, and tellings (Bottigheimer). Its subject echoed first statement of editorial policy from inaugural issue in 1987, which promised articles on literary fairy and folktales and reprinted oral as well as written examples (Statement, 1). However, in 1997, when journal transferred from Jacques Barchilon and University of Colorado to Haase's editorship at Wayne State University, purview extended to the fairy tale in any of its diverse manifestations and contexts (Editorial Policy, 7). For twenty years this policy has encouraged a widely inclusive scholarly approach to fairy-tale forms and transformations.The move signaled by Greenhill and Matrix's Fairy Tale Films and Zipes's Enchanted Screen, to consider fairy-tale films historically, ethnographically, and beyond their Euro-North American manifestations, also highlights that there is more to portability of than a binary and written exchange. Retellings in each new communicative technology confirm popularity and import of tales, while scholarship attends to, contextualizes, and inquires about such transformations. Greenhill and Matrix's essay collection encouraged one of us (Rudy) to ask other (Greenhill) about fairy on television during a presentation at American Folklore Society in October 2011, just as ABCs Once Upon a Time and NBC's Grimm were premiering.Very soon after, we were working together on edited collection that became Channeling Wonder (Greenhill and Rudy). By initiating a group of thematic studies of fairy on television, that book admittedly was an exploratory endeavor: as wide-ranging as possible in terms of audience, television genre, and teleography yet limited somewhat in geographic scope and focused on specific media more than relations through and across media. …