Fractured Fairy Tales c. 1959 : Rapunzel Spoof

Running as interstitials in The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, Fractured Fairy Tales was a pun-laden series of animated shorts by creator Jay Ward that retold classic fairy tales (always narrated by Edward Everett Horton with Daws Butler, June Foray, Bill Scott, and Paul Frees supplying voices) with a toonish, sardonic flair. In particular, we’re highlighting the series’ first short, a brilliant take on the story of “Rapunzel,” which sports significantly lowered stakes (we’re pretty sure the wife in the story isn’t going to actually die if she doesn’t get her rampion), dressed-down dialogue (“Rampion, shmampion, it still looks like weeds to me”), and a spunky Rapunzel who is sick of her hair-related headaches.Show more

Influenced by Dragnet spoof “St. George and the Dragonet,” by Butler and Stan Freberg, Fractured Fairy Tales started with twists on real fairy tales not only by the Brothers Grimm but by Hans Christian Andersen as well; after a while, the creative brains behind it started composing fairy tales of their own. Fractured Fairy Tales “were so distinctive an element of Rocky and His Friends,” wrote animation historian Keith Scott in The Moose That Roared, his book about Rocky and Bullwinkle, “that they remain the strongest memory of the series for many viewers.”

The humor holds up in excellent fashion eight decades later — unsurprising, given that Fractured Fairy Tales was one of Ward’s favorites of the show. But beyond its timeless binge-worthiness, Fractured Fairy Tales has also cemented its place in animation history for defying industry norms and influencing generations of subsequent creators.

Compared to the Hanna-Barbera re-creations of the family-sitcom format like The Flintstones and The Jetsons, the Rocky and Bullwinkle humor in general and Fractured Fairy Tales in particular felt jaggedly satirical and occasionally dark. Fractured Fairy Tales paved the way for a film like Disney’s Tangled and especially the Shrek franchise. We can ultimately thank Ward for everyone’s favorite Scottish ogre as well as for a host of later fairy-tale twists, such as Jon Scieszka’s award-winning postmodern children’s book, The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales.

https://www.vulture.com/article/most-influential-best-scenes-animation-history.html