For my birthday, my sister gave me some gifts for, in her words, “reliving my childhood.”
One of them is an old Shirley Temple movie, “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.” I am very excited to watch it, since I haven’t seen it since I was really young.
Another of the gifts is a book of Great Illustrated Fairy Tales, which contains Beauty and the Beast, Rapunzel, Thumbelina, and some other lesser known stories, such as The Twelve Dancing Princesses, The Golden Mermaid, The Goose Girl, and Dorani. One reason I really love this book is that the stories are so very different from the way that Disney would portray them.
For example, in The Twelve Dancing Princesses, the hero of the story (a star gazer) finds a way to make himself invisible, sneaks into the twelve princesses’ room, and hides under the bed (even though he is invisible), in order to try and discover why the princesses’ dancing slippers are worn out every morning, even though they are locked into their room all night with “triple bolts.” Of course, he finds out that they sneak out a trap door from their bedroom and sail away to a hidden kingdom, where they dance all night long with Princes whom the Princesses’ captured and had their hearts frozen so that the only thing they desire is dancing. My favorite part is near the end of the story, when our hero finally marries one of the princesses, and she asks him to show her his secret for becoming invisible. “So he showed her the two laurels which had helped him, and she, like a prudent girl, thinking they gave him too much advantage over his wife, cut them off at the root and threw them in the fire.” How sweet.
The last gift, which is probably my favorite, is “150 Cartoon Classics.” It is a compilation of “early animated shorts,” including Betty Boop, Casper, Woody Woodpecker, Popeye, The Three Stooges, Mighty Mouse, and a lot of cartoons I had never heard of before. Most of these are black and white, I think from the early 30s and 40s. I haven’t seen any of these cartoons in ages, so I was very surprised to realize the amount of “adult content” in them. It is also fun to see how far cartoons have come since their original debut. Many of the characters in these early classics are wildly different from the way I remember them from the 90s TV shows. I’m really happy to have this collection, especially since most of these cartoons aren’t shown on TV anymore today, which makes me really sad.
