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Britannica's Tales Around The World is a animated series that teaches children about the different fairy tales around the world that ran from 1990 to 1991. In each episode, Pat Morita hosts the show and talks about a fairy tale from one country, then tell about two other tales that are similar to the first story from another country.


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  • Adaptational Name Change: Sigge (Victory Bear) from "St. Olaf and the Troll" becomes "Wind and Weather" in the series.
  • Art Shift: Every story is done in a different art style. This also includes the opening and ending, that are animated in CGI.
  • Asshole Victim: The woodcutter ends up devoured by the man-eating monster in "The Woodcutter's Wealthy Sister", while his abused wife and children end up escaping.
  • Battle Couple: Sleeping Beauty and her husband take down the evil fairy in a team effort: the king draws her fire, freeing up Sleeping Beauty to kill her by spilling her cauldron of potion on her.
  • Beam-O-War: "Sleeping Beauty" has a "shield" variation of this, with the king blocking the evil fairy's energy beam with his sword.
  • Big Damn Heroes: The king in "Sleeping Beauty" kicks open the door of the dungeon with sword drawn just as the evil fairy is about to kill his wife and children.
  • Bowdlerize:
    • "The Woodcutter's Wealthy Sister" understandably cuts out the part where the monster eats each of the woodcutter's limbs one by one, and afterwards he requests to have his ears eaten next since he failed to listen to his family's warnings.
    • In "Rapunzel", the prince falling and getting blinded is softened so that instead of him losing his eyes, his hat gets pulled down over his face so he can't see.
    • "The Story of Sedna" keeps Sedna's father pushing her out of his canoe and into the ocean to save himself, but understandably omits the part where she tries to climb back in and he breaks her fingers.
  • Cassandra Truth: "The Woodcutter's Wealthy Sister" is about a woodcutter not believing his wife's warning that a man-eating monster - in truth, the mysterious "sister" that appeared out of nowhere and invited them to her home - is going to eat them.
  • Catchphrase:
    • Pat Morita opens every video with "Do you believe in...?"
    • He usually starts the second segment with "what makes a (insert Fairy Tale) story a (insert Fairy Tale) story?"
  • Cats Are Mean:
    • The man-eating monster in "The Woodcutter's Wealthy Sister" is a sinister, manipulative, cat-like demon.
    • The witch in "Fenchelchen" becomes an enormous lioness to chase the title character.
  • The Cavalry Arrives Late: In "Sleeping Beauty", the king's soldiers arrive to help rescue the queen moments after the evil fairy has already been killed.
  • Changeling Fantasy: Rumpelstiltskin attempts to get one going by making a deal with the miller's daughter: he'll spin straw into gold for her if she'll give him her firstborn child.
  • Cowardly Lion: The steward in "Sleeping Beauty" is obviously terrified of the evil fairy (disguised as the dowager queen), but he's still brave enough to defy her multiple times and save the lives of Sleeping Beauty and her children. He uses the potions she gave him to transform animals instead of the royal family, then sneaks away to get the king for help when the evil fairy tries to kill them.
  • Deity of Human Origin: The Inuit goddess Sedna in her story.
  • Department of Redundancy Department: When ''The Chinese Parrot" asks her mistress "why are you so sad and unhappy?"
  • Description Cut: A fun one from "Sleeping Beauty":
    King: It'll be good to see Beauty and the children again. And I'll wager that my mother has them all planning some big surprise for me!
    [Cut to the evil fairy laughing maniacally as she prepares to boil them all alive]
  • Determinator: The evil fairy wants Sleeping Beauty dead. 125 years after her first curse (which was ended by True Love's Kiss), having clearly deteriorated physically and mentally, she comes back to kill Sleeping Beauty and her children personally.
  • Disproportionate Retribution: The witch in Fenchelchen. Someone's been stealing from your vegetable garden? Better kill them by dropping them from the sky to their death... or just take their firstborn child.
  • Dull Surprise: Happens every now and then, both in the animation and voice acting. A notable example is when Sleeping Beauty, trying to hide from her "mother-in-law" trying to kill her, gets discovered and lets out a mild "Oh my."
  • Evil-Detecting Dog: In "The Woodcutter's Wealthy Sister" the family's cow fights off the monster the first night she comes to devour them. When she comes to the family in the morning in her human form, the cow is giving her a Death Glare; she knows what the "sister" truly is.
  • Evil Laugh: Many of the villains do this. At first the evil fairy of "Sleeping Beauty" is more of a Noblewoman's Laugh but ends up with deranged cackling after the Time Skip.
  • Evil Makes You Ugly: The evil fairy starts out decently normal-looking, but 125 years later she's become emaciated and hunched-over, with a shriller voice and Exhausted Eyebags. Also, her once large and impressive butterfly-esque wings have dwindled down to tiny skeletal ones.
  • Evil Mentor: The witch in "Fenchelchen" teaches the title character magic. For what it's worth she apparently treats Fenchelchen well for several years, though the two are still willing to kill each other by the end.
  • Eyes Are Mental: When the evil fairy in "Sleeping Beauty" impersonates the dowager queen, she still keeps her Yellow Eyes of Sneakiness.
  • Faint in Shock: The king's steward does this when the evil fairy discovers the hiding place of Sleeping Beauty and her children.
  • Family-Unfriendly Death: The witch in "Hansel and Gretel" gets shoved into her own oven by the two kids and screams as she's burned alive.
  • Forced Transformation:
    • In order to save her love interest from the witch, Fenchelchen turns him into first a cookie, then a bonnet, then a wooden log. When they later escape and get married, the narrator points out Fenchelchen's husband never argued with her, because it's not wise to argue with someone who can turn you into a cookie on demand.
    • The Beast gets turned into a monster by an evil fairy.
  • Framing Device: The live action segments with Pat Morita.
  • Game Face: When the evil fairy captures Sleeping Beauty and her children, she changes her face from the dowager queen's back to her own so Sleeping Beauty can know who's about to kill her.
  • Genre Savvy: In "Hansel and Gretel" the Witch realizes that Gretel is trying to trick her into her own oven.
  • Guile Hero: Hansel and Gretel, but especially Gretel. They manage to outwit their stepmother and the witch multiple times, staying alive through their wits.
  • Heroic Bystander: The woodcutter's cow notices a monster going after her owners and, even though she's not a target, decides to take matters into her own hands—er, hoofs.
  • Hoist by His Own Petard:
    • The witch in "Hansel and Gretel" ends up getting burned alive in the very oven she tried to cook Gretel in.
    • Fenchelchen uses her witch teacher's own magic balls of yarn to kill her.
    • The evil fairy is killed by the potion (and cauldron) she was going to use to kill Sleeping Beauty.
  • Indy Ploy: Fenchelchen has to improvise multiple times to keep her true love safe from the witch, shapeshifting both him and herself as needed.
  • Kaiju: The witch's animal forms in "Fenchelchen" are all massive, with her lioness form in particular seeming at least 50 feet tall.
  • Karma Houdini:
    • The monster in "The Woodcutter's Wealthy Sister" is still at large by the end of the story, having gotten away with eating the woodcutter.
    • None of the stepfamilies in the "Cinderella" episode face any consequences for their abuse of their stepdaughter. The sole exception is Maria II in "Cinderella Maria," who is stained in mud forever as a result of failing her Secret Test of Character.
  • Laser-Guided Karma: The stepmother from "Hansel and Gretel" was sent away by the father after he found out what happened to his kids.
  • Let's Get Dangerous!: Of all things, a cow does this in "The Woodcutter's Wealthy Sister", proving she's not to be messed with when she successfully fends off a man-eating monster by herself to protect her human family. She puts up such a good fight, in fact, that the monster doesn't even try getting past her the next night and instead asks the woodcutter to kill her before then.
  • Merlin and Nimue: Non-romantic version in "Fenchelchen", with the witch teaching the two-generations-younger heroine how to do magic. When the witch later attempts to kill the man that Fenchelchen's fallen in love with, Fenchelchen uses what she's learned to escape and kill the witch.
  • The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body: The Beast is becoming ever more feral the longer his curse lasts, instinctively going to chase a deer at one point while on a walk with Beauty.
  • Mind over Matter: The evil fairy has a kind of telekinesis, shooting magic out of her hands to freeze Sleeping Beauty and her children and later move them and a cauldron around the room. She later uses this power against the king, though he blocks it with his sword. Against a single beam he can still walk forward, forcing her to use beams from both hands to stop him... which frees up Sleeping Beauty.
  • The Mockbuster: Averted for the series. None of the episodes were made to cash in on the Disney films. This series’ "Beauty And The Beast" and "Rapunzel" came before Disney ever released their own takes. Played straight with the Brightspark DVD release of "Hansel and Gretel" and "Rapunzel", which were bundled together and given the title "Tangled Up", cashing in on Tangled. To say that Disney was not amused would be an understatement, as they filed a lawsuit towards Brightspark for deceiving customers into thinking that "Tangled Up" was Tangled.
  • Morphic Resonance: Fenchelchen and the witch retain aspects of their appearance when they shapeshift: Fenchelchen stays red/white/blue like her clothes, and the witch keeps her hat, earring, and purple color scheme.
  • Nightmare Face:
    • When the king in "Rumpelstiltskin" sees the miller's daughter can apparently spin straw into gold, he ponders how rich he can get by using such an ability and his face contorts into an absolutely terrifying smile.
    • There's also the moment when the woodcutter's wealthy sister looks right at the camera and takes off her face, showing the cat-like monster beneath.
  • No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Had the woodcutter's cow not intervened and stopped the monster from eating the woodcutter and his family, the monster wouldn't have asked the woodcutter to kill the cow and the cow would've lived.
  • Pink Means Feminine: Rapunzel, a fairly feminine young woman, wears a pink princess-type dress.
  • Sanity Slippage: The evil fairy seems a lot more unhinged when she comes back for Round Two a few years after Sleeping Beauty is awakened, speaking with a shriller voice and often cackling.
  • Speaks Fluent Animal: Both King Solomon and Reuben can talk to birds. In fact, Reuben's ability to speak to birds was how he ended being the perfect husband for Solomon's daughter.
  • Stock Audio Clip: In "Cinderella" Cinderella's first line when she walks in on the stepsisters' etiquette lesson is reused when she walks in on the Prince's visit.
  • Three Shorts: Each episode has three shorts. The first is a well-known tale, while the other two are tales from different countries that have some similarities.
  • Too Dumb to Live: The woodcutter knows full well he doesn't have a sister, but against his wife's reservations goes to live on the mysterious woman's property anyway to take advantage of her wealth. He later refuses to even look out the window when his hysterical wife says a monster's outside fighting the cow, and ignores his wife's warning yet again the following day and night.
  • Undying Loyalty: The cow in "The Woodcutter's Wealthy Sister" doesn't hesitate to throw down with a man-eating monster in order to protect her family.
  • Villain Song: The Witch from "Hansel and Gretel" has a little ditty about "Children Stew".
  • Warrior Prince: The prince in "Sleeping Beauty", after becoming king, goes off with his army to deal with trouble at the border, then later arrives in the nick of time to fight the evil fairy.
  • Weakened by the Light: Implied with the evil fairy in "Sleeping Beauty": when the king kicks open the door to the dungeon and sunlight falls on her, she flinches and suffers a minor Glamour Failure as her queenly outfit changes back to her original rags.
  • What Measure Is a Non-Human?: St. Olaf basically cheats a worker out of wages for completing a church and then straight up murders him, leaving his wife a widow and his son without a father. But it's okay because Wind and Weather was only a troll.
  • Wizard Duel: "Fenchelchen" has one as its climax. Fenchelchen changes into an eagle and drops different balls of magic yarn to evade the witch, while the witch continually changes form to keep pursuing.
  • You Shall Not Pass!: The woodcutter's cow successfully fends off the monster trying to get inside the home and eat the family.

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