The Boys Who Cried Wolf

Lon Chaney Jr.: "Every night when the moon is full, I turn into a wolf."

Lou Costello: "You and twenty million other guys."

"Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" (1948)

Once upon a time, Hollywood - a land where seldom is heard an original word (or thought) - jumped on the fairy-tale bandwagon, inspired, no doubt, by the billion-dollar box office conjured by Tim Burton’s "Alice in Wonderland."

Entertainment Weekly reported that no less than three versions of "Snow White" are in the works. The first, planned for a June 2012 release, features Julia Roberts as a purportedly "likable" Evil Queen. A rival production, "Snow White and the Huntsman," casts Charlize Theron, Oscar-winning portrayer of a real-life serial killer in "Monster," as the Evil Queen and "Twilight" star Kristen Stewart as the young princess, with "Lord of the Rings" trilogy star Viggo Mortensen "in talks" to play the huntsman. At the same time, Disney is developing the tale with kung fu monks in a martial arts twist called "The Seven." According to Entertainment Weekly writer Anthony Breznican, "In the end, the big question may not be whether audiences are ready for three ‘Snow Whites’ - but whether they can handle 21 dwarfs."

"Beastly" updates "Beauty and the Beast" with Alex Pettyfer (star of "I Am Number Four") as an unlikable cur cursed with creeping tattoos and scars who can be cured only by another’s love, that of "High School Musical’s" Vanessa Hudgens. Neil Patrick Harris plays the beast’s blind tutor.

Jeremy Renner (Best Actor Oscar nominee for "The Hurt Locker") and Gemma Arterton (Princess Tamina in "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time") star as the grownup siblings in "Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters," with Famke Janssen ("GoldenEye") as their wicked nemesis. Bryan Singer, director of the first two "X-Men" films and "Superman Returns," takes a new look at "Jack the Giant Killer," starring Nicholas Hoult ("About a Boy"), Stanley Tucci and Bill Nighy.

Catherine Hardwicke, director of the recent release, "Red Riding Hood," noted, "Fairy tales are made up from more than the imagination of one person. They’re known all over the world. Studios are enamored with making something that already has built-in name recognition or a fan base." She then added a telling a remark on Hollywood’s mindset: "And also the underlying rights are free."

Before delving too deeply into the pages of beloved fairy tales, filmmakers, perhaps, should have taken their once-upon-a-time and awaited the response, critical and financial, to the above mentioned "Red Riding Hood." Director Hardwicke and screenwriter David Leslie Johnson wanted to use the original story as a metaphor for a young woman’s independence as she contends with a love triangle, manipulative parents, and a werewolf. "You’ve got the safe journey and the more risky journey," Hardwicke said. "And how do you decide if you’ve gone too far? Or not far enough."

For Hardwicke, it would appear that the journey took her completely off the path. In the Washington Post, Ann Hornaday lamented, "O, for the love of all that’s Grimm, what hath ‘Twilight’ wrought?" Critic Chris Hewitt of the St. Paul Pioneer Press couldn’t help but notice that "Red Riding Hood" was "clearly an attempt to cash in on the success of the ‘Twilight’ movies."

Entertainment Weekly critic Lisa Schwarzbaum, who graded the movie D-plus, wrote, "Hollywood, it’s time to step away from ‘Twilight,’" calling "Red Riding Hood" "an overblown, pandering costume drama" and "a romance that’s sillier than the filmmakers probably intended." Entertainment Weekly’s Adam Markovitz had fun with the "odd feeling of ‘Twilight’ deja vu" in a piece called "How Is It Like ‘Twilight’? Let Us Count the Ways (10 of ‘Em!)."

Dubbing it "a sheep in wolf’s clothing," Los Angeles Times critic Betsy Sharkey commented that the film is "at its heart nothing more than a fashionable fairy-tale version of what’s all the rage in teen love stories these days. The basic formula includes a moody beauty falling for the wrong boy, who may actually be a vampire-alien-werewolf-whatever."

"It’s easy to imagine a story conference," wrote Roger Ebert, who gave "Red Riding Hood" one star, "in which they said, ‘Hey! Let’s switch the vampires with a werewolf and recycle the theme of a virgin attracted to a handsome but dangerous hunk.’"

Writing in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Colin Covert dismissed "Red Riding Hood" as "entertainment for the village idiot" and "amateur night at the Renaissance Fair." The Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday thought it looked "like an episode of ‘Gossip Girl’ set at a Medieval Times restaurant." Roger Ebert found the plot "so preposterous it demands to be filmed by Monty Python."

And it really doesn’t say much for a major Hollywood production when the glowing blurbs from reviews for newspaper ads are culled from obscure network television affiliates.

In an interview with "Red Riding Hood" director Catherine Hardwicke, the Los Angeles Times reporter remarked, "In Disney’s new film, ‘Tangled,’ Rapunzel is a much more active heroine. She does more than let her hair down. Do you think we need to update our fairy tales for modern audiences?" Hardwicke reponded, "The Brothers Grimm wrote down most of those fairy tales, and they were men." (Which is probably why they were called "Brothers.") "It’s great that people are infusing more life and more energy and a more active nature to the girls in the fairy tales. It probably would have always been that way if we had had our say." (Oh shut up!)

Without a doubt, the loudest voice amongst energetic, active heroines in fairy tales (in a desperate stretch of a segue for this piece) belongs to the little girl in the 1944 Warner Bros. cartoon "Little Red Riding Rabbit," directed by Isadore "Friz" Freleng. In the 1994 book The 50 Greatest Cartoons, which ranked the cartoon #39, editor Jerry Beck commented, "Making fun of Mother Goose and the Brothers Grimm was standard fare at Warner Bros. in the 1940s. Bugs Bunny added to any fairy tale was a surefire hit, so during the war years the famous rabbit shared the screen with the Three Bears, Jack and his beanstalk, even Hiawatha."

Little Red Riding Hood makes her entrance as an annoying loudmouthed bobby-soxer right out of the 1940s. Grandma works at Lockheed Aircraft Manufacturing. With Bugs in her basket, the toothsome girl proclaims, "I brought a little bunny for you - ta HAVE!" Voiced by the multi-talented Bea Benaderet (popular on TV as Jethro’s mother Pearl Bodine on "The Beverly Hillbillies" and as Shady Rest Hotel owner Kate Bradley on "Petticoat Junction," as well as the original voice of Betty Rubble on "The Flintstones"), the brat’s repeated "ta HAVE!" became a much-quoted catchphrase.

(Below, Alan Reed, Jean Vander Pyl, Bea Benaderet and Mel Blanc record their voices as Fred and Wilma Flintstone and Betty and Barney Rubble. )

According to animator Linda Simensky, a member of the Association Internationale du Film D’Animation (ASIFA), "All fans knew the phrase ‘to have’ and ‘I’ll do it, but I’ll probably hate myself in the morning.’" And it’s nothing short of a delight when Bugs tricks the Wolf into singing, "Put on Your Old Grey Bonnet."

Simensky noted, "‘Little Red Riding Rabbit’ is, in some ways, the quintessential Warner Bros. cartoon. It’s got everything we’ve come to expect in a Bugs Bunny classic: a wolf, stair and door gags, fairy-tale spoofs, a song-and-dance gag, and, of course, all the Warner Bros. cartoon sound effects. It’s even got a ‘Silly, Isn’t He?’ sign."

The selections in The 50 Greatest Cartoons were chosen by 1000 animators and historians, among them members of the previously mentioned ASIFA. The 1943 MGM cartoon "Red Hot Riding Hood," directed by the legendary Tex Avery, was ranked #7. Avery, according to Gary Morris, founder of Bright Lights Film Journal, "steered the Warner Bros. house style from Disneyesque sentimentality and made cartoons that appealed equally to adults, who appreciated Avery’s speed, sarcasm and irony, and to kids, who liked the nonstop action."

The once-upon-a-time narrator of "Red Hot Riding Hood" is suddenly interrupted by the Wolf growling, "Aw stop it! I’m fed up with this sissy stuff! Every cartoon studio has done it this way! It’s the same old story over and over! If you can’t do this a new way, bud, I quit!"

As the new screwball version unfolds, Red is transformed into a leggy nightclub singer, the Wolf becomes a skirt-chasing playboy, and Grandma is a man-hungry spinster with a neon sign outside her metropolitan high-rise that announces, "Grandma’s Joint - Come Up and See Me Sometime." (Grandma, incidentally, is voiced by Bea Benaderet.)

For Red, animator Preston Blair (an art school alumnus who worked on Disney shorts and features, notably Mickey Mouse’s "The Sorcerer’s Apprentice" segment of "Fantasia") designed a sexy character so immediately popular that animation cels were snatched by cartoon department employees before they were filmed.

Tex Avery later recounted, "Actually, we were thinking of the Army when we made (‘Red Hot Riding Hood’). The sergeant (stationed at MGM to plan training films for the troops) spotted the thing and roared…When the censor saw it…we had to trim and joggle and cut back. It got back to Washington to some colonel or whatnot that the censor had cut out quite a bit from us. Finally, Louis B. Mayer got a telegram from the colonel, saying that he wanted an uncut version…for his personnel overseas. The studio dug around, and I don’t know how many prints they gave him, but, man, it went great overseas."

"Red Hot Riding Hood" had immediately run into serious objections from the ever-vigil Production Code Administration. The controversy did not stem from the sultry depiction of Red, nor from the Wolf’s lust for her. It was, instead, Grandma’s pursuit of the Wolf and, particularly, how Avery illustrated the end result that bothered the censors. Originally, after the Wolf and Grandma are married (by a justice of the peace who allegedly resembled Avery), the couple is shown in the company of three lascivious wolf cubs. The Production Code Administration evidently objected to the strong suggestion of bestiality.

In 1943, the manager of an Iselin, New Jersey, theater was surprised that a particular cartoon was greeted with wild applause and wolf whistles. Afterwards, the audience shouted to see "Red Hot Riding Hood" again. The manager canceled another short subject to oblige the crowd, but they again demanded to see it a third time.

The cartoon became so successful that the characters of Red and the Wolf were reprised, more or less, in two of Tex Avery’s Droopy the Dog shorts, "The Shooting of Dan McGoo" (below) and "Wild and Woolly," both from 1945.

Through various incarnations, the popular duo continued to appear in cartoons during the 1940s, including "Swing Shift Cinderella" (below), "Uncle Tom’s Cabana" and "Little Rural Riding Hood."

For the most part in these cartoons, Red’s spoken dialogue was provided in a dead-on impression of Katharine Hepburn at her 1940s-haughtiest by actress Colleen Collins, while the swinging vocals were delivered by Imogene Lynn, a jazz singer with Artie Shaw’s big band.

Fifty years after "Red Hot Riding Hood," Jim Carrey paid homage to the eye-popping, jaw-dropping image of Tex Avery’s Wolf in a nightclub scene from "The Mask." 0

And there is no denying that the pinup appeal of Red herself was the inspiration for the sizzling rendering of Jessica Rabbit in the seminal live action-animation comedy "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" (1988). According to the film’s animation director, Richard Williams, Jessica Rabbit (notorious for her seductive line, as voiced by Kathleen Turner, "I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way") was also modeled after such ‘40s film noir icons as Lauren Bacall, Rita Hayworth and Veronica Lake.

Decades after the animation shops at Warner Bros. and MGM had fun twice-upon-a-timing classic fairy tales and nursery rhymes, the makers of "Shrek," the 2001 computer-animated blockbuster, which has inspired, so far, three equally popular sequels, breathed new life into the lively art of tweaking childhood favorites. The success of DreamWorks’ "Shrek" franchise led to a string of derivative, computer-animated kids’ flicks, peppered with enough self-referential sarcasm and non sequitur pop culture gags to appeal to parents.

When the Disney factory, once the towered palace stronghold of fairy-tale cinema, released its 50th animated feature, "Tangled" (based, as mentioned earlier, on the oft-told story of Rapunzel), Time magazine critic Richard Corliss noted that the movie "wades into the DreamWorks style of sitcom gags and anachronistic sass."

The tale of "Little Red Riding Hood" was twisted anew in "Hoodwinked!" a 2006 computer-animated comedy written and directed by Cory Edwards, Todd Edwards and Tony Leech. Interviewed by Louis B. Hobson for the Calgary Sun, Cory Edwards recalled, "My brother (Todd) and I were pitching original script ideas for feature films when we met with investors who were interested in animation. They said they’d fund us if we could put a new twist on an old folk tale. They gave us just under a month to come up with the pitch."

It was Todd Edwards who came up with the notion of reinventing the tale as a crime story. "We decided to take a ‘Rashomon’ approach…and look at it from four different perspectives." "Rashomon" (1950), directed by Akira Kurosawa, starring Toshiro Mifune and universally regarded as a classic of Japanese cinema, presents four conflicting accounts of a rape and a murder, related in flashbacks. (The film was Americanized in 1964 as a western, "The Outrage," starring Paul Newman, Claire Bloom, Edward G. Robinson and William Shatner, and would later influence the complex plots of the thrillers "Courage Under Fire" and "Vantage Point.")

"Hoodwinked!" begins, in media res, with the familiar "What big eyes you have!" exchange, but it soon becomes apparent that none of the participants is whom they at first seem to be.

With a $15-million budget (compared to, say, the $260-million budget of "Tangled," which made it the most expensive animated movie yet made), the makers of "Hoodwinked!" created their "own little animation studio" in a four-bedroom house in the Philippines where, according to Cory Edwards, "some of the animators worked at the kitchen table." He recalled that "the most difficult thing was getting enough electricity into the house. It was quite an adventure."

"We knew we that we had a limited budget, that we wouldn’t be able to compete with somebody like Pixar or DreamWorks as far as the fluidity of the animation," so they purposely modeled their computer-generated animation on the stop-motion puppetry of classic Rankin-Bass TV holiday specials. "Hopefully it gives you a nostalgic feeling like…‘Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,’ ‘The Year Without a Santa Claus.’" (One duped reviewer even commented on the movie’s use of stop-motion puppets.)

"We made a choice early on that we weren’t going to be Diet-Pixar. We were going to be something specific and aim for a certain target." Cory Edwards said it was always their intention "not to make a kids’ movie but a film that would entertain adults and teenagers, without excluding children."

"Hoodwinked!" was eventually released by Hollywood heavyweights Harvey and Bob Weinstein via the new company the brothers formed after selling Miramax Films to Disney. Cory Edwards recalled, "We had almost ninety percent of ‘Hoodwinked!’ finished when the Weinsteins came on board." The Weinsteins bump enabled the filmmakers to bring in formidable voice talent, including Oscar-winning Glenn Close as the Grandmother. She "did her work all in one day," Cory Edwards said. "She was yelling and screaming nonstop. It was wonderful to watch her work."

Academy Award-nominated Anne Hathaway "put a great deal more sarcasm into Little Red Riding Hood than we’d ever anticipated," according to Cory Edwards. "It makes the character way more interesting, and she has such a good singing voice as well."

With Jim Belushi as the voice of the oafish Woodsman, Cory Edwards said they wanted his tale to be "the kookiest version of the story. We wanted really absurd comedy and the kind of TV animation you find on ‘SpongeBob SquarePants.’"

The character of the Wolf, drolly voiced by Patrick Warburton, owes more than a passing resemblance to Chevy Chase’s role in "Fletch," down to the Los Angeles Lakers jersey, while David Ogden Stiers’ erudite contribution as the voice of the frog detective Nicky Flippers evokes memories of Hercule Poirot and Charlie Chan. On the yellow-taped crime scene to investigate, he requests, "Bring in a police sketch artist - no, make it a cartoonist." After he suggests the Wolf as the guilty party, the latter, in a gem of throwaway dialogue, complains, "Oh, the Wolf did it! Talk about profiling!"

Other standouts in the assembled vocal talent include Andy Dick as an annoyingly fawning bunny, rapper Xzibit as a grumpy grizzly bear cop, Chazz Palminteri as a "Goodfellas"-type sheep informant, and Cory Edwards himself as the hyperactive squirrel Twitchy.

Special mention has to be made of the scene-stealing character Japeth, a zany banjo-strumming mountain goat cursed by a witch to sing every bit of conversation. Manically voiced by the talented (and apparently breathless) Benjy Gaither, son of gospel singing royalty Bill and Gloria Gaither, Japeth will be making a welcome return in "Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil."

"Hoodwinked!" grossed over $110 million worldwide, paving the way for the inevitable sequel. Most of the original voices return, however, Anne Hathaway has been replaced as Red by Hayden Panettiere, best known as cheerleader Claire Bennett on the NBC series "Heroes," while Martin Short steps into Jim Belushi’s boots as the thickheaded Woodsman. A larger budget accommodates for more celebrities behind the microphone, among them "Saturday Night Live" stars Bill Hader and Amy Poehler as Hansel and Gretel, Bill Murray, Brad Garrett, Joan Cusack, Wayne Newton, David Alan Grier, Cheech Marin and Tommy Chong, and Jack Black.

We in the moviehouse can only hope that a ballooned budget, larger cast and a more complex plot don’t prevent original creators Cory Edwards, Todd Edwards and Tony Leech, who scripted the sequel but gave the directing reins to Mike Disa, from rekindling the heartfelt and humble charm of the original.

"Follow your passion," Sue Bea Montgomery, a co-producer of the original "Hoodwinked!" said. "When preparation meets opportunity, magic can happen. And that’s what happened with ‘Hoodwinked!’ It was a great group of people who were filmmakers and storytellers who didn’t have a lot to begin with. I think we started with $5000 and bought two computers, and it changed everybody’s lives. And we did it because we all wanted to go out and make a project that would be fun for people to see and enjoy."