Grim and Grisly

BY RON WOLFE, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Posted on Thursday, July 14, 2005

On the good ship Lollypop, It’s a sweet trip to a candy shop...

Curly-haired little Shirley Temple, singing sweetly, charmed a nation that yearned for happy times during the Great Depression. But now, the once-good ship turns out to be a barge of nasty schemes, and the sand is full of glass at Peppermint Bay.

So it seems from the sprawling body, so to speak, of grim entertainment for children. Two more loads of the jitters arrive this weekend.

Director Tim Burton’s PG-rated Charlie and the Chocolate Factory opens Friday. And Friday at midnight is when author J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince will go on sale in stores open late for the event. Saturday is the release date for the sixth book in the best-selling series about Harry, the boy wizard.

The Brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, would drop their quill pens in surprise at today’s audience for stories about children in weird and dangerous situations.

They gradually smoothed over the frightening German fairy tales they made famous a couple of centuries ago. And their first English publisher was even more cautious, according to The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature.

With "the amusement of some young friends principally in view," the 1823 edition of Grimm’s tales took out upsetting words like "devil" in favor of nicer words like "giant." It dealt less severe punishments to wicked stepmothers (no more nailing them into barrels). It left out tales so mean, they defied sweetening. Result: The bedtime story.

The discovery of a market for increasingly soft and safe children’s stories made for a powerful trend. Mickey Mouse started off as an ornery little rodent who thought it was funny to yank a goat’s tail; he turned into a beaming corporate icon.

Batman set out to terrify criminals; he went camp on TV. In the comics, the Caped Crusader took on a pint-size, pesky helper called Batmite.

But things have changed back from syrupy and chirpy to uncertain and terrible, partly because so many kids loved Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

This weekend’s movie version is from the 1964 book by Roald Dahl, who also wrote stories with chilling twists for adults.

Alfred Hitchcock made one of his best TV episodes from Dahl’s story, "Lamb to the Slaughter," about the woman who clubs her husband with a frozen leg of lamb, then feeds the roasted murder weapon to the police who have come to investigate.

Tragedy often jarred Dahl’s life, starting when his father died. The boy was 3. His friends said the bad times he endured only made him more determinedly positive, but misfortune also left him with a bent for macabre humor. His verses for children came out with more kinks than little Shirley’s hair:

(No animal is half so vile as Crocky-Wock the crocodile...)

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is about a boy who wins a tour of Willy Wonka’s mysterious realm of surprises, some not so sugary. In the book, a terrible brat named Violet Beauregarde gets her just desserts from a taste of Willy Wonka’s blueberry-pie chewing gum. She turns blue and swells up so big and round, she has to be rolled out the door to a doubtful fate. The 1971 movie version, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, starred Gene Wilder, who reminisced about it in a recent TV interview with Conan O’Brien. Kids never found the story scary, Wilder said, "but their mothers did." Dahl’s most obvious successors include Lemony Snicket (Daniel Handler) and his torn tales about the outlandish miseries of three orphaned children, A Series of Unfortunate Events. But no kid ever had such troubles as Harry Potter.

OH-OH! As Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince nears release, the trade journal Publishers Weekly wonders if a record 10.8 million copies will be enough. The national chain Books-A-Million will open fast lanes for anxious Harry Potter customers who have bought express vouchers. The chain’s more than 200 locations include North Little Rock, Hot Springs, Fort Smith and Texarkana.

Independent WordsWorth Books & Co. in Little Rock will have a Harry Potter party with "Muggle-May-I" games and Dr. Wu the magician, while Tyler & Tyler Booksellers in North Little Rock will have crystal balls for gazing.

Speculation bubbles internationally over Harry’s latest. Rowling stirred the pot last year when she revealed that more of her characters would die. Two words told the story on her Web site: "Yes. Sorry."

No telling who bites the pixie dust, but the Canadian magazine Maclean’s predicts a 95 percent chance it will be some member of the Weasley family, although not Ron; and zero chance of Harry being potted.

OH, WOE! Death and danger pervade several more entertainments at least partly meant for children in recent release: Batman Begins. The latest movie about the Dark Knight is rated a brooding PG-13, but Toys ‘‘ R ’’ Us has enough movie tie-in playthings to fill a cave. The movie sets up a sequel with the Joker, who, like Batman, has been everything from silly to intense over his 60-year career. Silliest was Caesar Romero’s portrayal of him as a giggling clown in the 1960s Batman TV series. But the new movie’s grave tone evokes a monster. Originally, the Joker was socalled after his dreaded "Joker venom," according to The DC Comics Encyclopedia. It left his victims with horrible death grins. Howl’s Moving Castle. Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki’s latest cartoon, rated PG, is another that deals with his recurrent theme of girls who learn to face peril — this time, a witch’s curse.

His previous feature, Spirited Away, is about a girl whose parents turn into grunting pigs, leaving her to run for her life through an eerie amusement park. Coming July 29 is director Terry Gilliam’s The Brothers Grimm, with Matt Damon and Heath Ledger as the brothers of fairy-tale fame who encounter a real, PG-13-rated sorceress.

(The real brothers were folklorists who collected German tales as told by firelight in the late 1700s — stories of witches, blood and terror.

In the early version, Cinderella’s nasty stepsisters don’t just cram their big feet into her glass slipper. They cut off their toes and heels to make the shoe fit.) And the New York Times reports a stage version of Disney’s Mary Poppins movie (1964) is bound for Broadway — but with changes that turn "the Technicolor-bright palette of the Disney film to shades of gray." The stage version, the newspaper says, will stress a "family-therapy-style awareness of how parents fail their children."

OH, DEER! Bambi: The Platinum Edition, the new DVD of the cartoon feature about the little deer (1942), finally answers the question: Did Walt Disney know the tears and trauma his movie would cause when Bambi’s mother dies?

Storyboards show that Disney tamed the scene from earlier versions. Originally, a hunter’s bullet killed her on screen. The final take told the story with a tear in Bambi’s eye.

But the DVD includes a storyplanning session in which Disney tells his artists, "you’ll tear their hearts out."

Disney movies became ever more kind and gentle over the years, but not before Tommy Kirk had to shoot his beloved dog in Old Yeller (1957).

How much make-believe angst is good for kids is a continuing debate. Gruesome tales help "to cope with our anxieties," Maria Tatar writes in Grimm’s Grimmest, a collection of uncensored stories about curses and bloody knives.

But Harry Potter’s close brushes with death and the supernatural make his adventures a fixture on the American Library Association’s list of books that people most frequently try to ban.

Research shows that violent entertainment — television, especially — "increases aggressive behavior in children," according to the American Psychiatric Association.

In Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, though, Dahl comes down on television for another reason. Willy Wonka’s factory workers, the Oompa-Loompas, sing that TV turns kids into lumps.

It keeps them, "... absolutely drunk/With all that shocking ghastly junk" — according to the song.

Grown-ups like it that way, quiet. But the worst thing of all could happen: "... a child so dull and blind

He can no longer understand

A fantasy, a fairyland!"