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Comment by nmz | Hacker News Reader

Everybody should keep their children far from morals? What?

In the original stories the bad guys are punished in a cruel and horrible way. Like forced to dance with red-hot iron shoes.

The Girl Who Sold Matches is my personal favorite.

The modern version is The Guy Who Sold Loose Cigarettes, and Was Choked To Death.

Moral of the story: Don't sell matches without a permit -corporations would starve. R.I.P. Eric Garner

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Goose_Girl

Similar grim

Moralistic has a completely different connotation, as I'm sure you are aware.

"once upon a time a beautiful but poor girl married a rich dude and everything was great"

Heh if by “once upon a time “ you mean all day every day since forever.

Why not "once upon a time a beautiful but poor dude married a rich girl and everything was great"? Oh. Right.

Aladdin?

Aladdin walked from the slums to the palace, and married the princess?

I feel like some steps are missing, but I could be mistaken.

You’re right, the story is more than a sentence. You should remember though that Jasmine walked into the slums, met a poor thief and fell in love with him. He had to jump through some hoops and had a crisis of confidence before the end of the story though.

We naïvely bought a book of classic German fairy tales and somehow no such stories appear

Moralizing can have the meaning of "inculcating morality", but it's more commonly used nowadays as "relating to a narrow-minded concern [for] the morals of others".

Walt Disney was repeatedly accused of racism during his lifetime, mostly because he kept putting dreadful racist stereotypes in his films. The defence given by his supporters is that he was essentially naive and conformist, that he just reflected the values of his time, that he viewed his work as harmless fun, that he wasn't really thinking about the message he sent when he made a film like Song of the South.

That defence is quite reasonable as a defence of the man, but it's also an indictment of his work. Do you really want your kids taking heavy-handed morality lessons from someone who didn't actually have a clear sense of morality?

>Do you really want your kids taking heavy-handed morality lessons from someone who didn't actually have a clear sense of morality?

Gotta take the good and leave the bad. You can find those in every single piece of media at the time, but it's not like I want to cast all of Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry, Donald, etc. As such.

Morality changes and is imposed by the times, what is moral today will not be tomorrow, To your great grandchildren you'd probably be the same as a "boomer" today and will be looked at in the same vein (an ageist word used as an insult). It is the way of human culture.

The moral of the story for quite a lot of these stories is... a bit effed up. Like, try getting a coherent one out of The Little Mermaid.

> try getting a coherent one out of The Little Mermaid.

It is possible to do just this, and to make a terrific and nurturing film out of it. See Ponyo.

The little mermaid is Hans Christian Andersen rather than brothers grimmm.

The messaging is about curiosity and exploration.

The moral is about accepting when things fail to go as you want, and choosing to avoid harm to others for your own benefit.

There is an anime adaptation that is faithful to the original story.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Mermaid

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Christian_Andersen%27s_...

Lessig isn't saying we should keep children away from morals. He's criticizing how Disney adapted the Brothers Grimm's stories, which often preached heavy-handed and regressive moral lessons in a moralizing manner.

No, he's referring to the Grimm stories. They are indeed violent. They simply are a product of their time. The Disney version is easier to digest. All of this should not detract from his main point, tho.

All of this should not detract from the fact that Al Bundy scored four touchdowns in a single game while playing for the Polk High School Panthers in the 1966 city championship game versus Andrew Johnson High School, including the game-winning touchdown in the final seconds against his old nemesis, "Spare Tire" Dixon.

They were actually a product of a time earlier than the Grimms. They were acting as proto-anthropologists, collecting oral tales from illiterate peasants because they feared that these were about to be lost with modernization. This is different from later people like Hans Christian Andersen, who really did create new fairy tales.

This is an almost impressive misinterpretation.

What lessig is likely referring to is the violent and grotesque consequences of the original Grimm stories as well as their brazen antisemitism.

https://www.history.com/news/the-dark-side-of-the-grimm-fair...

Everyone was antisemitic back then, even semites –against other semites. Not unlike current events.

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