YMMV / Faerie Tale Theatre

• Alternate Character Interpretation: In Sleeping Beauty, was Princess Debbie Henbane in disguise all along, toying with the Prince to try to sour him against princesses so he wouldn't try to wake Sleeping Beauty? Or was she a real, separate person whom Henbane just momentarily possessed to warn the prince never to trust a princess?
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The mole's impromptu musical number in "Thumbelina". It's the only musical number in the episode, and it's given plenty of build-up, but it contributes absolutely nothing to the story.
• Complete Monster: "Hansel and Gretel": Much like her literary counterpart, the Wicked Witch sets up a gingerbread to lure in innocent children, whereupon she captures them, fattens them up and eats them before using their carved out hearts to bake more gingerbread, stating that it's what she likes to do, so it is what she's going to do. Upon capturing Hansel and Gretel, she promptly cooks and eats a boy imprisoned with Hansel, planning on eating him and his sister for her coming feast day.
• Crosses the Line Twice: The stepsisters in Cinderella tell an old classmate of Cinderella's, who wanted to pay her a visit, that she died. When Cinderella asks who was at the door, the stepsisters tell her it was an old classmate of her's, and that he wanted to ask one of her stepsisters out, and that he said he hated her guts.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Matthew Broderick and Jennifer Beals played Cinderella and her Prince in the show's retelling of the story. They would later play lovers in the fairytalesque The Thief and the Cobbler (the notorious Miramax cut, anyway). Even funnier is that TATC reverses their roles, as a princess and a poor tailor.
  • Jeff Goldblum played a humorous, gangster-esque Big Bad Wolf in "The Three Little Pigs"; decades later he played the Faux Affably Evil Big Bad of Hotel Artemis, a gangster known as "The Wolf King".
  • The "Aladdin" episode featured Leonard Nimoy as the villain. His Star Trek co-star George Takei would later voice the villain for the "Aladdin" episode of Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales for Every Child.
  • One of the Three Little Pigs, as portrayed by Fred Willard, immediately balks at his brother's idea they create a folk trio called Peter, Paul and Larry. This wouldn't be the only time a Fred Willard character admitted to not liking folk music.
  • In The Frog Prince, René Auberjonois plays the Princess's father King Ulrich, and in one comic sequence, the castle's French chef tries to cook the Frog. In Disney's The Little Mermaid (1989), released seven years later, there's a similar sequence where Chef Louis tries to cook Sebastian the crab, and this time René Auberjonois voices the chef.
  • At the beginning of The Nightingale, when the kitchen maid's mother is sick, the gardener suggests that she make tea from a magic ginseng root to cure her. The gardener is played by Mako, who would go on to voice an animated character who also gives pretty good advice and great tea.
• Narm: The Emperor in "The Nightingale" played by Mick Jagger in Yellow Face looks more like Sheldon Cooper with a Fu Manchu mustache these days.
• Narm Charm: As an early pay cable production, the special effects (heavy on Chroma Key), costumes, and sets can look quite cheesy now — but that just adds to the "theatrical" experience.
• Older Than They Think:
  • In hindsight, one could say that Pinocchio is an Expy for Pee-Wee Herman. However, Pinocchio was made in 1983, when Pee-Wee was just starting to come into his own at Los Angeles comedy clubs.
  • In Aladdin, the Genie of the Lamp had a grille before Snoop Dogg and others made them cool.
  • The Played for Laughs episodes often goof on fairy tale characters and conventions, sometimes with Parental Bonus pop culture references. This was years before the Disney animated canon began doing so, much less the Shrek films. Moreover, many actors who participated in this series went on to those or similar works!
• One-Scene Wonder: The monster radish Rapunzel's mother has a nightmare about is on screen for less than a minute, looks ridiculous, and still managed to freak out a lot of viewers due to how sudden and bizarre it was.
• Questionable Casting: The episode "Beauty and the Beast". Klaus Kinski is a fine actor but a handsome prince he does not make.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • The white beams the "evil sorcerer" shoots out of his hands in The Boy Who Left Home to Find Out About the Shivers are a bit jarring in an episode of otherwise fairly convincing (and creepy) special effects.
  • All the special effects in "Rapunzel", adding to the general Narm of the episode.
• Squick:
  • The mole's attraction to Thumbelina. It's uncomfortable enough in the original story, but it's given a bit more creepy subtext in this version. Especially his line about "spoonin' in the gloomin".
  • The subtext in Little Red Riding Hood when the Wolf eats Mary/Little Red is especially creepy for adult viewers. This is one of the few versions to follow Perrault and have the Wolf urge the girl to get into bed with him while he's disguised as Granny, and has him actually pull her into an embrace on "All the better to hug you with, my dear." The fact that the Wolf is played by Malcolm McDowell, bringing his role in A Clockwork Orange to mind, and that he and Mary Steenburgen were a couple in real life at the time only adds to it.
• Spiritual Successor: This show has one in Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales for Every Child — both shows have at least 24 episodes apiece, revolve around the same basic concept of celebrities performing fairy tales, and originally aired on pay cable. They adapt almost all the same tales too: Happily Ever After has more episodes than Faerie Tale Theatre and so it adapts more tales, but The Boy Who Left Home to Find Out About the Shivers is the only tale that Faerie Tale Theatre adapts but Happily Ever After doesn't.
• Values Dissonance: Episodes like "The Nightingale" and "Aladdin" have white actors portray the Chinese and Arab characters respectively. While this was no issue in the 1980's when the series came out, later years would see the entertainment industry shift towards casting actors with the same ethnicity as the characters after the benefits of minority representation in media became better-understood.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: This series is aimed more at adults who still love fairy tales than at children, with self-aware humor, plenty of innuendos, and occasional mild swearing. Still, it's a series of classic fairy tale adaptations, and its fans have included many children as well as adults.

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