[quote name="Saphster"]Do you all know that there is a French fairytale called The Lost Children? ;D
I meant to say something about it but I forgot. I have a hunch that maybe Michael read this story sometime in his life and was inspired to write a song. Because the story does say that a boy and a girl get lost in the forest because of their awful parents.
"A couple, Jacques and Toinon, were very stingy. Their children -- Jean, who was twelve, and his sister Jeanette, who was eight-- suffered because of this, and finally they decided to lose them in the forest. Toinon took them and left them there. They tried to find her, and then tried to find their way out. Jean climbed a tree and saw a white house and a red house. They went to the red one. The woman there let them in, but told them to be quiet or her husband would eat them. She hid them, but her husband was the Devil and could smell them because they were Christians. He beat his wife and put Jean into the barn to fatten him up before eating him, making Jeanette bring him food. The Devil was too fat to get into the barn, so he ordered Jeanette to bring him the tip of Jean's finger to test how fat he was; Jeanette brought him a rat's tail. The third time, he noticed the trick and pulled Jean out. He made a sawhorse to lay Jean on to bleed, and went for a walk. Jeanette had Jean pretend not to understand how he was to be put on the sawhorse. The Devil's wife showed them, and Jean tied her on and cut her throat. They took the Devil's gold and silver and fled in his carriage. The Devil chased them. On the way, he met various people -- a laborer, a shepherd, a beadle, some laundresses -- and asked whether they had seen the children. The first time he asked, they each misheard him, but then told him they hadn't, except for the laundresses, who told him they crossed the river. The Devil could not cross it, so one laundress offered to cut her hair to let him cross on it, but when he was in the middle, the laundresses dropped it, so he drowned. The children got home and took care of their parents, despite what they had done."
Creepy isn't it? Not a happy ending. Fairytales were so much more gruesome back in the old days.[/quote]
That's a really strange story, and you're right they did used to be a lot more gruesome back in the old days. They've been sapped up by Disney, in the original Snow White she doesn't actually wake up, she's genuinely dead, and in the original Sleeping Beauty I think the Prince knocked her up while she was sleeping, and in Swan Lake she dies when she finds out he's gone off with someone else, and in the Little Mermaid she doesn't turn into a human and live happily ever after. Maybe I need to check my facts in some of those, but I'm pretty sure that's what really happened.
