Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Gypsy already has a more thorough post on the new Beauty and the Beast tv show over at Once Upon a Blog, but my main reaction after seeing the trailer is...where's the Beast? Despite the pretty minor scar, the lead actor is clearly still a very attractive man, which changes the whole dynamic of any supposed Beauty and the Beast-type story.
The whole hot female cop and mysterious protector reminds me more of Gargoyles than the 80s tv show, and it seems that Gargoyles also has more connections to Beauty and the Beast than this new show bearing its name.
I have earlier discussed (here and here) the phenomenon that artistic interpretations of the Beast began, a few hundred years ago, as completely animal and ultimately unattractive, but through the years has evolved into something first more safe and tame to someone more and more good-looking, and this most recent interpretation seems to push the envelope even further. This beast could hardly be less beastly. And if a large part of the pull of a story is the Otherness of the romantic male character (read what Griswold has to say on the subject), than the more we alter the Beast and make him desirable, the less the core of the story remains.
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Yes, yes, yes. Twilight, I'm afraid, is an example of this Beauty and Not-So-Beast trend.
ReplyDeleteI guess they're trying to emphasize the ugliness inside. But, as you've mentioned here before, that was never an issue in the original fairy tale. The beast was always perfectly civil.
Christie @ Spinning Straw into Gold
I think I would find the character's lack of ugliness more acceptable if he were more evil or dangerous. Then you could at least argue that it's in the Bluebeard subset of beast bridegroom tales rather than the Beauty & the Beast cycle... But it doesn't look like they've done a good job of that either, so it misses the point of both types of tale. I'll probably still show up for the first episode out of curiosity, but I expect to very unimpressed.
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