Big Bad Wolf
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The Big Bad Wolf (sometimes called the Big Ol' Wolf) is a fictional character who first appeared in the Three Little Pigs, Little Red Riding Hood, The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids, Peter and the Wolf and other folk tales. These stories can be traced to the literary salons of the 17th and 18th centuries.
Origins
The origin of the Big Bad Wolf lies in European folk tales and mythologies based on the deep ambiguity of human attitudes to the wolf. Wolves are usually afraid of human beings and prefer to keep to themselves, but in ancient Europe small settlements were sometimes attacked by starving or rabid wolves. The lone wolf attacking a flock of sheep or goats is a rarity, but a wolf faced with a penned flock that cannot flee will kill indiscriminately. Attacks on humans have always been extremely rare, and are usually associated with self-defense or defense of the pack's young, or less often with disease or starvation. However, the rarity of these attacks, during a period of European history in which most people lived on the verge of starvation or destitution, rendered them all the more stark.
Conversely, humans have often observed the complex social lives of wolves. Known to pair bond for life, to be protective parents, and to engage in playful behaviour with other animals — especially carrion birds such as crows and ravens, wolves have also been the objects of a level of respect. There is ample anecdotal evidence of wolves occasionally fostering small children abandoned in rural areas (there is an especially large body of such tales from India). "Wolf children" featured in folk tales, as did werewolves, creatures who perfectly embodied the human attraction to and fear of the wolf.
European mythology is replete with lupine imagery: in Norse mythology the god Odin possesses two wolves, Geri and Freki; the god Loki has a wolf son, Fenrisulfr, who bites off the hand of the god Tyr, and who will eventually devour Odin at Ragnarok; Romulus and Remus, mythological founders of Rome, were brought up by a she-wolf, and are usually portrayed as infants suckling on their foster mother; Aesop's Fables often centred on wolves, with The Boy Who Cried Wolf being the best known; the Greek goddess Hecate, who was associated with death and magic, is often represented as wearing three wolves' heads and/or accompanied by three dogs; the Greek king Lycaon was turned into a wolf by Zeus, and it is from his name that we get the term lycanthropy (the ability to turn into or take on the characteristics of a wolf). Interestingly, wolves appear to have been widely venerated and respected by Native American peoples, who were horrified by the European settlers' systematic attempts to exterminate the animal.
The Bad Wolf in fiction
In the 20th and 21st centuries, many works of fiction have been created including the Big Bad Wolf as a character, differing slightly from his incarnation in the folk tales.
Disney's Big Bad Wolf (Zeke Wolf)
Template:DisneyChar The character's best known incarnation is the villain of Walt Disney's animation Three Little Pigs, directed by Burt Gillett and first released on May 27, 1933. The Wolf's voice was provided by Billy Bletcher. As in the folktale, he was a cunning and threatening menace. This version had a taste for disguising himself, but both the audience and the Pigs could easily see through the Wolf's disguises. The short also introduced the Wolf's theme song, "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?", written by Frank Churchill.
The short was so popular that Walt Disney produced several sequels, which also featured the Wolf as the villain. The first of them was named after him: The Big Bad Wolf, also directed by Burt Gillett and first released on April 14, 1934. In the next of the sequels, Three Little Wolves (1936), he was accompanied by three just-as-carnivorous sons. (These three sons were later reduced to just one who, in contrast to his father, was full of goodness and charm and a friend of the three little pigs.) The final cartoon featuring the Three Little Pigs and the Wolf, The Practical Pig, was released in 1939. With each successive short, the Wolf exhibits a fondness for dressing in drag, and even "seduces" Fiddler and Fifer Pigs (who become more and more clueless as to his disguises with each installment) with such disguises as "Goldielocks the Fairy Queen", Little Bo Peep, and a mermaid.
The Wolf also appeared in Mickey's Polo Team, directed by David Dodd Hand and first released on January 4, 1936. The short featured a game of Polo between four of Disney's animated characters (one of whom was the Wolf) and four animated caricatures of noted film actors.
He also appears in Li'l Bad Wolf comic book stories as Li'l Bad Wolf's father, here called Zeke Midas Wolf, who wants his son to be as mean as he is, but, unlike the three little wolves who appeared in the shorts, Li'l Bad Wolf does not live up to his father's expectations.
More recently he is a recurring character in Disney's House of Mouse, where he is voiced by Jim Cummings. His first appearance on this show featured him as a jazz artist called Big Bad Wolf Daddy (a parody of Big Bad Voodoo Daddy), performing a swing version of his song with the Pigs as his backup band (they're under a contract that states he will eat them if they don't play for him). In this episode, his tendency to destroy houses by exhaling is shown to be an allergy-like reaction to the sight of a door. Later appearances on House of Mouse, however, returned the Wolf to his more traditional role; one episode even featured a newly-made short starring the character, based on the aforementioned Li'l Bad Wolf comic stories.
Zeke the Wolf was one of the villains in Mickey's House of Villains, and he appeared in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. He also appears at the Walt Disney Parks and Resorts for meet-and-greets, parades and shows.
MGM/Tex Avery's Big Bad Wolf
Created by animation director Tex Avery, This variation of the Big Bad Wolf's cartoons included many sexual overtones, violence, and very rapid gags, and became at least as popular as the Disney incarnation, but more likely with an older crowd (especially soldiers in World War II).
This version of the Wolf was referenced in the movie The Mask, when the Mask briefly turns into him while watching Tina Carlyle perform (who looks and acts very similar to Red Hot Riding Hood).
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References in other media
In the Marx Brothers film, Duck Soup, a sequence involves Harpo Marx activating a music box that plays "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?", which he accompanies on the harp.
In the Frank Capra movie, It Happened One Night, Clark Gable sings the song to Claudette Colbert.
A James Patterson novel in the Alex Cross series is named "The Big Bad Wolf", though it only minimally references the Disney character.
Edward Albee's Tony award winning play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, is an obvious play on words of the song title. It was turned into a film, starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, with Taylor winning an Academy Award for her performance as Martha.
Stephen Sondheim's musical Into the Woods features the Big Bad Wolf as a lustful and well-endowed character whose appetite for Little Red Riding Hood is more sexual than victual.
In the M. Night Shyamalan movie Lady in the Water a girl sings "Who's afraid of the big bad wolf?"
The 1966 hit song "Lil' Red Riding Hood" by Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs takes the wolf's point of view.
Other Bad Wolves
Several versions of the Big Bad Wolf have appeared in Warner Bros. Animation's Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons, particularly those of director Isadore "Friz" Freleng. In two Bugs Bunny cartoons directed by Robert McKimson (the second of which, False Hare (released in 1964), was the last cartoon of American Animation's Golden Age to feature Bugs Bunny), the Big Bad Wolf had a cheerful nephew.
Another version of the Big Bad Wolf character was Volk, the hooligan-like wolf chasing Zayats, the hare, in the classic Russian cartoon series Nu, pogodi! (the first episode released in 1969).
In the theme park Busch Gardens Europe, there is a suspended roller coaster named Big Bad Wolf.
Kiefer Sutherland played a (human) character representing the Big Bad Wolf in the 1996 movie Freeway.
The band Cartoons released an album in 2001 called Toontastic!, in which there is a song titled "Little Red Ridinghood". The Big Bad Wolf is the song's narrator, and he is telling the story of Little Red Riding Hood in the first person form.
The 2005 series of Doctor Who on the BBC contains many references to "Bad Wolf", and this is carried through in the websites the BBC has set up to accompany the series. The various references in the television series have been listed at the BBC's Bad Wolf website (along with many inaccurate references to folklore and mythology).
The Big Bad Wolf is a card used by Leonhard Wilson, whose deck is mostly composed of fairy tale monsters, in the second series Yu-Gi-Oh! anime. This card does not appear in the real Yu-Gi-Oh! Trading Card Game.
The name of one of the bosses in the Karazhan Tower in the World of Warcraft universe is named the Big Bad Wolf.
In a dark webcomic called "Everafter," the Big Bad Wolf is the name given to a sentient mass of "Grimm" energy that roams the island on which the story's asylum is built—aptly so because of the creature's notable likeness to a gigantic black wolf.
The Big Bad Wolf redeemed
Several recent interpretations of the Big Bad Wolf show him as being a character with relatively good intentions, mostly considered "Bad" due to a misunderstanding. Arguably, this practice started with the 1989 children's book The True Story of the Three Little Pigs. However, the best well-known "good" adaptations are from films, where it is mostly used for a comedic effect.
Shrek's Big Bad Wolf
The popular computer-animated Shrek films of 2001 and 2004 reversed many conventional roles found in fairy tales, including depicting the Big Bad Wolf from Little Red Riding Hood as a friendly misunderstood crossdresser (apparently still wearing her grandmother's clothes) and on good terms with the three little pigs. This depiction, along with a seemingly transgendered bartender (who the crew deny on the DVD commentary as having any sort of gender confusion) and Pinocchio's expansive nose in Shrek 2, raised the ire of some conservative groups who objected to the film's sexual content. However, these concerns were widely ridiculed in the media.
In the fighting game Shrek SuperSlam, released 2005, Big Bad Wolf is a playable character and appears as "Huff n Puff Wolf".
Hoodwinked's Big Bad Wolf
The Weinstein Company's computer-animated 2006 film "Hoodwinked!" which was a spin-off from Little Red Riding Hood, features the wolf from that story, as a misunderstood Fletch-type wolf. He goes undercover with his squirrel companion, Twitchy, and they record stories for the newspaper called The Once Upon a Times. Along with Red, Granny, and the Woodsman, he is a suspect of the recipe-robbing crime, which is wreaking the forests he lives in. He is voiced by Patrick Warburton.
Bigby Wolf
The comic book series Fables by Bill Willingham features a reformed Big Bad Wolf as a major character, commonly referred to as "Bigby". In order to pass for human (the other animal fables want nothing to do with him), he has been infected with lycanthropy, making him, in essence, a werewolf. He acts as sheriff for the Fable community, going by the name of Bigby Wolf. He is often portrayed as a typical film-noir-style trenchcoat-wearing detective. In the context of the series, he earned the name 'Big Bad' after his (much larger) siblings sarcastically noted his drive to be ferocious, particularily after his father, the incarnation of the North Wind, left his mother due to being bored with the relationship. Due to his unique parentage, his infamous 'huff 'n puff' is a form of wind control that has been shown to be powerful enough to smash trees down, blow out an army of flaming animated puppetmen, and Bigby once conjectured that even a brick house would most likely be blown to bits by it.
Wolf from The 10th Kingdom
In the 2000 eight-hour movie (broadcast as a mini-series) The 10th Kingdom, Scott Cohen plays a character called Wolf, which is based on the Big Bad Wolf and there is some speculation to whether he may even be the Big Bad Wolf's descendant (mainly owed to the fact that most other characters in the mini-series are descendants of many well-known fairy tale characters). Wolf recognizes he has a sort of obsessive-compulsive disorder towards eating lamb meat, rabbit meat, or little-girl meat, which he tries to overcome when he falls in love with Virginia, the main character. (Note that her married name would be Virginia Wolf.)
Other "good" Wolves
The Big Bad Wolf has become a regularly recurring puppet character on Sesame Street, appearing usually in purple fur (although he originally had blue shaggy fur, as he was a variant of Herry Monster). He is generally puppeteered by Jerry Nelson (particularly the blue version) and occasionally by Kevin Clash and Marty Robinson.
In the animated series Drak Pack, Howler, the werewolf, has super-breath powers, apparently derived from the Big Bad Wolf's "huffing and puffing" to blow the pigs' houses down.
In the Swedish cartoon and television short films, Bamse, The Wolf is, as his name suggests, a black wolf who had a thing for pulling pranks on the protagonist as well as his friends (he even won a diploma as "the master of evilness"). He eventually turned out to be a nice guy at heart and was only "evil" because of a problematic life where the only way for him to gain recognition from others was to do bad things.
In the Netherlandic series 'De Fabeltjeskrant', was the role as the Big Bad Wolf portrayed by the short tempered Bor de Wolf. He was, however, very bad at being bad since he wasn't really bad, as explained by the owl, Jacob: The other animals were afraid of Bor because he always got so mad, that's why he was always left out, and that's why Bor got so mad. After being well met by the host at Martha Hamster's birthday party, he got remarkably nicer, but had still some problems with his short temper.
An uncomfortable deconstruction of the "big bad wolf" archetype occurs in Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett. In this novel, a rogue fairy godmother, intent on making stories come true, has magically molded a little girl's life to follow the plot of Red Riding Hood. As part of the tableau, a wolf is reconditioned to act as humans perceive it, its mind clouded with human motivations to murder and destroy. Upon being found by the novel's heroines, a trio of good witches, the wolf begs for release from its madness, whereupon it is mercifully killed.
Another interesting interpretation of the Wolf can be found in The Sisters Grimm series by Michael Buckley. In the books, the Wolf is the alter-ego of Mr. Canis, an elderly caretaker for the two heroes and their grandmother. Canis fights with the monster for control over his body and as the series progresses the war is a losing one. Mr. Canis continues to become more wolf-like and in the most recent books is on the verge of losing his identity entirely to the savage beast.
The Big Bad Wolf of Jon Scieszka's The True Story of the Three Little Pigs is another example.
External links
The Big Bad Wolf on Muppet Wiki
- Internet Movie Database's profile of William Bletcher, his voice actor
- Zeke Wolf's HooZoo Profile