Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Wolf
The Big Bad Wolf
The Big Bad Wolf
Who’s afraid of the Big Bad Wolf
La la la la la…
I have a vague memory of watching Walt Disney’s ‘Silly Symphony’ cartoon, The Three Little Pigs, on television back in the late 1960s, but I hadn’t retained an faithful memory of the animated version, so it was useful to watch it again on YouTube.
As we all remember, one of the pigs built his house out of straw, and the second, out of sticks. The third pig built a sturdy house out of bricks. The Disney cartoonists did not explain how a pig managed to come across enough money to afford a brick house, but Disney was not always big on describing how the real world works.
The Three Little Pigs story appeared in, arguably, its best-known form in English Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs, first published in 1890. Like many authors and animators, Jacobs generously stole from previous storytellers.
An earlier published version is from Dartmoor, England in 1853, and featured three little pixies and a fox, in place of the three little pigs and a wolf.
The first pixie had a wooden house.
“Let me in, let me in”, said the fox.
“I won’t”, was the pixie’s answer; “and the door is fastened.”
The story was much improved by making the victims into pigs, because pigs have chin hairs, which pixies do not have. So now the conversation could feature poetic rhyming.
“Little pig, little pig, let me come in!”
“Not by the hair on my chinny-chi-chin!”
“Then I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house in!”
Joseph Jacob’s 1890 version, now involving young pigs, begins with the title characters being sent into the world by their mother, to “seek out their fortune”. We are not told if the mother learns of her children’s eventual fate. She doesn’t appear again in the story, and while the telephone had been invented 14 years earlier, it was not yet a common household feature in England in 1890.
The first little pig builds a house out of straw, but the wolf blows the house down and eats him up.
The second little pig builds a house out of sticks, but the result is the same.
We have to wonder what kind of education these pigs were given. Had the mother pig taught them nothing about the real world?
In the Disney cartoon, we are served up a somewhat different story. The first and second pigs were musicians — a flutist and a fiddler, respectively — and they built their inadequate homes not because they were uneducated, but because, being musicians, they preferred to spend their time dancing and making music.
This was convenient for the Disney team, because this was after all a ‘Silly Symphony’ and thus required songs and dancing.
It was not convenient, however, for the first and second pigs, who each lost his home to the huffing and puffing of the Big Bad Wolf.
Walt Disney did not allow the Wolf to eat the foolish little pigs, however, as happened in the original story. Death by ingestion was an expected part of children’s stories back in the 1800s.
The Disney cartoonists instead allowed the first and second pigs to escape to the third pig’s impenetrable brick house, where the only possible entrance was through the chimney. At the bottom of which was a boiling cauldron.
Once again, the Disney team allowed their character — the Wolf — to escape certain death… in this case, shooting back up the chimney with a blood-curdling howl, and running away down the road, with only second degree burns.
In 2026, we have our own Big Bad Wolves to consider.
Some of those Wolves are involved in the tech industry, or weapons manufacture, or politics. Or all of the above.
What kind of houses will we build? Straw and sticks are certainly looking more attractive by the day, what with the cost of labor and materials. And interest rates. Has anyone noticed the interest rates lately?
I am by no means implying that Americans are little pigs, just waiting to be devoured.
I leave it to our corporate CEOs to make that insinuation.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all. You can read more stories on his Substack account.