The Friendly Giant

 

I recently saw a tribute online to Bob Homme. He for many years appeared on Canadian TV as “The Friendly Giant.” It had a long run, and is apparently generally beloved. I never liked the show as a child. To me, it was like chalk squeaking on a blackboard.

It was the basic premise. The hagiography to Homme explained: Homme figured he had his winning formula by making a friendly giant. Because giants in the fairy tales are always the bad guy.

Somehow, this perversion of fairy tale conventions was considered clever, or creative, or child-friendly, or something.

As anyone should realize, there is a reason why giants in fairy tales are always bad guys. There is a reason for everything in fairy tales. That is why they are so conventional. Fairy tales have strict morality and strict rules. Making a giant friendly is as subversive as making Judas or Satan the good guy in the Bible.

That’s how sinister this is.

I can even cite a Biblical reference here: the Nephilim. Giants bad. They are why God sent the flood.

In fairy tales, giants always eat children.

The Friendly Giant was also always treacly sweet, and that was yet more sinister. “Here, little girl, would you like some candy?”

He was grooming children for sexual predation; and abuse by authority of any kind. “The Friendly Giant” was not a subversive concept. The fairy tale giants that were a subversive concept, teaching caution when dealing with figures holding power over you.

The standard trend ever since has been to subvert the fairy tales. 

Ogres are misunderstood, witches are feminist heroines, dragons are merely lovelorn and make fun pets. It is lazy and uncreative, and it also seems positively designed to subvert youth and make them vulnerable to abuse of all kinds.

This may be why “Western civilization” has recently gone so awry and seems to have lost its way: we have subverted the life lessons traditionally passed on to our young. That is what civilization is: the wisdom we pass down to the young. Subverting and reversing the fairly tales is the fastest way to destroy any civilization.