Stuff You Should Know - How Grimm's Fairy Tales Work

Episode Date: November 5, 2015

Unless you were raised alone in a basement (in which case you may be the subject of one), you probably grew up on fairy tales. That's appropriate because they may be humanity's greatest psychic projection screen. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. There's Noel, he's back.

He's actually sitting in for this one. And that makes this stuff you should know. Yeah, we left a trail of breadcrumbs. Or pebbles, depending on what part of the episode that's right, we're talking about. That's my favorite one now. That and the Juniper Tree are my favorite. Hansel and Gretel, yep.

And the Juniper Tree, yeah. Yeah, and we should say this is a two-parter. You should have already previously listened to one. We probably should have put this one out first and then done the other one. Yeah, but hey. But whatever. Whatevs.

We just think this is a nice, I really enjoyed these two actually. I think you can make the case that we did it in the right or because now people have thought about fairy tales and have jailed and bathed in them for like the last day or so and now they're ready to understand what's been haunting them.

But where did they come from? Right, what's the deal? And we're gonna tell you what's the deal. This is, I really did enjoy these though. This kind of reignited my, kind of brought up a lot of stuff. Oh yeah, did you find yourself weeping? Not weeping, just kind of like remembering childhood

and I don't know, I enjoyed it. I guess I didn't read that many fairy tales. It reminded me that fairy tales are... Awful. No, they're not awful, they're just very... Dark. Yes, but I appreciate that part. I think it's more just that,

have you ever seen a picture of a human being without a face? Yeah, sure. I think that's kind of how I think of fairy tales. Okay. They're blank, they're anonymous, they're... Flat. I think I've actually run into that term a lot

in researching for this episode. Well, there's certainly not a lot of character development and... No, and that's part of their charm, their lure, but it's also like, that's the memory I formed of them. It's like, I'm used to characters or psychology is lacking as well. Totally.

People do stuff for almost no apparent reason whatsoever and a lot of it's horrible stuff. Yeah. And that's actually kind of set the stage for fairy tales to be told and retold and retold and interpreted and analyzed. And I think that's what makes them so enduring is that they are, they're so minimalist

that they just survive because humans will change and update and we'll go from wearing bell bottoms and macrame vests to wearing silver jumpsuits which are in right now. Yeah. But ultimately we're still like very similar to what we were, you know, 60,000 years ago. Yeah.

And I think fairy tales reflect that. Well said. Thanks, man. And also I can say that because from what I understand, despite the fact that there is serious study of fairy tales, no one really has any definitive say over what they are. Like try to define what a fairy tale is, Chuck.

It's a story usually encompassing like a moral or ethical lesson involved in fantastical elements. Sure, okay. That often had dark undertones or overtones. That's actually a pretty great definition. But it does raise some questions. It's like, what is the difference between a fairy tale and a fable or a fairy tale and a nursery rhyme?

You know, what's the, what is it specifically about fairy tales? I think it's all, I think they're all very similar and it's all part of folklore. Yeah. So if you listened, I think in February this year we did one on folklore. So it ties in heavily with that.

For sure. And also we didn't, I don't know why we just defined fairy tale because we never defined what vocal fry was apparently. I feel like we did. Yeah, we got some complaints like you never said what it was, but we demonstrated it over and over. Yeah.

And we said it's like a flat, creaky way of speaking. Yeah. I don't know. I feel like we got the point across. Yeah. Okay. So fairy tales. Yes.

Specifically when you think of fairy tales, you might think of Disney, but if you give it a little more thought, you're probably going to come up with the brother's grim. Yeah. Matt Damon and. Heath Ledger. Right.

RIP. Yeah, for real. Yeah. Jacob and Wilhelm Graham and of course they're, well, let's just go ahead and say there's a couple of types of fairy tales. There's the. Oh yeah.

There's the. Oral tale. Yeah, the oral tale, which is, and the grim brothers kind of exist between the two worlds, but one is the oral world, which we talked about in folklore, the age old tradition of passing stories down via mouth parts. Right.

Over and over and over, changing them, adding some spice, just like telling a joke or a ghost story or something like that. Right. Exactly. And fairy tales specifically, as far as they went with oral tales,

are typically associated with women and typically associated with women undertaking domestic chores. Yeah. That that's typically where they were passed down. And so you've got the oral tale. Well, which makes sense though. When I read this, I was like,

why are there so many fairy tales that have women at the loom or spinning stuff? Because apparently that's where they were told. Exactly. It makes sense now. Yeah, it's like, hey, I'm bored out of my mind here spinning this straw into gold. Let me eat some peyote and make up a story.

Right. And you sit there and listen. There's also the literary fairytale, which appears to be, there's a handful of people like Charles Peralt or... Shalapiro. Right. And then there's also Hans Christian Andersen,

very famously. Sure. And these people are reputed as having created many fairy tales. And those are called literary fairytales. Yeah, like they were original authors and made these up. Right. That's apparently a total misattribution.

Like, for example, Little Red Riding Hood, right? Yeah. Is a great example. That's typically attributed to Charles Peralt. Yeah. In the, I think the 17th or 16th century. Not Charles Peralt. No.

Charles Peralt, his ancestor. And Charles Peralt, he was very famous, as famous as Hans Christian Andersen was, for writing down fairy tales into collections and just being delightful, right? And he was great. And at the end of every one of his, there was a moral to the story.

Yeah. But people tend to think they either, if he didn't come up with it, it was originated right before then. But we found an article that was from, it covered a 2009 study carried out by a cultural anthropologist who basically went to some biologists and said,

hey, you guys know how you trace species and create the tree of life, the taxonomy of biology? Yeah. Can you do that with Little Red Riding Hood? And they said, man, you are one crazy lady. You are one whacked out, hep cat. Actually may have been a man, Dr. Jamie Tarani. It was a man.

Yeah. And still is probably. I mean, it's only been six years. You never know. So Dr. Tarani went to some biologists and figured out how to apply the same methods to this story, Little Red Riding Hood. And he found that not only was it not just

like a few years older than Pearl's version, it was as much as 2600 years old, basically. Yeah. They found variations in China and Iran and the Middle East. They found some, you know, for the Aesop's fables. Another person. They found some of those from 6th century BC. So basically what they're saying is maybe nobody made these up.

Well, someone at some point did. At least as far as Little Red Riding Hood goes. Yeah. That there's some common ancestor that predates 2600 years before the present. And it's a very widespread tale. Not only did Dr. Tarani trace the lineage back to 600 BCE, he found that you could take these tales all around the world

and lump them into groups, just a handful of groups. And that places as disparate as Iran and Nigeria and Europe all were in the same group. Whereas like Japan and Burma and China were in their own group. But they all kind of bear this resemblance where there is a lion or a tiger or a wolf who is posing as something else in order to get the drop on someone else. Yeah, and it's usually a little girl,

but I think in Iran it was a little boy. Yeah. So details change. Again, simple folklore, I think. But the structure, the skeleton of the story is still very much the same, traceable back to 2600 years. So that kind of answers the question that I don't know if we raised or not yet.

Who owns or who came up with fairy tales? But humans did. That's the best answer you could possibly come up with. As humans came up with it and over the years, like you said, people embellish it, people add, people subtract. And the Grim Brothers did exactly that same thing. All right, let's talk a little bit about these Grim Bros. Jacob and Wilhelm, did I already say that?

They were born in Germany. You said Jakob in part one, which I really appreciated. Jakob and Wilhelm, Jacob or Jakob was born in 1785, Wilhelm, just a year later. And they were kind of rich kids. Their dad was a lawyer. And they had some money. Their original house, if you look at it, it's funny.

It looks like, I mean, it's a total Bavarian like gingerbread house. And they grew up in Germany. And when they were 10 years old, their dad died of pneumonia. And all of a sudden, they didn't have the kind of dough that they were used to having. No, they did. It was not good and a little scary.

I don't get the sense that they were like dirt poor or anything because they still had some relatives that had some cash. Well, plus also, I mean, they made it all the way through law school in honor of their father. So I mean, that wasn't free even back then. Yeah, I think their aunt paid for school. They graduated, each graduated at the top of their class. And I guess what would be considered high school.

And then their auntie paid for law school. And it wasn't long after law school that they got into the, it's about to say writing. They did write, but they were editors for sure. They're collecting and editing and writing business. They were what's called philologists. Curating is the word I meant. Right.

And they were also, they considered themselves and were considered linguists as well. And by the way, they were Hessians, which means that they were from the same place as the headless horseman from the Sleepy Hollow legend. Really? He was a Hessian mercenary. I don't remember that.

Yeah. So anyway, they graduated from law school during this period called German Romanticism, which is basically this idea that years before in the mists of history, the Germanic people were very interesting. They had a very good grasp on things. And a lot of this was passed down through oral folklore. Sure.

And that this stuff was disappearing thanks to industrialization. So you get the idea that there's a little bit of nervousness, at least among the intellectual people of Germany at the time, that this cultural history was drying up very quickly. And there was a movement to collect this oral knowledge before it disappeared. And that's what the Grimm brothers were doing when they said

about collecting these stories. Although they weren't very honest about it, at least at first. Yeah, we know them now as just simply the Grimm brothers' fairy tales. Yeah. But the original collection was called Nursery and Household Tales, or Dekende und Hausmärchen in German.

Man, your German is mwah. It's coming back. There were 86 stories originally in the collection. And by the way, big shout to the article from the New Yorker Once Upon a Time, a lore of the fairy tale by Joan Akkosella. Yes, very nice. I think that's it.

Yeah, she wrote a great article. And that's largely the basis of our podcast, by the way. That's right. So thanks for that. But 86 original stories. And like you said, originally they, in the forward, in the introduction, they were like, this is all German all the time.

Basically, word for word, we went around to the peasantry and collected this, was it Marchen or Marchen? For what? The tales, German for tales, is it Marchen or Marchen? Hausmärchen. Marchen? So that's the umlaut at work. So they went around to the vault, the peasantry,

and collected the marchen from them. Yeah. And didn't change a word. Specifically, they said they had a primary source, a woman named Dorothea Viman. And she was a peasant in a village near them. But it turns out that all of this, again, was folklore, which I can't fault them too much,

because that was their business. No, but they did trump it up to be a little more folksy than it was. Well, they basically lied in the introduction in their first edition, which was published in two volumes in 1812 and 1815, right? And so this nursery and household tales became known as Grimm's fairy tales.

And at first, it was definitely a much more of an intellectual pursuit. There are lots of footnotes. They tried to make it seem like they were just collecting and preserving this German folk knowledge and all that. But it turns out that they did have that primary source in that woman, but she was pretty far from a peasant.

Apparently, she was the wife of a tailor, which was part of the merchant class, not the peasant class. Yeah, and she was just one source. They relied on friends and family and relatives. Other collections of folk tales and fairy tales that they just lifted. And we're not suggesting they were thieves. This was a common thing to do.

It was, but again, they bald-facedly lied in the introduction and preface, which is funny. But they were trying to adopt an aura for their project that they wanted it to have, that it didn't necessarily have. Well, yeah, and I don't think we mentioned there. One source wasn't even of German descent. She was a French Huguenot. Yeah, so they even kind of trumped that up.

Right, which means that a lot of the stuff that Red Riding Cap is a ripoff of Charles Peralta's Little Red Riding Hood. Yes. Or an adaptation, whatever you want to call it. But again, this is in the midst of this German romanticism, where German culture was trying to be promoted and celebrated and preserved. So all of this stuff was very much painted as German,

even though not necessarily any of it was German in origin. But it was far more ancient than even the French that they were lifting it from. That's right. All right, here, let's take a little break and let's come back and let's talk a little bit more about these Grimm brothers. OK. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point,

but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64?

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Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast

and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And we're back. And Chuck, before we get back to it, I want to shout out to guest producer Noel, who is responsible for the fairytale-themed jingle that this episode in the first one,

too. Yeah, we asked and he was like, too easy. I'll do it with my eyes closed. Yeah. While I'm asleep. And he did. With an alligator. I was like, oh, I'm going to sleep.

I'm going to sleep. I'm going to sleep. I'm going to sleep. I'm going to sleep. I'm going to sleep. I'm going to sleep. I'm going to sleep. I'm going to sleep.

With an alligator chasing me. That's right. So thanks, Noel. That's awesome. All right, these are Grimm brothers. They were tight. They were really close with each other. They were.

They worked really close with each other. They were buddies from what I can tell. And apparently, for most of their career, they worked at desks facing each other, that classic writing partner. Like we are now. Yes. Even though it's one desk.

And we only sit here to record. Yeah, I guess there is some similarity here there, sure. We're making magic and they were too. I think that's the similarity, right? Sure. Jakob was a difficult introvert. And Wilhelm was pretty laid back. Wilhelm would eventually get married

because he was more outgoing and had four kids. Whereas Jakob stayed a bachelor his whole life. Right. And they were tight. They worked as librarians together for a lot of their career. And like you said, they were philologists. It's a tough word to say.

It is. They worked on most things. I think eight things together. Jakob wrote 21 books on his own, Wilhelm 14. And one of them wrote a book on grammar. One of them wrote a history book. They were smart dudes. They were smart dudes.

But their life's work, aside from the fairy tales, ended up being, they seemed to be sort of obsessed with making a German dictionary. Right. Complete, like writing a dictionary. Yeah, they made it to F, I believe. Before they died. Yeah, and then some other people came along and said, we're going to carry on this work and finish it.

And it was completed. But it was a massive project. Oh yeah, I mean like for decades they worked up just to get through F. Right. And I think who died first? I believe Wilhelm, the younger one, died first. And Jakob carried the dictionary on for four more years

even after his death. Yeah. But Jakob said, OK, I'm done with the fairy tales. I'm going to move on to other stuff. And Wilhelm actually edited that thing for 45 years. It went through seven editions. Of the fairy tale thing, yeah. Yes, the nursery and household tales, the grim fairy tales.

Yeah, I thought you were on the dictionary story. I'm sorry, I switched. It went from, I guess, 1812 to 1857 was when he released the last edition. And they were very different books by the time the first edition and the last edition came out. And even between the first and second editions they were tremendously different books

because the Grim Brothers decided that their book wasn't selling like they thought it would, e.g. Hotcakes. Yeah, if you listen to the previous episode, it was originally much darker and aimed at adults and was poorly reviewed and didn't sell well. Right. And for grammarians listening by e.g.

I'm an example, not that is. I would have said i.e. had I meant that. But they decided that if they could just kind of alter their book just a tiny bit, it would sell a lot better. So they went through and took out all the sex, basically. Yeah, and tradition of modern Americans take out the sex, pump up the violence. Right, but these are like early 19th century Germans doing this.

Yeah. And I guess it's that same thing. And here, Chuck, I have a question. Yes. And it's a rhetorical question. But so you know how nursery rhymes or fairy tales are just weird? They're very weird.

Sure. There's a lot of random things that just seem really out of context. Like talking eggs that break and. Right, but also like really horrific violence for a children's story and all that. Yeah, oh yeah. I think that this is the point where that weirdness sets in

because they went through and they took these same tales and they altered them just slightly for children. Yeah. But it went from these are adults or these are stories for adults meant to be told from one adult to another, not for kids. Yeah. To let's adapt these for kids.

And in that adaptation, that weirdness set in that's still there today. Yeah. I think that's when it happened. That wasn't even a rhetorical question. That was just a statement. Thank you. You're putting it out there.

Had I ended in upspeak, though, I could have made the case that it was rhetorical. So in this in the very next edition out of the seven, they went ahead and after the bad sales and stuff. And like I said, they sanitized it and geared it to kids. But they also dropped that stuff from the intro, all the lies in the intro. I'm like, I guess you're like, why do we even do that?

Yeah, you know, they're like, we're sorry, everybody. That was just dumb on our parts. It was Wilhelm. Yuckam's like, Wilhelm's like, no, it's Yuckam. And it just goes back and forth for like eight pages. So in the previous podcast, we mentioned Rapunzel, how that was how Rapunzel basically, the lady in question got pregnant after having sex.

Rapunzel. Yeah, so they would whitewash that kind of stuff. They would sanitize the sexier parts. Right, they just took out the fact that she got pregnant and didn't mention what the prince and she were doing. Right. They just left it up to the parents to imagine and the kids to just be dummies and not

know what they were talking about. Right, but like we said, too, the violence stayed. And in some cases, it even got worse. Like when Hansel and, well, the violence got worse, but they also did sanitize it a little bit just to make it a little more palatable. Like in Hansel and Gretel, in the previous show, we mentioned that it was a stepmother, an evil stepmother,

which we'll talk about later as a recurring motif that it took the children out in the woods to abandon them. In the original version, it was both a real mother and a real father. And they were like, all right, that's really bad. So let's at least make it an evil stepmother that the dad tries to battle and say, no, don't do this. Right, but eventually gives in to.

Gives in to and the kids are still taken out in the woods to die. But it's just a little bit more like, OK, well, it's not the real parents because that's just horrific. So the violence is still there, but they've taken away a little bit of the psychological terror by replacing the mother with a stepmother. Right.

And yeah, I think that that's a, I guess that is something of a cleansing process as far as editing goes, but the violence is still in there. And it seems very weird, especially today, when you look back at this and think like they were reading this to kids. But there's a very smart woman named A.S. Byatt, who's a children's author herself, but also

an expert on children's books. And she wrote the introduction to a collection, I think, actually, in addition of the Grimm's fairy tales, by Maria Tatar, who's basically the foremost expert on fairy tales working today. Yeah, that's, is Zeip's not around anymore? He's retired because that guy. He's still available for comment for sure.

But Tatar seems to be the, she's taken up the mantle from him. Yeah. And in this edition, A.S. Byatt writes in the introduction of it that, yes, this violence seems weird, but if you step back and think of it as 17th and 18th century Tom and Jerry cartoons, it becomes way more understandable. And at the same time, way more acceptable as well.

Like, think about all the horrible things that Jerry did to Tom. Yeah. And what you're looking at is the same exact stuff in a fairy tale. So it's not quite as odd as you would think. Yeah, and as far as the historical motif or the motif of the evil stepmom,

there's a historical realism there that someone else pointed out that at the time, women died in childbirth a lot. And so oftentimes, there was a widow or a widower left with kids that they would bring in a stepmother and resources could be scarce. So you'll see this recurring motif over and over this evil stepmother who basically is competing

for both the affections and food of their little children that they inherited that they don't like. Right, exactly. So that's why you see it pop up over and over and over is because that's kind of what happens sometimes. Yeah, and that's the socio-historical interpretation of fairy tales, which basically takes fairy tales largely on their face.

I mean, if you have a talking egg or something like that, you're not going to be like, well, obviously, in the 12th century, eggs talked. But there's a lot of context and background that I think people imbue with a lot more fancifulness than need be. For example, like the presence of wicked stepmothers throughout, or in the case of Hansel and Gretel,

a child abandoned it. Like if you look back at the 14th century during famines and plagues, I think it was the Black Death in particular that just leveled Europe, a lot of people abandoned their children because they just couldn't feed them any longer. So this wasn't so outlandish that it only belongs in fairy tale land.

It might have been a fairly approachable theme that people talked about to hash out the feelings of collective societal guilt at the fact that child abandonment was rampant. Absolutely. I think the socio-historical interpretation is probably my favorite. Can we talk about the Juniper Tree real quick?

I love this one. So like we said, in fairy tales, there's incest, there's cannibalism, there's murder, there's torture, there's buried alive. There are all kinds of things that can happen. And the Juniper Tree, maybe the worst one of them all. So in this case, we have an evil stepmother, of course, who hates her stepchild, who's a boy.

So she comes home and says, hey, you want an apple? And the boy says, sure. Let me lean in there and get one. And it's a trunk, and she slams the trunk down and cuts his head off. Yeah. And that's just the beginning. So she's like, all right, probably not a wise move.

Let me put the kid in a chair. Let me stick this head back on his neck and wrap a scarf around it. And just here, open his eyes here and put a little smile on his face. And then her real daughter comes in, not a stepdaughter. Right. Her favorite real daughter.

Yes. And is like, he looks all weird. Why is he just sitting there like an adult? She says, I don't know. Go slap him and bring him around a bit. Box his ear, I think, is what she told him. Yeah. So she boxes his ear.

His head falls off. And by the way, the little girl, which makes it even more horrific what you're about to say, loved the little boy, even though he was a stepbrother, even though in the mom's eyes, they were rivals for these scarce resources. Yeah. Little girl loves the little boy.

So go ahead. So she knocks his head off, and the mom's like, you knocked your brother's head off. But you know what, we're going to just keep this quiet between us. And you won't get in any trouble. Let's just cook him into a stew and feed him to your father. Yes.

Or stepfather, in this case. And the little girl's beside herself with guilt and shame and horror at the thought that she killed her beloved stepbrother. But she goes along with it because this is what her mom's saying. And the father comes home, and he eats the stew. And actually, it's black pudding.

Yeah. I'm not sure what that is, but the father eats it, and he's like, this is all for me. Yeah, then he had a little misogyny and greed on the end. Yeah. Because he's like, no one else in this family is going to eat this but me. It's pretty nuts.

And in the end, the little girl takes the boy's bones and buries him by the juniper tree, and he's reborn as a bird, and ends up killing the wicked stepmother, and then comes back to life as the boy. So it all works out in the end for the boy. But it's pretty nuts as far as these stories go. Like, that has it all. Do you want to talk about how children played

butcher with each other? Yes. This one's very short, and we should point out many of these are very short. Like, Little Red Riding Hood was only four pages long. I think Rapunzel was only two or three. But that also, in and of itself, was the work of the Grimm brothers.

They would embellish this stuff tremendously, and often double it in size. Double it from a few paragraphs to a couple of pages. Right. It's still short. And by the way, if you want to read a really neat analysis of the juniper tree, read Ernest Parkins' analysis on words and edgeways.

Yeah? Yeah, it's pretty cool. He finds a lot of neat symbolism in it. All right, here's how children played butcher with each other. It's a great title. A man once slaughtered a pig while his children were looking on when they started playing in the afternoon, one child said to the other, you be the little pig,

and I'll be the butcher, whereupon he took an open blade and thrust it into his brother's neck. Their mother, who was upstairs in a room bathing the youngest child in a tub, heard the cries of her other child, quickly ran downstairs. And when she saw what had happened, drew the knife out of the child's neck, and in a rage, thrust it into the heart of the child who

had been the butcher. Then she rushed back to the house to see what her other child was doing in the tub. But in the meantime, it had drowned in the bath. Wow. The woman was so horrified that she fell into a state of utter despair, refused to be consoled by the servants, and hanged herself when her husband returned home

from the fields and saw this. He was so distraught that he died shortly thereafter. The end. That's like the episode of Dragnet, where they have a pot party, and the parents forget their child is in the bath and it drowns. Was that on Dragnet? Wow.

So of course I'm laughing because, I mean, you can't take that seriously, right? If you watch Dragnet, you can. Well, no, I mean, that story. It's just so over the top and weird and violent and dark. Right. And stuff just happens. Like, again, there's almost no psychology to these things.

People just do stuff. Well, supposedly, I think Wilhelm Grimm said specifically about that one, like, no, the clear lesson here is, is like, don't play with knives and things. Which is, and that's a good point. And I don't know if we've even said that. Like, the predominant theory for why these things even exist is, as far as being taught to children goes,

they are lessons, they're tales on how to grow up, how to avoid strangers. Sure. Stay away from knives. Stay away from, I guess, witches. Like, don't eat houses made of gingerbread. Just good life lessons, that kind of stuff. Yeah, there's sexual predators out there.

Yeah, which we'll talk about. But let's take another break. You ready for it? Yes. OK. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker

necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper,

because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

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And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So Chuck, you, um, you said that there are sexual predators out there in that little red riding hood in particular.

Like if you read it, especially if you read the Grimm version and not the Charles Perrault version, yeah, it's, um, like everything comes out great in the end. She's saved. Yeah, um, you can read between the lines a little bit. And that's the key though. Like these, these fairy tales, even after they became sanitized through seven editions, even after they became

Disney-fied, um, there's still this underlying thread, the theme, the central theme, the message. Look out for sexual predators. Don't cut your brother's head off with a knife. Like they can't be expunged and the story still remain the same. It's, it's so woven into the fabric of them. And I think that's one of the things that makes them interesting. But alternately, something else I ran across and I think that

AS By It, um, article was the idea that they don't have any designs on you. Right. They're not trying to teach you a lesson necessarily in and of themselves. They just are what they are. Right. Maybe the person telling you that fairy tale wants you to learn that lesson, the fairy tale in and of itself couldn't care less whether you, you learn that lesson or not. It's just, here's a snapshot of what happened in 1217 to this little boy who played with

knives with his brother. Learn it or don't. We don't care. Yeah. But that's, uh, what was Zeib's first name? Jack. Jack Zeibs. He was, uh, may still be, you said he's retired now.

Yeah. He's, he worked at the university of Minnesota as a comparative literature professor and German professor. Go golden gophers. Yeah. Uh, and he for many, many years was the preeminent fairy tale dude. Uh, he was where you would go. He turns up all over the place in this research, but he said though, um, that there usually

is like a comeuppance. Like he says whoever is a tyrant, a witch, an evil brother or mother who wants her own daughter dead, they will always be punished. There will always be justice. Yeah. And usually that, uh, characters that are of humble origins go on to have like great success, like the, you know, the, the, uh, poor maiden marries the prince in the end in most cases.

Right. It's true. But not always. Or the king who wants to have an incestuous relationship with his daughter ends up getting killed or something like that. Yeah. In that case, uh, I believe what was his wife was dying and he said, I will only remarry if I can find someone as beautiful as you and turns out that's my daughter.

Right. What was that one called? Like first of many or something like that? I think it was called the creep king. Yeah. But that's a recurring theme. Yeah. Actually, it's a very ancient one.

It falls under the Cinderella story, um, which apparently, so there's a, I don't know if we mentioned it or not, but there's a, uh, folklore cataloging device, like cataloging convention. And I think Cinderella stories, which is the persecuted heroin is, uh, number 510A. Really? Yeah. For real. It's the arm Thompson, Uther classification, 510A persecuted heroin Cinderella stories. The Uther pin dragon.

Yeah. And that's another Cinderella is another one. Like there was one woman in particular who collected 385 different versions of the Cinderella story from around the world. And I think they've identified as many as 15. So Cinderella is another very, very ancient one as well. Yeah. And the one that you recounted about the king and wants to marry his daughter, that particular

one's from Greece. Yeah. And it's called all kinds of fur, which is a weird title. It's all hyphenated. Like that's her name or something. I think it's very creepy. So we were talking about like sanitizing it and, um, uh, Joan Acosella comes to the Grimm's defense, like saying, you can't really fault these guys for, for changing this stuff.

Because again, it doesn't really belong to anybody. They belong to the ages and the Grimm's just put their stamp on it. Yeah. And also, you know, uh, if you, if you just take an oral tradition and faithfully write it down, it's going to be virtually unreadable. Yeah. So they, they definitely stylized it. They added some more pros and they made it a lot more memorable and it became a beloved

book. It's a UNESCO book, um, memory of the world. I think. Yeah. Collection. So like it's a, it's a very well beloved book, but some people say, you know, if, uh, why should the Grimm's be the only ones to be able to, to change fairy tales? Why, why does it have to end with them?

Right. Maybe it's time to rewrite them some. Well, isn't that what, uh, Tartar? Zipes. Zipes. That's his position. No, no, no, but I thought the woman who, uh, Tatar, is that her name? Yeah.

Wasn't that what she's done? Didn't she release a new version in 2005? She released an annotated version, but she didn't rewrite them. Well, Zipes is saying is like, here, here's the basic story. Go rewrite it as your own. Yes. Um, there've been some feminist collections that, that are rewritten stories. Yeah.

Like, why is every girl defenseless and needs a man to rescue her from poverty or danger? Right. And that's a feminist interpretation of a lot of the, um, the fairy tales. Some people say, uh, if you look a little further, like, yes, all the ones that Disney picked and all the most popular ones are very much patriarch, patriarchically slanted to where it is a damsel in distress as a prince that has to come help her and she's helpless until he comes along and then whatever. Um, but if you look a little further, there are some very, there are other ones where

they're resourceful heroines and think of Hansel and Gretel. Uh, Gretel tricks the witch and kills her all by herself without the help of Hansel, who's being fattened up by himself, right? Yeah. And I'm sure Disney, Walt Disney himself was just like, man, they love this stuff. Like, of course I'm going to do. They're eating it up. Yeah.

But there, but there, you can also look at Hollywood too as a means of taking these classic fairy tales and rewriting the grim versions. Like, um, there's a huge, I don't want to call it a movement, but there's, there's like a trend, I guess. Trend. To, to taking these things that were Disney fide versions of the stories and restoring them back even, even to their pre grim darker roots, just making them dark again. They're grimmer roots.

Yeah. Um, have you ever seen Freeway with Reese Witherspoon? Oh yeah. That was a little red riding hood. A little red riding hood. Yeah. If you're a feminist, I guarantee you appreciate that version of a little red riding hood because she takes no guff.

No guff. And comes out on top. And at no point is she. Keep her, uh, this other one. Yeah. And Brooke Shields is his wife and she like, it's crazy. That's a neat, neat movie, but that's a good example of a rewriting of a classic fairy tale.

It doesn't have to end with the Grimm's totally, uh, in the company of wolves. Wasn't that a, that was a rewrite of, uh, or redo of little red riding hood too. Little more of a horror though. Right. I think so. I didn't see it. I didn't either. I think that was Neil Jordan, right?

Crying game. Oh yeah. Like one of his early movies. Yeah. So, um, we have to talk a little bit about, uh, the Nazis here because, uh, the Nazis were big on co-opting things for their own purposes. Uh, and one of the things they co-opted were Grimm's fairy tales. And since World War II, there's been a big, I don't know about big again.

Maybe it was just a trend, but there were folks who said that, you know, when you look at these, they're talking about German nationalism and, and discipline and violence and an order and obedience. And I think the Grimm brothers were like, yeah, it's totally nationalism. We were all about Germany, but, but we died like decades before Hitler was even born. Yeah. Like, I don't think they would have appreciated that it was co-opted by the Nazis and Hitler saying like, put these in schools.

This is awesome. Right. Like read this stuff. Put them in Boy Scout rooms. Everywhere. That's funny. So, um, the, the allies came in and occupied Germany. And one of the things they said was like, you guys can't teach this Grimm book anymore

and banned it. Yeah. A lot of towns around Germany. It became very political. Because it was very much associated with the Third Reich. And one of the reasons why is because the Third Reich said, go teach this to young German kids to make sure that they know they're German and that they will triumph over the Allied Wolf because they're all a little red riding hood.

That's right. Little Nazi kids. That's right. So, um, again, people make the case like, you can't really hang that on the Grimm brothers. They didn't foresee Nazism and this, this German nationalism in and of itself isn't necessarily inherently evil. And if you put it in the context of German Romanticism, most countries in Europe were undergoing nationalist fever, you know, so, um, there was some anti-Semitism though in

some of the tales. Yeah. And that can't be gotten around either. Yeah. One was called the Jew and the Brambles where the protagonist torments a Jewish person by dancing, making him dance on a thicket of thorns, uh, calls him a dirty dog. And then there's, I mean, there's various, I think it said three basically of the 200 tales.

Right. And they were never like favorable. Yeah. The other two, um, referenced the Jewish stereotype of being stingy with money or something like that. Yeah. The good bargain. And a lot of people are like, well, let's just expunge those two, um, and some people

have from their collections. I think that's the other thing too, is you can, if the Grimm's kind of set a precedent for you can take these tales and, and cleanse them if you want or do whatever you want to them. Like they're, they belong to the ages. Well, and that's then comes in the, the people who posit whether or not it's, that's good for us. Should we sanitize it?

Should we not? Uh, WH Alden, I love this. He, uh, described the people who sanitize them as the society for the scientific diet, the association of positive parents, uh, positivist parents, the league for the promotion of worthwhile leisure, uh, or the cooperative camp of prudent progressives. Man. That is so WH Alden. Oh yeah.

He couldn't just leave it at one description. In no way. Uh, so he clearly wasn't in favor of it. Some people think, uh, it's good for us. Um, a man named, uh, Bruno, uh, Bettelheim in a name, Bruno Bettelheim. Mm hmm. Yeah, totally is. Sounds like a Bond villain or something.

Yeah. Uh, in 1976, he had a book called the Uses of Enchantment and he was very Freudian in nature. Oh yeah. And that he basically says that we all, all these kids have these unconscious desires and these books help, uh, what like these repressed desires come out to help them deal with them. Yeah. We, it helps, uh, children, yeah, deal with their repressed desires.

Like the example of the, um, so we talked about the socio historical interpretation of the presence of wicked stepmothers, right? Right. There were lots of stepmothers and they were competing for resources. Bettelheim and the Freudian say, well, no, the stepmothers are there because, um, children love their mother, but they also hate their mother. Right. So they come away to work through that complex, yeah, that complex, um, combination of emotions

where they can hate the wicked stepmother, but they can also love the biological mother who's absent or appears early on and then dies, but who is always very loving and kind. Right. So they can work that out. That's a great example of it. Yeah. And then you have Zeiss who, uh, Jack Zeiss says, you know, what it really is, is, uh, you can see the fairy tale as like a counterworld or reflection of their own world and it allows

them to, you know, consider what's going on in that world and then take steps in their own world to reform it and not do those things. Right. And specifically it teaches children to identify tyrants and people who are power mad and people who hoard money or harm other people because those people almost invariably come to a terrible end in those things and then fairy tales, right? Yeah. So we've got all these different interpretations, Freudian, Carl Jung got into it, um, socio-historical,

feminist interpretation, Jack Zeiss own personal leftist interpretation, right? Yeah. Um, and all of them, although they compete here or there, none of them are wrong and none of them are right. And that, again, is the beauty of fairy tales. It's like a blank white piece of plywood that we project our own thoughts and fears and hopes and ideas onto culture by culture, age by age. Yeah.

And Tatar, in her collection, did a pretty smart thing, I think. She actually collected some of the more disturbing ones in the back of the book under the title Tales for Adults, basically read these first on your own, see if you want to read them to your kid. Yeah. Don't front load it with the juniper tree, you know. And actually Joan Acacela says that you should take an exacto knife and just cut the juniper tree out of your...

Oh, was that who said that? I thought that was pretty funny. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. If your kid's got a strong fortitude. It's up to the parents, but it wasn't always up to the parents. There was a big movement in the mid-20th century for realism among children's books.

Yeah. And the Grimm's were first on the chopping block there, instead it was replaced by like Judy Goes to the Firehouse, as Acacela says. Right. I totally, like think about it. It's like a total 50s children's book. Yeah. Like C. Dick and Jane Run.

Yeah. You know? And it was, I guess, Maurice Sendak with where the wild things are who said, yeah, we're not doing that anymore. He brought the cool back to children's books. He definitely did. Yeah. I haven't read many children's books lately, but I think there's a lot of...

You read Daddy's Side on a Duck, right? Yeah, I did read that one. Lots of fart jokes in that one. Yeah. That was written by one of our listeners, even. Highly recommended. It is. It's very good.

I think these days there's a mix of things going on, realism, fanciful stuff, stories. And now, well, this is more of a young adult novel, but Collin Malloy of the Decemberous wrote a three-part children's novels, like big, big books about this fantastical world in Oregon, this forest in Oregon, where I can't, I've bought them all, I can't wait to read them. Yeah. He's a cool man. Yeah.

I think he's, that's more the tradition of the like Lion Witch and the Wardrobe. Yeah. This is what I thought of when you said that. I wanted to say Avalon. It's not the name. Narnia. Narnia. Yeah.

I have no idea where children's books are these days, either. I wonder, though, what it reflects about society at large, whatever phased children's books are, whether it's realism or fancifulness, you know? Yeah. Like, are we, like, when you're in an economic downturn, is realism or fantasy the one that steps in? Yeah. I would guess fantasy, because people want escapism then.

I was way into that stuff. I wasn't into, like, Hobbit and Lord of the Rings and stuff like that, but I love Maurice Sindak and Dr. Seuss and stuff that was really kind of out there. I love Dr. Seuss. I found out that it's not every boy read Ramona Quimby books. I thought it was unisex. Apparently not. Yeah.

I read some Judy Bloom. Yeah, of course. And I did read the first couple of the chronic what-cools-of-Narnia, did you ever see that skit? No. It was one of the Saturday Night Live shorts they were doing, Chris Parnell and Samberg were doing a rap. The chronic what-cools-of-Narnia, it's like a very weird misplaced what.

Did you see Mr. Show's coming back on Netflix? Yeah, well, we're going to get to Mr. Show, I don't think they can call it Mr. Show. No, they're calling it with like W slash Bob and David. Yeah, Bob and David. I can't wait, man. I saw a couple of clips and it looks like it's going to be as good as it ever was. I'm pretty psyched. Me too.

Before we leave you, since we're talking about fairy tales, we thought it'd be appropriate to mention that two of our horror fiction contest submitters are published. One's published again. Jay McMurray published The Dreamings of Leonard J.M. Leaper and you can check that out at tapepublishing.com. Leaper? No, Leaper. Okay.

And then also, you can find Patrick Scott, he wrote Play, I believe, which was in Meet for Tea magazine. And you can find information about that at meet4t.com. Since I said Meet for Tea, it's time for Listener Man. I wish it was time for us to meet for tea. No, M-E-A-T. Yeah. Okay.

Okay. I'm going to call this a little bit more on vocal fry. We got a lot of response from this one. I think it's second in controversy only in homelessness. Yeah. A lot of ladies wrote in, women that were very appreciative. A lot of men wrote in who were not appreciative. Many were too.

Yeah. Many were. But a lot of dudes wrote in. I think they're part of the men's movement, you know? It was divided like you would expect, but there were men who wrote in to support us. There were women who wrote in to criticize vocal fry that agreed with Naomi Wolfe. Yeah. And I just want to clear up.

I don't mean all old white men are awful. I don't. You don't even need to say that. If you're not one of the ones that are doing these things, then great. Who cares? Yeah, I know. You don't need to defend the ones who are. Nope.

All right. Here we go. Hey, guys. Just want to say thanks so much for your recently, for recently tackling some very charged gender issues in the most mature, but non-apologistic ways. I like how this emails going to whether it be female puberty, vocal fry, or your excellent double duo with the stuff you miss in history class crew and listener mail. You nailed what I consider to be the best way to handle the ubiquitous double standards

that women find themselves held to state that it is unequivocally wrong and calmly and rationally pick apart. Why? You are not trying to start a gender war, though I'm sure there are those out there who will take it as such see beginning of this email. But you meticulously undercut the, meticulously undercut the arguments and unconscious justifications that allow these attitudes to endure underneath all the truths by consensus and familial and cultural norms.

Very little remains to give weight to these perspectives and I believe that both genders are, albeit slowly shedding them thanks to the efforts of you and many others on this path. Very well said, right? Yeah. For real. This is the road to equality, dudes. I threw that in there and I cannot say how much I appreciate your proper championing of

it. We are all persons no matter our gender and should be respected as such free as much as possible of worthless generalizations. Also as a side note, I was once upon a time a linguist and very much agree with your handling of socio-linguistics. A linguist, sorry Chuck, is that because I said like, linguistinator or something weird? A linguistinator. A linguist's most fundamental tenet is that no use of language to communicate is wrong

and thus linguistic evolution should be no more surprising than that of pop music or fashion. Yeah, the prescriptivists are just screaming at their iPods right now. Ideas and perspectives change and language by its nature will rise to meet it. Cheers. That is from David, a long time stuff you should know, man. Thanks a lot, David. That was a very kind email, very well said.

Representative, I would say about half of the emails that we got about vocal fry, the other half. If you want to get in touch with us, you can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com and as always join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of

the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you listen to podcasts.