Fairy Tale Mash-ups
Sunday, January 6th, 2008Zag has, in the past month or so, moved from listening to songs and rhymes and stories to singing songs and retelling rhymes and stories himself–and also remixing them. It’s not always clear whether he’s doing the remixing on purpose, or if he’s just confusing two or more stories together. I’m inclined to think that at least sometimes, it’s on purpose. It hardly matters though–I love the results.
For example, he recently has been singing:
Humpty Dumpty came to town, riding on a pony
stuck a feather in hims hat and called in macarooooni!
Today at dinner he told me a much more complicated one (edited lightly for continuity):
Once upon a time there were three little bears. One day, thems mama told them to go out and build thems own houses. One little bear built hims house out of sticks, and one built hims out out of bricks, and one built hims house out of sticks and stones. One day a Bad Wolf came and knocked on the doors, and the three little bears said “Not by the hair of my chimmy chin chins!” Then the wolf said “then I huff and I puff and I blow the house down!” [blows for effect]. And he knocked down all the houses and the little bears ran away!
The End.
Now, obviously the core story here is the three little pigs, but he’s swapped out the pigs for the bears from Goldilocks, and tossed in a reference to “London Bridge is Falling Down” (in the construction materials)–something I’d love to see elaborated further in future retellings. And even the stones and bricks are powerless against this bad wolf, who is so bad that even three bears (admittedly, three little bears) run away from him.
Funnier still, they’ve been riffing on modern retellings of the three little pigs over on Making Light recently–some good stuff there to, go check it out, and we’ll update with more as Zag tells them.