MORE GRIM TODAY THAN DIRE GERMANIC ORIGINALS
TRUMPLESTILSKIN: Desperate to win favor, a sycophant convinces the King that his daughter can spin untruth into truth. With her life at stake, Lady Liberty gets offered a deal by a roguish gnome, expert at spinning untruth. The damsel promises him her first born for his help but reneges after the King marries her and she gives birth. She learns the only way to avoid that fate is to guess his name. A conservative courtier, who appreciates democracy more than culture wars, tells her his name’s Trumplestilskin. In a typical rage, Trumplestilskin tears himself in two.
BEARSKIN: Fixated with amassing fortune and exotic wives, a man makes a pact with the devil, the Russian Bear King. The Bear King promises to make the man a vassal king if he’ll wear a bearskin, not wash away any mean thoughts for seven years, and serve the Bear King’s interests. They first met in 2013 when the man staged a beauty contest in the lair of the bear. Rumor has it the man promised women to the Bear King and his oligarchic friends in exchange for patronage: The Bear King promised that he, the Panda King, and King Trump would eventually divide the known world, with King Trump even showing his bare bear ass to his kingdom’s longtime NATO friends.
PIED PIPER OF DOGE: THE [MUSK]RAT’S REVERSAL: Instead of rats and children led off Hamelin’s cliff by a piper’s melodious music, the contemporary version finds the [Musk]rat in charge. He coerces federal workers, immigrants, and decent Americans to face the music, coercing them off the fiscal and psychological cliff. Meanwhile, fellow [Musk]rat vermin plunder the people’s treasury. A screen version features 1970’s Captain and Tennille’s “Muskrat Love,” a suitably fur-raising background soundtrack.
HANSEL AND GRETEL ESCAPE THE I.C.E.MAN: Banished from home, the immigrant siblings, separated from family, first leave trails of tears to return home. Hungry and thirsty when deported once again, they initially sustain themselves by slurping an I.C.E.man’s snow-cone sculpture house. When he entices them in, I.C.E.man boasts, “I have them, and they shall not escape me.” Gretel finally pushes I.C.E.man into an oven, melting him.
SLEEPING BEAUTY, CURSED NOT TO BE WOKE: A nefarious claimant to the throne and hisevil minions, distracting common folk with much bluster, curse the female aspirant to the throne and her adherents: She and they will sleep through the perilous times the evil King promises as he forbids any in the kingdom to be WOKE. The King commands heroes who would remove the curse by kissing Sleeping Beauty to kiss off. A prince named Schumer kisses off.
SNOW WHITE AND THE SEVEN CABINET DWARFS: Because she’s white, the Beauty Contest King and his supporters use an 18th Century broken mirror to deem Snow fairer than other beauties. They hide her away to avoid seeing DEI entrants get so-called special treatment. Taking her in, the King’s seven height-challenged minions — Little Marco, Pervy Pete, Deranged Robbie, Dopey J.D., Choke-to-Submission Linda, Falsie Tulsi, and Petulant Pam – enjoy the company of a stay-at-home woman caring for their house. A prince, however, bemoaning the King’s new DEI thrust (Discrimination, Exclusion, and Injustice), rescues her from exile with her stature-challenged hosts. Her response to her experience? “I’d feel safer sharing a bathroom with a transgender person than the Cabinet dwarfs, especially Pervy Pete.”
LITTLE ORANGE RIDING HOOD: Sent to support Grandma Ukraine, Little Orange strays from the kingdom’s ancestral path. Little Orange gets distracted while blathering about tariffs, culture wars, name-shaming, tax relief for billionaires, and annexing Greenland, Canada, Mexico, and Panama to cowed creatures. Thinking with his bunions, he doesn’t realize the wolf who charms him poses danger. While Little Orange meanders in the so-called forested deep state, the wolf takes on his orangeness, eats grandma, and eventually Little Orange too. A huntsman cuts grandma and Little Orange, both worse from the ordeal, out of the wolf’s stomach.
THE QUEEN WITH GOLDEN HAIR: Queen Viv, one of 13 known children of the [Musk]rat from the litters of four women, felt compelled to be a golden woman, causing her deadbeat dad to take out his grievances on her and other transgender people. He recently gained much power, even though he had been an illegal immigrant. He entered this kingdom from Africa on a student visa but then dropped out of school to seek riches. He came from the same far-off continent that the King always accused his predecessor of being born in, ironic since the King gave this real son of Africa Kingly powers. The Golden Queen, standing up to her father who ignored her much of her life, concluded the difference was simply a matter of black and white for this “pathetic man-child” and his sponsor.
