Little Red Riding Hood - Modern Uses and Adaptations

Modern Uses and Adaptations

There have been many modern uses and adaptations of Little Red Riding Hood, generally with a mock-serious reversal of Red Riding Hood's naïveté or some twist of social satire; they range across a number of different media and styles. Multiple variations have been written in the past century, in which authors adapt the Grimms' tale to their own interests.

The tale can be told in terms of Little Red Riding Hood's sexual attractiveness. The song "How Could Red Riding Hood (Have Been So Very Good)?" by A.P. Randolph in 1925 was the first song known to be banned from radio because of its sexual suggestiveness. The 1966 hit song "Lil' Red Riding Hood" by Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs takes the Wolf's point of view, implying that he wants love rather than blood. In the short animated cartoon Red Hot Riding Hood by Tex Avery, the story is recast in an adult-oriented urban setting, with the suave, sharp-dressed Wolf howling after the nightclub singer Red. Avery used the same cast and themes in a subsequent series of cartoons. Allusions to the tale can be more or less overtly sexual, as when the color of a lipstick is advertised as "Riding Hood Red".

This sexual analysis may take the form of rape. In Against Our Will, Susan Brownmiller described the fairy tale as a description of rape. Many revisionist retellings depict Little Red Riding Hood or the grandmother successfully defending herself against the wolf.

The story may also serve as a metaphor for a sexual awakening, as in Angela Carter's story "The Company of Wolves", published in her collection The Bloody Chamber (1979). (Carter's story was adapted into a film by Neil Jordan in 1984.) In the story, the wolf is in fact a werewolf, and comes to newly-menstruating Red Riding Hood in the forest in the form of a charming hunter. He turns into a wolf and eats her grandmother, and is about to devour her as well, when she is equally seductive and ends up lying with the wolf man, her sexual awakening. Such tellings bear some similarity to the "animal bridegroom" tales, such as Beauty and the Beast or The Frog Prince, but where the heroines of those tales transform the hero into a prince, these tellings of Little Red Riding Hood reveal to the heroine that she has a wild nature like the hero's.

As they often did with fairy tales and children's classics, Warner Brothers' Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies cartoon unit made frequent use of Red's story for satirical purposes. One of the most famous was "Little Red Riding Hoodwinked," featuring Sylvester chasing Tweety---who's the gift Red is bringing to Grandma's house---concurrent to the wolf hunting Red after throwing Grandma out of the house.

Little Red Riding Hood is also one of the central characters in the 1987 Broadway musical Into the Woods by Steven Sondheim and James Lapine. In the song, "I Know Things Now" she speaks of how the wolf made her feel "excited, well, excited and scared," in a reference to the sexual undertones of their relationship. Red Riding Hood's cape is also one of the musical's four quest items that are emblematic of fairy tales.

Publishers like BeeGang and So Out maintained unaltered the original story written by Charles Perrault mainly adding interactivity or educational content to their book apps; Other publishers like BlueQuoll, an Australian publishing group, have pushed further the boundaries of the narration and re-invented the story even in the title, Mr. Wolf and the Ginger Cupcakes that puts the wolf at the center of the narration. In their version the element of good vs evil is removed from the story and the wolf is not portrayed as a negative character that deserves to die miserably at the end of the story.

A recent adaptation of Little Red Riding Hood has been seen in the ABC new hit series Once Upon a Time. In this version, Little Red Riding Hood (played by Meghan Ory) goes by 'Red' and she is no innocent little girl. Red is given a mature, fiery attitude but lives with her grandmother because she was told her parents were killed in a hunting accident. As the story elaborates, we find out Red is actually the wolf that threatens the forest and if she does not keep her magic, red cloak on she turns into the wolf on the night of a full moon. Later, Red finds her mother, who is in fact not dead, but part wolf as well, and is the leader of a group of other half-wolf people who have learned to embrace the wolf inside them instead of fear it. Her mother teaches Red to embrace the wolf as well, and Red learns to accept who she is instead of seeing herself as a monster.