Marxist-style fairy tales

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32775, 27 November 1971, Page 12

Marxist-style fairy tales

(Newsweek Feature Service)

Little Red Riding Hood as a disobedient brat? Snow White’s stepmother as an understanding woman trying to jump the generation gap? Puss in Boots as a tormentor of peasants?

Generations of parents and children have long taken these familiar old fairy-tale figures pretty much at face value. But here in Chile under the socialist government of President Salvador Allende, a series of official new comic books are drawing some startling new Marxist morals from the traditional children's favourites.

Take poor Miss Riding Hood. According to a recent episode in the comic book "Cabrochico” (Little Kid), she was really a bad little Red because she strayed from the designated path to pick wild flowers instead of carrying out her assignment. To teach her a lesson, her grandmother and a concerned wolf

gave her a healthy scare. She reformed, and they all sat down for a nice cup of tea. Furthermore, according to Little Kid, Puss in Boots is a feline fink. The fame and fortune he brings to his master, the miller, is illgotten capitalist gain. When the miller sees the light, he gives it all back, to the cheers of the proletariat, and he exits saying, “Everything has been a lie invented by that farcical cat.” Happy endings The happy ending in Little Kid is always a victory for Marxist principles. At the fade-out in Snow White, for instance, the fetching teenager is in the arms of her father and stepmother after mending her ways as a lazy parasite in the commune of the industrious dwarfs. She spurns Prince Charming until he makes it clear that he will work for a living. Little Kid is viewed by some as the harbinger of a new set of educational tools aimed at indoctrinating Chilean school children and bending them leftward at a young age. But Little Kid’s editor, Saul Schkolnik, describes his revisions of the classics as “socialist humanism. One can't continue to deceive Chilean children with the possibility of finding treasure or falling back on fairies, goblins and witches.” Not-that there aren’t some villainous characters in Little Kid’s redtime stories. In a

tale involving a group of poor moppets who want to get a small piece of land for a playground, the enemies are a greedy landowner and bumbling bureaucrats. In the end, the tattered, spunky kids prevail on the mayor (whose office wall displays a picture of Cuba’s Fidel Castro) to intervene and deliver the land. Schkolnik’s moral: "To

work as a team. People must

fight for their things. They can’t wait around to be handed things. But the fight must be just” The cartoonists who illustrate the comic book may well have pondered the lesson of another story that featured an artistic Little Bee. Revisionist bee Little Bee liked to make Imaginative flower - shaped cells for the honey-comb, instead of the orthodox hexagonal design. The other bees gently straightened him out and in the final frame he is back on the production line making hexagons. “Because,” as the editors note, “his work was necessary for the progress of the hive.”

Interestingly, though, Little Kid’s new versions of the old favourites don’t seem to be attracting many young readers. Some 100,000 copies of every issue are printed and newstand dealers say they sell only about half their copies. “Who wants to lead a lot of propagandistic bla-bla-bla?” one vendor complains. And a sociologist, Pablo Huneeus, observes: "In a country so crammed with party lines, the minute readers realise that Little Kid is political they’re turned off.” Little Kid, of course, has to compete with non-ideologi-cal comic books such as Disneylandia which features the popular Donald Duck. In fact, Disneylandia is printed on the same Government presses as Little Kid and, to the chagrin of editor Schkolnik, the capitalist duck often gets priority press time at the expense of “socialist humanism.” “I don’t like that duck,” Schkolnik states flatly. “He has negative values. He never works. Whenever he needs money he just has to ask his rich uncle.” >