Sunday, September 23, 2007

Oh Man, Now That's Just Wrong

The Pillowfight Fairy has taken to creating stories--long, repetetive stories told with great seriousness and earnestness, that can take thirty minutes or more until she finally gets bored with telling them and and terminates them with an abrupt, "The End". If you're lucky, she doesn't then continue with "And now, for my next story...," but you have to be pretty lucky for that to happen.

One thing we've noticed about these stories is that she doesn't create them from whole cloth. She takes story elements from books she's reading or videos she's seen--or even dreams she's had--and she mixes and matches these elements in new and unusual ways. This can often create new juxtapositions that are far more humorous than she understood or really even intended. Of course, when she then sees her parents hunched over from laughter, she is more than happy to take credit for having come up with something brilliant, even though she had no idea what it was.

One example: we have a collected set of the original A. A. Milne Winnie-the-Pooh stories. Now these are not the Disneyfied versions; these are the originals that are so well-written and so funny, even for adults. She loves these stories, and has memorized the chapter numbers of the various stories ("Mommy, could you read me Chapter 8?") . Well, several months ago, she told one of her stories, that went a little like this:
This is Chapter 12, In Which Eyeore Goes Swimming. One morning Eyeore got up and put on his bathing suit. Then he walked and walked through the forest until he came to the river. Then he climbed up on the diving board and looked down at the river. "That's the river," he said. "Pathetic." Then he dived in....
She delivered Eyeore's quotes in a low-pitched monotone, just as Daddy reads them in the book. At this point in the story, Mommy and I were consumed by a fit of giggles so hard that we didn't catch the rest of it.

It rather remids me of the whole Monkeys-Typewriters-Shakespeare thought experiment. If you throw enough random story elements together into a long enough story, eventually you come up with some zingers. The Fairy has apparently figured this out, and as a result her stories have been getting longer, and longer....

So! Over the last few days we've been thinking a lot about Valkyries, and I had to dig up that old Wagnerian Bugs Bunny cartoon on YouTube to help illustrate my last post, and my daughters absolutely loved it. Our home has been filled with the joyous sounds of "Kill the Wabbit!" and "Speaw and Magic Hewmet!" and "Wightning! Stwike the Wabbit!" repeated over and over, in forever new and interesting combinations and situations.

But nothing (Nothung? Sorry, bad pun) prepared us for this morning's offering.
So one morning Winnie-the-Pooh was walking through the forest, singing to himself "Kill the Waaaa-bit, Kill the Waaaa-bit, Kill the Waaaa-bit...."

And I think I even caught a "Hojotoho!" in there somewhere.

As my title says, this is just wrong, in so many ways....

1 comment:

Tenor_Ron said...

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but I do seem to hear "Kill the Wabb-it" in a very Hojoto-hoish syllabic form, even riding on the melody.