YMMV / The Pied Piper of Hamelin

• Alternate Aesop Interpretation: Depending on whether you see Hamelin or the Piper as the villain...
  • If Hamelin is in the wrong, always remember to pay your debts... or suffer the consequences.
  • If the Piper is the villain, don't make a deal with a stranger no matter if he is genuine or not. You'll regret it either way.
  • In the case of the Piper, it would be "Always ask for your money up front." Or, alternatively, in the case of Hamelin, "Don't make promises you can't keep."
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Is the Piper a greedy villain? Are the townsfolk being cheapskates? Somewhere in-between? Every way to answer those questions has had a version of this story all to itself:
  • It's not unheard of for the townsfolk to gather up their money to pay the Piper, only to hear his price is so exorbitant they can't actually pay him.
  • Michael Ende's play The Rat-Catcher presents the rat-catcher as a good fairy that rescues the children of Hamelin from a corrupt world. Oh, and the citizens of Hamelin secretly worship a rat-demon.
  • The 1933 Disney animated short takes a similar approach. The Piper explicitly states he's taking the kids to stop them from becoming as horrible as the adults, with the mountain he leads them into actually containing a happy wonderland. In fact, the lame child makes it inside in this version, rendered able to walk without a crutch via sheer joy.
  • Tanith Lee's "Paid Piper" from Red As Blood has the townsfolk openly worshiping a rather Mammon-like rat god of prosperity. The piper is a different god, a god of love, and he takes the children away in a more subtly horrible fashion: with a Sterility Plague.
  • This song by Heather Dale gives one to the children. It interprets the story being a scam by the children who recruited the Piper to help them get out of town.
  • The Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales for Every Child version has the Piper lure most of the children away as a final punishment for the greedy, hostile-to-outsiders adults of the town — but implies that the children are safe and that they will return once the adults well and truly reform. The left-behind lame boy in this version is also homeless, and the first sign of their repentance is that they extend kindness to him at last.
  • The Classics Illustrated/Classic Comics version portrays him as a reasonable man angered by the injustice of the town's mayor refusing to pay him — he even backs down to his original price, after the mayor rhetorically promised over 10 times that much in a moment of despair. The lame boy's mother, who is very poor, tries to pay the piper what little she can, and this is why the lame boy is spared (the Piper even tells her not to worry).
    • Similarly, the Faerie Tale Theatre version expanding upon the Browning poem has the Piper spare the lame boy because he was the only person who was nice to him when he first arrived in the town (and just as he was reconsidering helping the townsfolk out at all because "I never intrude where I'm not needed"), though the boy never realizes the mercy he was shown.
  • The Michael Morpurgo version, told from the viewpoint of the lame boy, has the Piper only asking for a gold coin, and enlisting the lame boy to tell the Mayor and the townspeople that the corrupt town needs to change. When he returns, he asks for the money again, and is told that it's all gone, as they had to change the town, and he... replies that that was the payment he truly wanted, so it is definitely a positive example.
  • Some people theorize that the Piper was responsible for the rat infestation in the first place.
• Nightmare Fuel: A whole village's innocent children are abducted to get back at what only one person did. Scarier in the versions where we never find out where he takes them, or what happens to them afterward. Up to eleven in the versions where the Piper drowns the children like he did with the rats. Of course, the varying degrees of truth to the story could have real implications of what happened to the real children of Hamelin.

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