Little Red Riding Hood in Other Forms
Read
The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck, Beatrix Potter, 1908
Beatrix Potter is best known for the Peter Rabbit books. Potter created groundbreaking watercolor illustrations based on an intense study of nature. A scientist and conservationist, Potter was also one of the first to tie merchandise to an intellectual property with the distribution of a stuffed Peter Rabbit. (Optional – Learn more “How Beatrix Potter Invented Character Merchandising”)
The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck is one of Beatrix Potter’s 23 Tales which were each published in a small collectible volume. You can read it below as published via the Internet Archive. This site, archive.org, is a fantastic resource for books and recordings that can be accessed digitally. Many of the materials are in the Public Domain, but the site also allows borrowing of some materials for an hour at a time.
If you prefer a single page version of text you can get it via Project Gutenberg, a site that houses many Public Domain texts.
Watch
This is a Laugh-O-Gram, an early animation from Walt Disney Studios that was first shown in 1922.
The next video is “Red Hot Riding Hood” produced by Warner Brothers in 1943. It takes a very different direction.
The next videos are from “Fractured Fairy Tales,” which was a segment that was part of the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show and aired from 1959-1964. As you watch these two episodes, one from the first season and one from the third, pay attention to how the narrator, Edward Everett Horton, sets a tone and character for the pieces.
What do we need to identify something as a Little Red Riding Hood story?
What do you think is the difference between a retelling, and adaptation, and an inspiration when it comes to working with a fairy tale?
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