Drew RothhaarFebruary 16, 1990 - February 21, 2023"To die will be an awfully big adventure."Thank you all so much for being part of our lives the past two years.

Sadly, we are here to wrap up our final thoughts on Of Slippers and Spindles. Drew and Cassie return for one last episode to explain the sudden hiatus that began in December and has now led to the decision to end the show. In true Of Slippers and Spindles style, we each give three final book recommendations: three retelling novels we wanted to cover on the podcast and are disappointed we didn't get to. But before we go, we celebrate one major goal that we were able to accomplish! Thank you all so much for listening, supporting, and going on this journey with us! Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles Visit our our new merch store, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected]  Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com  

Drew and Cassie begin our journey into The Wild Swans by Hans Christian Andersen with a look at the 1977 anime film from Toei Animation. The anime is a pretty straightforward retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's tale, although it takes several cues from Six Swans by the Brothers Grimm as well. We discuss our experiences with anime, Avatar: The Last Airbender, the incredible sound effects, Eliza's tear friends, swans bartering for goods, and more! Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch store, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected]  Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com  

It's time to tie up one fairy tale and fly into the next one! Drew and Cassie begin by giving their final thoughts on the tale of Rumpelstiltskin, including our ideas on how we would interpret the story ourselves. Then we begin our discussion of The Wild Swans by Hans Christian Andersen, which starts with the story of Six Swans by the Brothers Grimm. We talk through each of these stories and note their differences, and then we finish by revealing the four retellings we will be looking at through December!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch store, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected]  Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com  

For our final week of Rumpelstiltskin Month, Drew and Cassie are delighted to be joined by Bethanie from Prince Kai Fan Pod to discuss Gilded and Cursed, the recently-completed YA duology by Marissa Meyer. This duology centers around Serilda, the daughter of a miller who was blessed by the god of fate and fortune and who is known for the fantastical stories she tells. When she comes face-to-face with the dangerous Erlking, her ability to tell stories gets her in trouble when she claims to spin straw into gold. Locked away in his castle, all seems hopeless - until a young man named Gild appears and offers to help. We discuss Marissa Meyer's use of names, the meanings behind some of the location names, Gilded vs. Wicked word counts, Cassie's lack of trust in Marissa, Cassie's fondness for banter, and so much more! And of course, we wrap up by revealing next month's fairy tale! Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch store, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected]  Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com  

Drew and Cassie are thrilled to be joined by Kimmy and Ryan from the Aloreing podcast for our third week of Rumpelstiltskin Month! We return once again to Shelley Duvall's Faerie Tale Theatre to discuss the second episode of the series, Rumpelstiltskin, starring Shelley Duvall herself as the Miller's Daughter. This episode of the show is a relatively straight forward adaptation of the Brothers Grimm story, and though it gets goofy, it doesn't go off the rails nearly as much as some of the other episodes of Faerie Tale Theatre! Along the way, we discuss Shelley Duvall's wig, the trumpeter's wig, the trumpet itself, Shrek, Dwight Schrute, Li'l Sebastian, and more!Check out Kimmy and Ryan and Aloreing anywhere you listen to podcasts and at aloreing.com/links!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch store, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected]  Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com  

It's week 2 of Rumpelstiltskin Month, and Drew and Cassie are back to dive into Spinners by Donna Jo Napoli and Richard Tchen. This is the story of two spinners. The first, a man who renames nameless throughout the book, hones his craft at a stolen wheel, crippling his leg, turning a room full of straw into a golden dress for his beloved - and losing her in the process. The second is Saskia, the daughter of a miller, a young girl who teaches herself to craft beautiful, unique yarns. And then the king learns of Saskia's talent, bringing the two spinners together. Tune in for some strong opinions about some of the genius ways this book retells the story of Rumpelstiltskin - and one devastating way in which it misses the mark!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch store, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected]  Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

For our first week of Rumpelstiltskin Month, Drew and Cassie are discussing A Curse Dark as Gold by Elizabeth C. Bunce. This 2008 YA novel follows Charlotte Miller, a young woman who inherits her father's mill upon his death. Although there are rumors that the mill is cursed, Charlotte has never believed them - but it's hard to deny the bad luck that piles up as workers depart, impossible debts are revealed, and an domineering uncle enters the scene. But then a strange man named Jack Spinner offers to help, and Charlotte finds herself caught up in his bargains until she can unravel the truth of who he is, what he wants, and why - and the mill, her community, and her family are at stake. Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles Visit our our new merch store, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com  

It's our 100th episode! Drew and Cassie celebrate by answering questions sent in by our amazing listeners, patrons, and supporters. We tell the origin story of the podcast and then we dive into the amazingly thoughtful questions you all sent in. We discuss our favorite episodes of the podcast, fairy tales we'll cover in the future, favorite tales from outside Europe, favorite books and TV shows, writing advice, Shakespeare, theatre, and so much more! Thank you all for your questions and thank you for listening!Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles Visit our our new merch store, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com  

It's time to climb down from the pile of mattresses and start spinning a new tale! Drew and Cassie begin this episode with our final thoughts on The Princess and the Pea, including our disappointment in the presence of the concept of the divine right to rule. As always, we discuss our ideas for how we would like to retold the story ourselves. Then we begin our journey into a new story for November, which is Rumpelstiltskin by the Brothers Grimm. We talk through the plot of the story and the many questions it brings up - and we disagree strongly on the randomness of the tale's ending! Then we reveal the criteria we'll be using for the story of Rumpelstiltskin and which retellings we'll be talking about throughout the month! Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles Visit our our new merch store, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com  

"It wasn't the pea, it wasn't the pea, it wasn't the pea at all!"For our final week of The Princess and the Pea Month, we are discussing the ultimate retelling of The Princess and the Pea: Once Upon A Mattress, the 1959 Broadway musical with music by Mary Rodgers, lyrics by Marshall Barer, and book by Jay Thompson, Dean Fuller, and Marshall Barer. We focus our plot discussion on the 2005 TV film starring Tracy Ullman and Carol Burnett, but we also reference the changes made from the original musical and for the 1964 and 1972 TV adaptations, all of which also starred Carol Burnett.  We discuss Carol Burnett's comedic genius, the set and costume designs, the subversion of tropes, the minstrel's presence, our love for the song "Happily Ever After," the genius reveal at the end, and more! Plus, we reveal which fairy tale we'll be looking at next month! Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles Visit our our new merch store, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com  

It's week 3 of The Princess and the Pea Month! Drew and Cassie return to the Once Upon A Time series of YA books from the 2000s to discuss Violet Eyes by Debbie Viguié. This book centers around Violet, the daughter of a farmer who encounters her kingdom's prince when he is found unconscious in their fields after a storm. The two quickly fall in love - but Richard's parents want him to marry a true princess. Violet soon finds herself competing with princesses from throughout the land in order to prove her identity and character in hopes of winning Richard's hand.Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles Visit our our new merch store, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com  

In our second week discussing The Princess and the Pea by Hans Christian Andersen, Drew and Cassie are taking a look at The Princess Test by Gail Carson Levine, the third in her middle grade series called The Princess Tales. This quick little book centers on Lorelei, a blacksmith's daughter who is born with extreme sensitivity, who falls in love with Prince Nicholas, whose parents want to abdicate their thrones. Nicholas's parents insist Nicholas must marry a true princess and thus put 79 princesses - and Lorelei - through a series of ridiculous tests to determine who is worthy of their son.  We discuss the other books in the series, the series's writing style, a modern way to interpret Lorelei's sensitivity, Gilmore Girls, the lorelei of German folklore, the terrible princess tests, the Crocodile Princess, and more! Plus we make a very special announcement at the end that you won't want to miss! Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles Visit our our new merch store, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com  

"Never underestimate the power of a vegetable." Drew and Cassie open The Princess and the Pea Month with the 2002 American-Hungarian animated film The Princess and the Pea from Feature Films For Families. We had a bit of a hard time when it came to enjoying this particular film, so we work our way through the story in an attempt to understand a very convoluted plot.  We discuss Sebastian's obsession with pea lore, tapestry vs. parchment, bizarre rules of succession, physical indicators of villainy, the stained glass window ghosts, nature vs. nurture, various similarities to other animated films from the 90s, dancing inconsistent world rules when it comes to animals, Drew steals Cassie's catchphrase, and more!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch store, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected]  Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com  

Are you ready to leave the ball and climb some mattresses? Because it's time for a new tale! Drew and Cassie wrap up their final thoughts on Cinderella, including some themes that we've noticed that have been arising now that we have covered 10 different retellings of Cinderella. Then we begin our new story, The Princess and the Pea by Hans Christian Andersen. This tale is short and sweet, so we talk through its plot real quick before revealing the criteria for this new tale and which adaptations we'll be looking at through October! Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch store, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected]  Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com  

"Never let the fear of striking out keep you from playing the game." It's the final week of our second Cinderella Month! We are joined by Bethanie Finger from Prince Kai Fan Pod, the Marissa Meyer Bookclub Podcast, to discuss the 2004 film A Cinderella Story starring Hilary Duff, Chad Michael Murray, Jennifer Coolidge, Regina King, and more. This teen romcom take on the Cinderella tale follows Sam, a modern-day high schooler who is left in the custody of her wicked stepmother, Fiona, and is forced to work in her family's diner while navigating high school. Things come to a head when Fiona insists Sam work instead of attending the Halloween dance, where Sam knows she could possibly come face-to-face  when her anonymous penpal crush for the first time - of course, Sam has no idea that this anonymous penpal crush is actually Austin Ames, the most popular boy in school. We talk about the various A Cinderella Story spinoffs, cell phones in the early 2000s, Sam's friendship with Carter, casting adults as teenagers, comparisons to The Princess Diaries, Bethanie's many red flags about Austin, the wacky timeline, some jokes that didn't age well, and much more!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles Visit our our new merch store, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com  

"'My feet are not bound.' 'I noticed,' said the prince." For our fourth retelling in our second Cinderella Month, Drew and Cassie are taking a look at Bound by Donna Jo Napoli. This 2004 book specifically retells the ancient Chinese legend of Ye Xian, reimagining the main character as Xing Xing, a young woman whose circumstances have left her orphaned and living with her cruel and jealous stepmother and half-sister, Wei Ping. We discuss the appropriateness of Napoli as a white author telling this story, the lack of development for the prince, the complicated family relationships, the way Napoli uses foot binding to connect to the Cinderella story, the inclusion of the toe removal from the Grimm version of the story, Stepmother as a clever villain, and more! Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles Visit our our new merch store, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com  

"I'm not happy pretending everything is fine when I know it's not." Drew and Cassie return after a hiatus to continue our Cinderella Month with our next book, Cinderella is Dead by Kalynn Bayron. This 2020 YA novel imagines a harshly patriarchal world set 200 years after Cinderella's death, in which her story is used to enforce the rules of the world. Our heroine is 16-year-old Sophia, who is about the attend the ball for the first time, and who is desperate to rebel against the world thanks to her love for her best friend, Erin. Sophia ends up fleeing the ball and starting a campaign to bring down the king along with help from a descendant of Cinderella's stepsister, the original fairy godmother, and more. While we share many of the same frustrations with this book, we do appreciate some of the ideas at the core of the story! Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles Visit our our new merch store, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com  

"His father wanted him to choose Lavaliere for Prince’s Preference, but he had to talk to Ella."Drew and Cassie are so excited to talk about Megan Morrison's Tyme series but also sad that this is the final Morrison book that has been published! For our second week in Cinderella Month, we are discussing Morrison's Disenchanted: The Trials of Cinderella. This novel is told from three points of view: Ella Coach, a young woman whose mother died in a sweat shop and wants every laborer in the Blue Kingdom to receive fairer treatment; Prince Dash Charming, a young man whose familial curse has recently been broken, and who wants to be a better person than his father and grandfather before him; and Serge, a fairy godfather who is losing his magic, and who finds himself in a position to help one Ella Coach. We discuss the creative world of Tyme, the incredibly themed characters names, Serge/Jasper, fantasy slang, the way the Cinderella elements are rearranged, awesome mom Queen Maud, and we say "these books are so good" about ten times!Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindlesVisit our our new merch store, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindlesWe love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected]: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"I don't want a life stuck waving from a royal box any more than a life confined to a basement."Drew and Cassie begin our return to the fairy tale of Cinderella by discussing the Amazon Prime movie from 2021 starring Camila Cabello, Idina Menzel, Billy Porter, and more. This jukebox movie musical incorporates songs like "Rhythm Nation," "Somebody to Love," and "Material Girl" while reimagining Cinderella as a young woman who dreams of designing fashion and owning a dress shop. Meanwhile, Prince Robert is struggling with his father's expectations versus his own desires, and soon the two protagonists find their ambitions entwined. We discuss jukebox musicals, the movie's similarities to other Cinderella-adjacent movies, the aggressively contemporary dialogue, the reinterpretation of Cinderella's relationship with her stepfamily, Cassie's idea on how to fix the story, and more! Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles Visit our our new merch store, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

It's time to wish our way out of one fairy tale and into another! Drew and Cassie wrap up their final thoughts on Aladdin, including, and then rather than discussing how we would retell the tale ourselves like we usually do, we suggest ideas of how we would like to see someone else retell Aladdin. Then we take a journey to the past by explaining why we wanted to revisit Cinderella. We discuss the plots of some of the most prominent cultural variants of the story: Rhodopis of Greece, Ye Xian of China, and Vasilisa the Brave of Russia. We also update our criteria a little bit from the last time we talked about Cinderella and reveal which books and movies we'll be reading and watching throughout the month!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch store, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected]  Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"This is all your fault, Jafar." In our final week of Aladdin Month, Drew and Cassie are joined by Cassie's younger brother, Jeffrey, to discuss the 2013 musical Twisted: The Untold Story of a Royal Vizier from StarKid Productions. This parody of Disney's Aladdin is inspired by Wicked and retells the tale from Jafar's point of view, reimagining him as a well-intentioned advisor to the king who is trying to fix all of the kingdom's problems, but finds himself blamed for them instead. Aladdin himself is a greedy 33-year-old orphan who seeks to take advantage of the optimistic Princess, and all this is happening while Prince Achmed - yes, that Prince Achmed - seeks revenge for being attacked by a tiger. We discuss Jim Povolo's voice, dodging copyright laws, Jasmine as a Social Justice Warrior, Dylan Saunders' extraordinary performance, the inclusion of Scheherazade, Michael Caine in The Muppet Christmas Carol, the many references and allusions to Disney movies and Disney history, and more!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch store, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected]  Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"You ain't never had a friend like me!" Disney week came early this month! For our third week of Aladdin Month, Drew and Cassie discuss Disney's 1992 animated film, the 2019 live action movie, the 2011 Broadway musical, and much more! We talk about our personal memories and connections to Disney's version of Aladdin before delving into the plot specifics of the animated movie. Then we talk about the differences made for the live action movie and the Broadway musical, and then we go even further by looking at some of the changes made for Aladdin, Jr. and Aladdin: A Musical Spectacular at the California Adventure theme park. We discuss the Disney+ stereotype warning, the various iterations of Iago, the casting issues across all versions, Aladdin as the "diamond in the rough," Jasmine's naiveté contrasted with her strength, Robin Williams' Genie vs. Will Smith's Genie vs. the Broadway Genie, the adaptation from screen to stage, ways in which Disney nods to the original fairy tale, Aladdin's appearances in the theme parks, and much more!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch store, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected]  Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"Oh, my naive thief. Love is rarely a choice.” For our second week of Aladdin Month, Drew and Cassie are discussing The Forbidden Wish by Jessica Khoury. This 2016 YA novel casts Zahra as the protagonist, a jinn who has been trapped for five hundred years until her lamp is found by a young man named Aladdin. As Aladdin makes his three wishes and Zahra receives an opportunity to earn her freedom, the two characters find themselves falling into a star-crossed love. We talk about the novel's jinn lore, reinterpreting Aladdin's laziness as trauma, Pinterest, the "make me a prince" wish across all retellings, compulsory heterosexuality, the different ways Drew and Cassie imagine characters when reading, and more! Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles Visit our our new merch store, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

Drew and Cassie begin Aladdin Month with the Aladdin episode from HBO's Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales for Every Child featuring the voices of B.D. Wong, George Takei, Joan Chen, and more. This series from the 90s reset classic fairy tales into alternate cultural settings, although for Aladdin they kept the Chinese setting from the original story. We discuss Aladdin as a dreamer instead of just lazy, the combination of the magician and the vizier, using the lamp as a lamp, the lack of actual wishing involved, the movie Holes, and much more!Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindlesVisit our our new merch store, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindlesWe love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected]: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

It's time to dance our way out of June's story and make a wish to start July's story: Aladdin! Drew and Cassie wrap up our final thoughts on The 12 Dancing Princesses, and Drew shares some thoughts on the reasons he doesn't care for the original story while Cassie helps sort through these ideas. As we discuss our own ideas for how we would retell the tale, Drew connects The 12 Dancing Princesses to a different, perhaps more beloved, story, and Cassie goes into detail about "Deliverance," her version of the story that she's been hinting to throughout the month. Then we begin our journey into the world of Aladdin by discussing its muddled history before talking about the "original" tale. We end by revealing the Aladdin criteria and which retellings we'll be reading and watching throughout July! Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles Visit our our new merch store, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"I could dance forever and ever and ever."In our final week of The 12 Dancing Princesses Month, Drew and Cassie are joined by Drew's sister, Daurie, to discuss perhaps the world's most popular retelling of the story, the 2006 film Barbie in The 12 Dancing Princesses. Barbie plays the role of Genevieve, the 7th of 12 sisters whose father decides they must learn to be "proper princesses." When their instructor begins to suck all of the joy out of their lives, the 12 princesses find a magic portal to a secret world where they can dance to their hearts' content. We talk about the musical and ballet influences, Felix the Parrot, the personality prescribed to each princess, the total elimination of the fairy tale's original plotline, Mattel's protection of the Barbie character, Ken-as-Derek-as-Sherlock Holmes, "the Power of Twelve," the magical wishing flowers, and more! Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindlesVisit our our new merch store, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindlesWe love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected]: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

“Nights like this were meant to be shared, remembered, and talked about for years."The 12 Dancing Princesses Month continues as Drew and Cassie take a look at the popular 2019 YA novel House of Salt and Sorrows by Erin A. Craig. This book follows Annaleigh Thaumas, the sixth of twelve sisters, who lives a sheltered life at her family's stronghold in Highmoor. The four eldest Thaumas daughters have died over the last few years, and rumors are spreading that the family is cursed. As Annaleigh's remaining sisters begin to sneak out every night to attend glittering balls, Annaleigh herself is more occupied with seeking out answers about the sisters that are gone. We discuss our many frustrations with the book, the mysterious theme connecting the sisters' names, the incorporation of the gods of the book's world, the story's many twists, and more!   Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindlesVisit our our new merch store, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindlesWe love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected]: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

“Dancing was a dangerous game, but it meant that at night, at least, they knew what to do with themselves.” We continue our month of exploring The 12 Dancing Princesses with The Girls at the Kingfisher Club by Genevieve Valentine. This YA retelling removes all magic from the story and recontextualizes it by dropping the twelve young women into the Roaring '20s! Jo Hamilton and her eleven sisters live their lives trapped in the house of their father, who almost never acknowledges them, but they find freedom by sneaking out at night and dancing in the speakeasies of Manhattan. But everything changes when their father begins to suspect their activities and decides to start marrying his daughters off one by one. We discuss the creative new setting, Jo Hamilton vs. Jo March, the emphasis on the relationships between the sisters, the king/father as a villain, and more!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles Visit our our new merch store, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

“She was, surprisingly, an exquisite dancer." We journey into Week 2 of The 12 Dancing Princesses Month with one of Cassie's favorite fairy tale retellings of all time, Princess of the Midnight Ball by Jessica Day George. Cassie loves this book and was pretty anxious to hear what Drew's opinion would be after reading it for the first time! Set in the fictional kingdom of Westfalin, this YA novel from 2009 remains faithful to the original story while digging deeper to answer the many questions the fairy tale raises. Galen is a young soldier returning from war and Rose the eldest of a dozen princesses, and both find themselves searching for a way to break a curse that is forcing the twelve sisters to dance in a secret underworld every night. Dark forces are working against them in the world below as well as the world above, and they must resort to some creative resources to defeat some formidable foes!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles Visit our our new merch store, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"I have no patience for hearts and flowers and young men who brag about this victory and that. There's more to life than romance." We begin our month discussing The 12 Dancing Princesses by returning once again to Shelley Duvall's Faerie Tale Theatre! This time we are looking at the series' final episode, season 6, episode 3, The Dancing Princesses, starring Lesley Ann Warren. Although the number of sisters is slimmed down to 6 instead of 12, once again Faerie Tale Theatre remains fairly faithful to the original story. We discuss the rhyming names, the soldier's moustache, Lesley Anne Warren's classic deadpan, our ideas for developing the story further, and more! Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

It's time to let one story croak and dance into a new tale: The 12 Dancing Princesses! But first, Drew and Cassie wrap up their final thoughts on The Frog Prince. We acknowledge some of the similarities between this month's books and movies, we read a listener email about Iron Henry, and we discuss our thoughts on how we would adapt the story. Then we move on to our next fairy tale! We talk through the plot of The 12 Dancing Princesses, then we reveal our criteria and which books and movies we'll be looking at throughout the month of June!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"There is no way I am kissing a frog and eating a bug on the same day!"  It's the final week of The Frog Prince Month, which means it's Disney week! We are taking a look at Disney's version of this story, 2009's The Princess and the Frog, starring Anika Noni Rose, Bruno Campos, Keith David, Jennifer Cody, John Goodman, Oprah Winfrey, and more! This animated movie, loosely based on the book The Frog Princess by E. D. Baker, is a little bit meta as it inverts the classic tale. When a frog appears to Tiana, a hard-working woman living in New Orleans in 1926, she agrees to kiss him to make him human again. But the spell backfires, leaving Naveen as he is and turning Tiana into a frog too! Now they're stuck together until they can figure out how to reverse the spell. We discuss this movie's controversial history, Tiana's friendship with Charlotte, the beautiful 2D animation, the affect this movie had on Disney's marketing, similarities to Wicked and The Wizard of Oz, and more!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

In our third week discussing The Frog Prince, Drew and Cassie are looking at Water Song by Suzanne Weyn, the 10th book in the Once Upon A Time YA series from the early 2000s. This book sets the story during World War I and follows Emma, a British socialite who has found herself isolated in her family's mansion along the warfront in Belgium. A soldier named Jack seeks refuge from a gas attack in Emma's well, and soon the two find themselves confined to the house by German soldiers. They must fake a marriage as they also plot to undermine the enemy and search for an escape. We discuss the incorporation of magic, the ways Weyn uses the story elements, the possibility of an appearance from Iron Henry, and more! Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"Lose yourself to be found. Transform to be transformed."  Drew and Cassie are revisiting their favorite fairy tale series, the Tyme novels by Megan Morrison! The third book, Transformed: The Perils of the Frog Prince, follows Prince Syrah of the Olive Isles, an arrogant young man who makes a wish that backfires and turns him into a frog! A sudden, deadly plague descends upon the people of Yellow Country, and as a small creature, Syrah finds himself privy to a lot of crucial and private information. He soon finds himself playing detective, trying to discover the origins of the plague and trying to break his curse simultaneously. As we talk through the story, we laud Megan Morrison for her genius world-building and clever adaptive choices, admire the creative incorporation of the various elements of the original fairy tale, lament the Tyme series' cancellation, speculate about what may have happened in the future, and more!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"Pardon me, could you not make so much noise? You're scaring away all the flies."  For our first week of The Frog Prince Month, we watched the premiere episode of Shelley Duvall's Faerie Tale Theatre from 1982, The Tale of the Frog Prince, starring Robin Williams, Teri Garr, and Eric Idle. This relatively faithful adaptation of the Grimms' fairy tale gets pretty wacky, with an over-the-top performance from the spoiled princess and stand-up comedian version of the frog. We discuss theories on Grizelda the Witch, the magic, floating, golden ball, Robin Williams' frog costume, the antagonistic dynamic between the frog and the princess, the bizarre ending, and much more!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

It's time to tap our heels together three times to leave Oz behind and splash our way into a new fairy tale: The Frog Prince! Drew and Cassie wrap up their final thoughts on The Wizard of Oz, including discussing why adapting Oz seems to elude authors and reading an email from a listener explaining a gap in our knowledge about The Wiz. Before we leave the Yellow Brick Road behind, as we do every month, we discuss our own ideas about how we would retell Oz (although, of course, Cassie already has)! Then it's time to move on to The Frog Prince! We talk a little about the story's history and a lot about how we as a society have revised the story's ending before breaking down the tale's plot. We wrap up by revealing our criteria and which books and movies we'll be looking at throughout the month of May!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"Are people born wicked? Or is wickedness thrust upon them?"  We're nearing the end of the Yellow Brick Road! For our final week in The Wizard of Oz Month, Drew and Cassie discuss Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire as well as the 2003 Broadway musical adaptation with a book by Winnie Holzman and music and lyrics by Stephen Schwartz, originally starring Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth. Wicked follows the story of Elphaba, a young woman who was born in the land of Oz with green skin, chronicling her friendship with a girl named Glinda, her antagonism with the Wizard of Oz, and how she became known as the Wicked Witch of the West. The book and the musical are vastly different stories, so after discussing our personal connections to Wicked, we work our way through the plot of the book first and then the musical. We discuss Maguire's decision to make Oz dark and gritty, the origins of Elphaba's name, some of the book's struggles, Maguire's intentional word usage, Chekhov's gun, some of our favorite quotes and lyrics, No Fly shows, the fun and obvious foreshadowing, Glinda's development, and we end it all by getting super emotional about For Good. Plus, we reveal which fairy tale we'll be talking about for the month of May!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"There's only room for one diva in Oz, and that is MOI!" Drew and Cassie are here to discussing the third Oz adaptation of the month, the 2005 TV film The Muppets' Wizard of Oz starring Ashanti, Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, Gonzo, Fozzie Bear, Pepe the King Prawn, and many more Muppets and humans alike! This particular adaptation begins in a modern-day Kansas, where Dorothy dreams of becoming a big star by joining the Muppets Tour. When the tornado drops Dorothy in Oz, she finds herself in a land entirely inhabited by Muppets - even her pet king prawn, Toto, is a Muppet now! Dorothy then follows the Yellow Brick Road to the Wizard to ask him to make her a star. We discuss the modernized setting, the combination of the Munchkins and the field mice, the Wizard's disguises, the embracing of Oz's theatricality, the fun reimagining of the Kalidahs, and much more! Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"Come on and ease on down, ease on down the road..."  For our second week in The Wizard of Oz Month, we're discussing the 1975 Broadway musical The Wiz: The Super Soul Musical "Wonderful Wizard of Oz" with music and lyrics by Charlie Smalls (and others) and book by William F. Brown. In addition to reading the show's script, we watched the 1979 film adaptation starring Diana Ross and Michael Jackson as well as the 2015 production of The Wiz Live! starring Shanice Williams, Queen Latifah, David Alan Grier, and more. This cultural sensation's plot is remarkably faithful to L. Frank Baum's original Oz book, but there are plenty of moments of adaptation to talk about along the way. Within these three formats - the script, the movie, and the TV adaptation - we find plenty of variation! We discuss Dorothy's different relationships with Aunt Em, Diana Ross's strange arrival in Munchkinland, the Scarecrow's songs, the Kalidah and Poppy battles, the owl therapist, Queen Latifah as a female Wiz, the lessons Dorothy learns along the way, and much more!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more!  https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"Are you a good witch or a bad witch?"  We are starting The Wizard of Oz Month with the classic 1939 film starring Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, Bert Lahr, Billie Burke, Frank Morgan, and Margaret Hamilton. Drew and Cassie start by revisiting their personal connections to this nostalgic musical film before talking through the plot that has been majorly streamlined from L. Frank Baum's original novel. We talk through many of the smart and fun changes the movie makes, like expanding the Kansas scene and swapping out the silver shoes for ruby slippers. We talk about the movie's dedication and opening shot, the origins of the farmhands, the transition from Kansas to Oz, Glinda's questionable motives, Buddy Ebsen's lingering presence, the snow that saves them from the poppies, and more! Plus, you will not want to miss Cassie's unique connection to this movie!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

It's time to fly away from Neverland and get caught up in a tornado that will whisk us off to Oz! But first we have some exciting announcements: we now have MERCHANDISE available, and we are launching our PATREON! Pledging just $1 a month gets you all kinds of fun perks that we outline for you. Then we dive into some final thoughts on Peter Pan, and ask our traditional question of how we would adapt the story ourselves. Then we begin the journey down the yellow brick road! We talk about our personal connections to Oz before discussing the original book by L. Frank Baum. And as always, we reveal the criteria for The Wizard of Oz and which retellings we'll be reading and watching!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

“When there's a smile in your heart, there's no better time to start…” It's Disney week! We're talking about Disney's 1953 animated classic version of Peter Pan, featuring the voices of Bobby Driscoll, Hans Conried, and Kathryn Beaumont. Drew grew up on this movie and, unsurprisingly, it holds a special place in his heart. Cassie, on the other hand... is not a fan. It was a long journey for the Disney company to figure out how they were going to retell J. M. Barrie's play and novel, so we discuss some of the history behind the movie before diving into our discussion of the movie. After we work our way through the movie's plot, we also discuss the 2002 sequel, Return to Never Land, Drew talks about Pan's presence in the Disney theme parks, and we announce next month's story! We discuss the male narrator, song parallels between the Disney movie and the stage musical, Peter's personality, the rhythmic nature of the dialogue, the Lost Boys' names, the timeline issues, the offensive Native and Indigenous representation, Never Smile At A Crocodile, the changes to Tink saving Peter, the importance of the month of February in Drew's life, Return to Never Land's WWII setting, parallels between the original and the sequel, Nana Two, the Octopus, and much more!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"To have faith is to have wings."  In our third week of Peter Pan Month, we are looking at the novel Peter and the Starcatchers by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson as well as the stage adaptation written by Rick Elice and starring Christian Borle, Adam Chanler-Berat, and Celia Keenan-Bolger. This Peter Pan prequel/reboot follows the adventures of Peter, an orphan being sold into slavery, and a girl named Molly who is protecting a chest full of starstuff, a magical substance with immense power. Trials on the treacherous seas lead to wild escapades on a remote island, forcing Peter and Molly to face pirates, mermaids, crocodiles, and more before their journey ends. We talk through the book's story and then discuss the creative changes and revisions made for the stage version. We discuss the characters' names, Black Stache vs. Captain Hook, the play's story theatre format, the creative parallels the play adds, the small title change, character motivations, how Peter Pan gets his name, and more!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"I do believe in fairies! I do! I do!"  Drew and Cassie are here to gush over the 2003 film adaptation of Peter Pan starring Jeremy Sumpter, Jason Isaacs, and Rachel Hurd-Wood! This film knows that Wendy is the protagonist and focuses on the underlying romantic tensions between Peter and Wendy in some beautiful and unique ways. We talk about the movie's incredible soundtrack, a generation's crush on Jeremy Sumpter, adaptation vs. retelling, Barrie's vision for a film version of Peter Pan, the many wonderful performances from the three leads as well as Carsen Gray, Ludivine Sagnier, Richard Briers, and Theodore Chester, Neverland's location in the universe, the pink affect, the incorporation of the power of the hidden kiss throughout the movie, Hook's flight, the emotional reunion at the end, and much more!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"Just think of lovely things, and your heart will fly on wings..."  Drew and Cassie are joined by Leah from YA Book Chat to discuss the 1954 musical version of Peter Pan! With music and lyrics by Jule Styne, Mark Charlap, Betty Comden, Adolph Green, and Carolyn Leigh, the original Broadway production starred Mary Martin as Peter Pan and Cyril Ritchard as Captain Hook. An adaptation of this production was televised in 1955, 1956, and 1960. Olympic gymnast Cathy Rigby would eventually claim the role of Peter, and famously played the role on stage for over four decades. For this episode, we compare and contrast 1960 televised Mary Martin version and the 2003 production starring Cathy Rigby that was professionally filmed for A&E. Drew also bit the bullet and watched the 2014 Peter Pan Live! starring Allison Williams and Christopher Walken, and sprinkles in some of the changes they made - some bad, some good. We discuss the different Nanas, the medicine scene, Cathy Rigby's massive amounts of fairy dust, the differences between Martin and Rigby's portrayals of Peter, the too-slowly-evolving portrayal of Tiger Lily and her tribe, the enigma of Liza's presence in Neverland, "Oh, My Mysterious Lady" vs. Marooner's Rock, the Hamlet joke, the casting choices for Adult Wendy and Jane, and so much more!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

It's time to leave the rabbit hole behind and fly off to Neverland! Drew and Cassie give their final thoughts on Alice in Wonderland and its place in history before moving on to our next story, Peter Pan by Sir J. M. Barrie. This is by far the longest and most complex story we've looked at so far, so we work our way through the story's plot, along the way discussing Barrie's unique writing style, Peter as the embodiment of childhood, the rich details of the novel, the parallels between Captain Hook and Mr. Darling, the intentionality of symbolism, Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, Wendy as a protagonist, the genius of saving Tinker Bell, and much more. You won't want to miss Drew's explanation of why this story means so much to him. Plus, we reveal the Peter Pan criteria and which retellings we'll be reading and watching this month!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"I give myself very good advice... but I very seldom follow it."  Drew and Cassie are joined by Drew's sister-in-law, Emily, for our final week talking about Alice's Adventures in Wonderland! First, we talk through the 1951 animated film, then we take a look at the 2010 live action reboot directed by Tim Burton, starring Mia Wasikowsa, Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, and Anne Hathaway. We discuss the universal inclusion of the Tweedles in Wonderland, the cut song "Beneath the Laughing Sky," the new character of the Doorknob, the Disneyfication of The Walrus and the Carpenter, Long Neck Alice, which characters were cut, a Very Funny Jell-O Commercial, Alice's not-like-other-girls syndrome, reimagining live action Alice's story arch, the uncanny valley effect, the creative new character names, Drew tells us about Wonderland in the theme parks, and much more!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"Off with their heads!"  For this week's special Valentine's episode, we are looking at Heartless by Marissa Meyer! Drew and Cassie are joined by Bethanie A. Finger from Prince Kai Fan Pod, the Marissa Meyer Book Club Podcast to discuss this 2016 YA prequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.  Heartless follows Catherine, a young woman who wants to open the finest bakery in Wonderland, but is being held back by her duty to her family as well as an impending -and unwanted - engagement to the King of Hearts.  When Cath encounters Jest, the handsome and mysterious court joker, she feels the pull of true attraction for the first time in her life. At the risk of offending the king and infuriating her parents, she and Jest enter into an intense, secret courtship. Cath is determined to define her own destiny and fall in love on her terms. But in a land thriving with magic, madness, and monsters, fate has other plans.  We discuss the book's many nods and references to the original Carroll books, the backstories for characters other than the Queen of Hearts, the Starkid musical Twisted, the origin of Margaret Mearle's name, the parallels of Cath's and Jest's struggles, an examination of Hatta's character, Heartless the Musical, and... the movie Titanic?? Plus, we call this book "brilliant" about a hundred times!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"When I used to read about fairy tales, I never thought I would end up in the middle of one."  For our second week of Alice in Wonderland Month, Drew and Cassie are taking a look at the 1999 TV film starring Tina Majorino, Whoopi Goldberg, Miranda Richardson, Martin Short, Ben Kingsley, Gene Wilder, and many, many more. This adaptation of the Alice story sticks very faithfully to the original Lewis Carroll book, but also adds a few Looking-Glass characters and introduces a lovely framework that gives meaning to Alice's journey. We discuss the movie's strange use of the looking-glass, the amazing opening credits, the addition of the extra Looking-Glass characters, Alice's journey, the unique interpretation of the Caterpillar, and much more!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"Believe it or not, we are in your head!"  Things are getting curiouser and curiouser as we begin our Alice in Wonderland month! In this episode, Drew and Cassie discuss Alice, the 2009 TV min-series from Showcase and Syfy starring Caterina Scorsone, Kathy Bates, Andrew Lee-Potts, Matt Frewer, Colm Meany, Philip Winchester, and Tim Curry. This Alice is a contemporary judo instructor, and her Wonderland is reimagined as a dystopia injected with elements of sci-fi and fantasy. Alice finds herself wrapped up in plot to take down the Queen of Hearts, who has been kidnapping people from Alice's world and sucking out their emotions to sell to the people of Wonderland. In addition to discussing this fascinating version of Alice's circumstances, we talk about the movie's design choices, the new functions of the various Wonderland characters, our opinions on Mad March, the funky timeline, the incorporation of The Walrus and The Carpenter poem, how excited we both were to recognize Matt Frewer, and much more!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

It's time to let the snow melt away and head down the rabbit hole - and through the looking glass, too! Drew and Cassie are back from hiatus to give their final thoughts on The Snow Queen and, as always, talk about our ideas for how we would retell the tale. Then we begin our discussion on Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll. Cassie gives us a fascinating glimpse into the importance of Carroll's works in the history of children's literature before we discuss our opinions on the original Alice books. Then we explain what criteria we'll be looking for in our Alice retellings, and we reveal which movies and books we'll be discussing throughout the month!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"The lack of resemblance to The Snow Queen never bothered me anyway."  Look, we like Frozen. But is it a retelling of The Snow Queen? Drew and Cassie are here to sort it all out! Disney's 2013 animated film tells the tale of Elsa, a princess who is about to be crowned queen, but is also grappling with hiding her secret magic powers of ice and snow. These secret powers have estranged Elsa from her sister, Anna. But when Elsa's powers come to light, she flees, and Anna must journey up the North Mountain to try to bring Elsa back and end the magical winter she has accidentally brought upon the kingdom. We try to find as many connections as we can, and still deliver the full Of Slippers and Spindles Disney episode treatment by talking through the movie, discussing the Broadway musical, touching on the sequels and spin-offs, and wrapping up with the theme parks. Plus, find out what story we will talking about next!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"The more you see of evil, the more evil seems limitless. I guess the same goes for good, but I haven't seen as much of that."  In our fourth week of discussing The Snow Queen, we are talking about Stealing Snow by Danielle Paige. This 2016 YA novel follows the ventures of Snow, a seventeen-year-old girl who has spent most of her life in Whittaker Psychiatric. Snow's life turns upside down when the boy she loves is pulled into an alternate world and as she follows him, Snow learns that she is from this alternate world as well. Not only that, but this world's wicked tyrant king is Snow's real father, she has magic powers, and she is involved in a prophecy that will allegedly determine this world's fate. To put it mildly, we have some strong opinions on this one! We share our feelings on the story's twists, the novel's pacing, the unresolved storylines, the trio of romantic interests, and much more!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"Loving something doesn't mean that you own it."  It's a very special episode!! For the first time in six and a half years, Drew and Cassie were together in-person, and we got to record this episode sitting at the same table in the same room! This week we're talking about our third adaptation of The Snow Queen, Robbergirl by ST Gibson. This retelling is unique in a couple ways, primarily because it shifts perspective to that of the robbergirl, here named Helvig. When Helvig and her band find a young woman named Gerda in the forest, they bring her back to their camp and into their way of life. As the secrets of Gerda's past slowly unravel, Helvig's own history comes to light as well, and the two women develop a romance that can only be interrupted by Gerda's determination to continue on her quest to find her missing brother. This creative revision of the story is independently published and can be easily found for purchase online!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"If you wake me up during the summer, I'll make you suffer."  This week, Drew and Cassie are joined again by Cassie's brother, Matt, to talk about Snow Queen, the 2002 Hallmark mini-series starring Bridget Fonda, Chelsea Hobbs, and Jeremy Guilbaut. This version recasts Gerda and Kai as young adults who fall in love when Kai is hired to work at Gerda's father's hotel. Their romance is interrupted by the arrival of the Snow Queen, who spirits Kai away to force him to piece together a magic mirror, sending Gerda on a journey through the domains of spring, summer, and autumn in order to bring him back. This series is a nostalgic favorite of Cassie's, and she advocates passionately throughout the episode in its favor, and we all have fun picking on some of the lighter elements and analyzing some of the stronger elements of this retelling!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"She had believed that because someone needed saving they were savable."  We begin our month discussing The Snow Queen with middle-grade novel Breadcrumbs by Anne Ursu. This book's protagonist is Hazel, a fifth-grader who is having a tough time in her life at the moment. This is exacerbated when her best friend, Jack, suddenly changes... and then disappears. Hazel embarks a complicated journey through an enchanted forest to rescue Jack from the Snow Queen - and comes across a few other Hans Christian Andersen stories along the way. We discuss the book's title, the decisions to change Gerda and Kai's names to Hazel and Jack, the inclusion of a different Kai, the many pop culture references, Hazel's experiences with the other Andersen stories, and even have some realizations along the way!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

It's time to let the curtain fall on Into the Woods and start to get icy! We start off by working through some final thoughts on Into the Woods, including discussion of the musical's ultimate message, our feelings on design concepts of the show, and a few extra personal experiences we forgot to mention. This all culminates in our assignment for the month: fancasting our dream versions of Into the Woods - you won't want to miss our legendary ideas for who should play the Witch, Cassie's clever casting for the stepsisters, or Drew's choice for Granny/Cinderella's Mother/Giant. Then we start our journey into December's fairy tale with a recap of The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen. Plus, we reveal which books and movies we will be reading and watching throughout the month!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

It's our 50th episode! We're here to “stop and take stock,” just like Cinderella did while standing there stuck on the steps of the palace. In this next episode about the 1987 musical Into the Woods by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine, Drew and Cassie take a look back. As part of our podcast's premise, we traditionally set criteria each month in order to compare the various fairy tale retellings. Since Into the Woods includes four separate fairy tales, we pulled the criteria from the our previous months covering Cinderella, Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood, and Jack and the Beanstalk to see how Into the Woods holds up! Did we feel like this Cinderella had control of her destiny? Did the musical contextualize the magical elements of Rapunzel? Does Into the Woods address the frustrating moral of Little Red Riding Hood? Are the implications of Jack's actions in the land of the giants appropriately addressed? Plus, we reveal which fairy tale we will be discussing as we return to our usual format in December!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"People make mistakes. Fathers, mothers, people make mistakes…"  Our journey through Into the Woods continues! This week, Drew and Cassie look at how Into the Woods has been adapted in a few different ways. First we break down the 2014 film starring Meryl Streep, James Corden, Emily Blunt, Anna Kendrick, and Chris Pine. We discuss the adaptations between mediums in general, Disney's changes to the Narrator and the Mysterious Man, the changes to important songs like On the Steps of the Palace, giving away plot twists too early, Johnny Depp as the Wolf, the brilliance of Agony, the cuts they made like No More, and much more. Then we talk about Broadway Junior, which adapted the first act of Into the Woods to be performed by children. Cassie gets on her soapbox about very existence of the Broadway Junior collection and then we get pretty meticulous with exactly what was eliminated in order to turn the musical into a 60-minute... skit. We also briefly touch on the illustrated book by Hudson Talbott and a couple of interesting changes he made. And yeah, we get super dramatic about all of it, but it's because we CARE!  Of Slippers and Spindles is not a spoiler-free podcast, so we do recommend watching Into the Woods before listening to the episode because we're not going to explain the story in as much detail as we usually do, since we've already done so this month. But we do want to let you know that in this particular case,  watching these particular versions may not be necessary! Viewing Disney's movie in advance may help to follow along, but you do not need to seek out Into the Woods, Jr. or the Hudson Talbott book unless you wish to!  In today's episode, Drew references the YouTube video "Adaptation, Brand, and Into the Woods" by Zack Paslay - https://youtu.be/1736u5QdVKU  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"Once upon a time... later..."  This week, Drew and Cassie are joined by Cassie's brother, Matthew, to explore the deconstruction of fairy tales in Act II of Into the Woods. In Act I, the Baker and his Wife collected the cow as white as milk, the cape as red blood, the hair as yellow as corn, and the slipper as pure as gold. They successfully lifted the curse on their house and now they have a baby, as they've wished for so long. Now, they are living "happily ever after," as are Cinderella, Jack, Little Red Riding Hood, and our other characters... or are they? Act II explores the consequences of the characters' actions in Act I in a fresh, new way. We dig in deep, discussing the complexity of Stephen Sondheim's score, the "bean theme," the many parallels between Act I and Act II, the Baker/Cinderella ship, the Jack/Little Red ship, the word "nice," some of the changes made before the show opened on Broadway, more "realization songs," dwarfs vs. dwarves, and much more that we can't reveal without getting too spoilery! What is Cassie's mysterious childhood memory of Act II? Which role was Matthew going to play in Drew's dream childhood backyard production of Into the Woods? What fascinating insights will Matthew offer regarding the Granny/Giant double casting? You'll have to listen to find out!  Throughout the episode, we reference the following productions of Into the Woods. As always, we recommend watching before listening to the episode, but you definitely don’t need to watch all of these! The original Broadway production is the one to watch for sure!  - The 1987 original Broadway production, professionally filmed in 1989 (available on Broadway HD), starring Bernadette Peters as the Witch, Chip Zien as the Baker, Joanna Gleason as the Baker's Wife, Tom Aldredge as the Narrator/Mysterious Man, and Kim Crosby as Cinderella  - The 2002 Broadway Revival production, starring Vanessa Williams as the Witch, Stephen DeRosa as the Baker, Kerry O'Malley as the Baker's Wife, John McMartin as the Narrator/Mysterious Man, and Laura Benanti as Cinderella  - The 2010 West End Regent's Park production (available on Broadway HD), starring Hannah Waddingham as the Witch, Mark Hadfield as the Baker, Jenna Russell as the Baker's Wife, Billy Boyle as the Mysterious Man, and Helen Dallimore as Cinderella  - The 2012 Central Park production, an American recreation of the West End Regent's Park production, starring Donna Murphy as the Witch, Denis O'Hare as the Baker, Amy Adams as Cinderella, Chip Zien as the Mysterious Man, and Jessie Mueller as Cinderella  - The 2019 Hollywood Bowl production, starring Patina Miller as the Witch, Skyler Astin as the Baker, Sutton Foster as the Baker's Wife, Anthony Crivello as the Mysterious Man, and Sierra Boggess as Cinderella  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"Do you know what you wish? Are you certain what you wish it what you want?"  Have we said "we're excited" enough yet? Probably, but we're going to say it approximately fifty more times. Drew and Cassie are joined by Drew's sister, Daurie, to work our way through the complexities of Act I of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine's Into the Woods. This 1987 musical tells the tale of a Baker and his Wife who learn that their next-door neighbor, a Witch, was once wronged by the Baker's father and so she placed a spell on them so they could never have a child. In order to break this spell, the Witch sends them "into the woods" to collect various iconic fairy tale objects. Act I of this musical weaves together the plots of four fairy tales: Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Rapunzel. Along the way, we talk about the show's themes, the double-cast roles, Jack and Little Red's ages, sibling rivalry, the varied portrayals of the Baker and his relationship with the Baker's Wife, Milky White, Cassie's cues from the production she assistant stage managed, the Baker's Wife's "celebrity list," the show's choreography, Daurie's experience playing Rapunzel, the brilliance of this interpretation of Cinderella, and much more, including a plethora of our favorite quotes!  Throughout the episode, we reference the following productions of Into the Woods. As always, we recommend watching before listening to the episode, but you definitely don’t need to watch all of these! The original Broadway production is the one to watch for sure!  - The 1987 original Broadway production, professionally filmed in 1989 (available on Broadway HD), starring Bernadette Peters as the Witch, Chip Zien as the Baker, Joanna Gleason as the Baker's Wife, Tom Aldredge as the Narrator/Mysterious Man, and Kim Crosby as Cinderella  - The 2002 Broadway Revival production, starring Vanessa Williams as the Witch, Stephen DeRosa as the Baker, Kerry O'Malley as the Baker's Wife, John McMartin as the Narrator/Mysterious Man, and Laura Benanti as Cinderella  - The 2010 West End Regent's Park production (available on Broadway HD), starring Hannah Waddingham as the Witch, Mark Hadfield as the Baker, Jenna Russell as the Baker's Wife, Billy Boyle as the Mysterious Man, and Helen Dallimore as Cinderella  - The 2012 Central Park production, an American recreation of the West End Regent's Park production, starring Donna Murphy as the Witch, Denis O'Hare as the Baker, Amy Adams as Cinderella, Chip Zien as the Mysterious Man, and Jessie Mueller as Cinderella  - The 2019 Hollywood Bowl production, starring Patina Miller as the Witch, Skyler Astin as the Baker, Sutton Foster as the Baker's Wife, Anthony Crivello as the Mysterious Man, and Sierra Boggess as Cinderella  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

This month we're mixing it up! Rather than focusing on various retellings of a specific tale like we usually we do, we're spending the entire month of November on just one retelling! In this episode, we start by wrapping up our final thoughts on Jack and the Beanstalk by recapping some of the recurring ideas that we found throughout the various retellings we looked at in October. We also discuss how Cassie and Drew would each retell Jack and the Beanstalk - and Drew comes up with his on the spot. Then we finally start our journey into the woods! We talk about our personal experiences discovering the 1987 musical Into the Woods by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine. We also give a spoiler-free explanation about what the musical is about without digging in too deep. Since there are no books or movies to reveal this month, we finish by giving an episode-by-episode break down of how we're going to break down Into the Woods across November!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"All the wealth, all the power, everything we have springs from the greed of your ancestor." In the final week of Jack and the Beanstalk month, Drew and Cassie discuss Jack and the Beanstalk: The Real Story. This retelling is a 3-episode mini-series from Hallmark that aired in 2001 and features an all-star cast that includes Matthew Modine, Jon Voight, Mia Sara, Vanessa Redgrave, Richard Attenborough, JJ Feild, Jonathan Hyde, and Daryl Hannah. Modine plays Jack Robinson, a wealthy man living in contemporary New York City who soon learns that he is the last descendant of the Jack from Jack in the Beanstalk. As Jack uncovers the truth of a story that he has always believed to be mere fiction, he learns that it's up to him to right his ancestor's wrongs. We talk about the series' timely message, Jonathan Hyde's body of work, numbers in fiction, bean pod sleeping bags, the unfortunate lack of Muppets, rushed romances, and much more!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

All right, friends, this is a fun one.  Drew and Cassie are here to duke it out over a disagreement that has lasted many years! This week's retelling of Jack and the Beanstalk is The World Above by Cameron Dokey. This is the last book in the Once Upon A Time book series, which ran from 2002-2010 and retold various fairy tales as written by different authors. Cameron Dokey's take on the Jack tale focuses less on Jack and more on his sister, Gen, who goes on her own adventure. This version is based on the tale as written by Andrew Lang and Benjamin Tabart, in which Jack's adventure is actually a quest to reclaim the castle, gold, goose, and harp that belonged to his father. In addition, Dokey loops in the legend of Robin Hood as well! Cassie has always enjoyed Dokey's books; Drew, not so much, and in high school we used to fight about it... A LOT. Is this the book that finally changed Drew's opinion on Dokey's writing? What about Cassie’s? Do we think Robin Hood has been worked in effectively? Check out the episode to find out!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

This week, we return to one of the queens of fairy tale retellings, Donna Jo Napoli. Her reimagining of the Jack and the Beanstalk tale, Crazy Jack, came out in 1999 and focuses on a Jack who is dealing with the trauma of losing his father. When a handful of beans provide a possible clue to his father's disappearance seven years ago, Jack can't stop himself from chasing the truth. Drew and Cassie discuss the romanticization of farming, the introduction of women in Jack retellings, our general opinions of Napoli books, the hazy presence of magic, rainbows, and much more!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"Fee, fi, fo, fum, Ask not whence the thunder comes For between heaven and earth is a perilous place Home to a fearsome giant race." For our first week of Jack and the Beanstalk Month, Drew and Cassie are here to talk about Jack the Giant Slayer! This 2013 film has an all-star cast including Nicholas Holt, Eleanor Tomlinson, Ewan McGregor, Stanley Tucci, Ian McShane, and Bill Nighy. Along the way, we discuss beanstalk violence, Sisters of the Never Sea, fear of heights, fear of depths, the portrayal of royalty in fairy tale retellings, the theme of history being written by the victors, Twisted: The Untold Story of the Royal Vizier, our family lineages, and Cassie's favorite game to play with her husband: "Hey, Look, It's Warwick Davis!"  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

It's time to let Little Red skip off into the woods and climb into the tale of Jack and the Beanstalk! Drew and Cassie give their final thoughts on Little Red Riding Hood, including how they have interpreted the story in their own writing. Then we work our way through an examination of October's tale, Jack and the Beanstalk. Plus, we reveal the criteria for Jack and which retellings we'll be watching and reading!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"What big ears you have!" "All the better to hear your many criticisms with." It's episode 40! Drew and Cassie are here to talk about this week's retelling of Little Red Riding Hood, Hoodwinked! We discuss this movie's shockingly star-studded including Anne Hathaway, Glenn Close, Patrick Warburton, Jim Belushi, David Ogden Stiers, and Andy Dick. We take a look at the way the movie plays with its non-traditional storytelling format and unique take on each of the Little Red character tropes. Plus, we reveal which fairy tale we will be discussing in October!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"Whatever creature you turn into, whatever form you take, I won't let go of you." In our third week of Little Red Riding Hood Month, Drew and Cassie discuss Crimson Bound by Rosamund Hodge. We once again find ourselves asking the question, "What does it take to count a book or movie as a true adaptation?" This novel, purported to be "inspired by" the story of Little Red, focuses on Rachelle, a young woman who finds herself struggling to save her world while also trapped in a classic YA love triangle. We discuss our strong feelings toward this book, the intense worldbuilding, the wandering plot, how the story may or may not relate to Little Red, and Scarlet Moon by Debbie Viguie. Plus, what is the comparison between Crimson Bound and the 90s classic The Pagemaster? Listen to find out!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"Funny, that we always told stories with wolves and beasts and demons as villains, but in real life it seemed the humans were always the worst enemies." For our second week of Little Red Riding Hood Month, we are journeying back into the world of the (Fairly) True Tales Series through the third book in the sreies, Red by Liesl Shurtliff! After we thoroughly enjoyed Shurtliff's Grump during Snow White Month, we are excited to find out how she has reimagined the girl in the red cape. This middle grade novel focuses on Red, a young girl who begins a quest for ingredients for a cure-all spell when her granny falls ill, and comes face-to-face with a wolf, a huntsman, a beast, a bear, a witch, a dwarf, a girl with golden locks, and many adventures! We break it all down in this week's episode!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"I know there must be a God, because you're the devil." It's officially the first week of Little Red Riding Hood month! This week's retelling is Red Riding Hood, the 2011 film starring Amanda Seyfried. We start off by discussing the importance of the year this movie came out and its promotional tactics, then we dive into this werewolf mystery. Did Cassie figure out who the werewolf was? Did the retelling pass the criteria? In which country did the podcast suddenly chart? And what do brown contacts have to do with this movie? You'll have to listen to find out!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

We're back! After our hiatus, Drew and Cassie return to the podcast full time! September's fairy tale is Little Red Riding Hood, so we discuss the history of the tale and break down some of the major differences between the most well-known versions as recorded by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm. If it's been a while since you've read them, you may be surprised at the endings to these stories! We also detail our criteria for the retellings and reveal which film and book adaptations of Little Red we will be looking at this month! Plus  we've got plenty of Into the Woods references waiting for you too. We're so excited to be back!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

We're not fully back, but we're briefly back! Since we've been on hiatus since February, Drew and Cassie give an update on how our lives have changed over the past few months, and then we give our final thoughts on the retellings of Snow White we looked at so long ago. We discuss Disney's influence on the tale's prevalence in our culture, thoughts on some adaptations we didn't discuss in February, Cassie issues an important apology, and as always, we share our ideas on how we would like to retell Snow White!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"Some day my prince will come..."  Well, today is "some day" and this episode is your prince! We recorded this episode back in February, and extenuating circumstances delayed it's release, but it's finally here! You can enjoy Drew and Cassie's debate once again as we disagree on Snow White's personality but agree that the sequence where the Evil Queen rushing down the stairs with her cape billowing is excellent. In addition to the 1937 animated film, we also discuss the stage adaptation that was produced for the MUNY in St. Louis and then filmed at Radio City Music Hall in New York in 1979, featuring Anne Francine as the Evil Queen along with some horrifying animals and dwarfs. Featuring misconceptions of precious gems, traumatizing trips to Walt Disney World, Silly Symphonies, and so much more!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

Of Slippers and Spindles is taking an indefinite hiatus while Drew deals with some health issues. We hope to be back with you soon. 

"If the love you for anything, it will be your beauty." In the third week of our Snow White Month, Drew and Cassie are here to discuss Girls Made of Snow and Glass by Melissa Bashardoust. This 2017 novel switches perspectives between two characters: Mina, who learns that her magician father replaced her true heart with a heart of glass and eventually ascends to the role of queen in a kingdom of eternal winter, and Lynet, her stepdaughter, who is shocked to learn that she is a clone of her father's dead wife, created by the same magician using snow and blood. The story revolves around their relationship as their lives run parallel courses in alternating timelines, their hopes and fear entwining to retell a story we all know if a fresh and beautiful new way.  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"Lips red as blood, hair black as night, bring me your heart, my dear, dear Snow White." This week, Drew and Cassie are joined by Maggie and V from the I Met You On LJ podcast to talk about the 2012 film Snow White and the Huntsman starring Kristen Stewart, Charlize Theron, and Chris Hemsworth! We discuss the film's strengths and weaknesses, world-building, bird imagery, Jupiter Ascending, the miscasting of the dwarfs, Countess Erzsébet Báthory, women in power through history, map hopping, The Matrix, a breakdown of Snow White's big speech, the twist on the kiss that awakens Snow White (and whether it actually does), and much more!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"Life is one big mirror. That which we put out into the world will always come back to us." We're kicking off our Snow White Month with the middle grade book Grump by Liesl Shurtliff! This take on the fairy tale is told from the perspective of Borlen a.k.a. Grump, one of the seven dwarfs. Having spent his whole life underground but wishing to visit the surface, Borlen finds himself in a predicament when he is magically bound to follow the orders of both Queen E.V.I.L. and her stepdaughter, Snow White. We discuss the creative world building, the nods to the Disney version, a fun and fresh take on the prince and the kiss, and our newfound cravings for diamonds and rubies!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

It's time to let The Little Mermaid sail off into the sunset as we end January and bite into a new fairy tale for February: Snow White! We start off this episode wrapping up our final thoughts on The Little Mermaid, including our own ideas for how we would like to retell the story ourselves. Then we sink our teeth into the history of Snow White and summarize the version told by the Brothers Grimm, including some changes to the tale as we commonly know it today. And of course, we reveal which Snow White books and movies we will be discussing through February!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"Watch and you'll see, someday I'll be part of your world!" It's Disney week, and Drew and Cassie are here to battle it out! We break down the story, characters, music, and more of Disney's 1989 animated film, and explore further into changes made for the 2008 stage adaptation. We discuss the incorporation of Broadway-style storytelling, Triton as a father figure, Disney characters with Shakespearean names, updates to Ursula and Eric's characters for the stage musical, the Little Mermaid Extended Universe, Disney sequels, theme parks, dinglehoppers, and who is more annoying: Scuttle, Olaf, or Jaq and Gus? And of course, there’s plenty of discourse about Ursula the sea witch. Plus, find out which fairy tale we will be talking about in February!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"There's something a little monstrous in both of us. And maybe it has to be that way for us to survive." In the third week of our Little Mermaid Month, we read The Seafarer's Kiss by Julia Ember! This 2017 novel tells the story of Ersel, a mermaid living in frozen seas far north, who becomes entangled in the tricky dealings of the Norse god Loki. Among other things, we discuss the question of how much of a classic story must remain intact for a new version to still be a retelling, not just as it relates to this novel but also as it relates to an outlandish statement that the musical Grease is a retelling of The Little Mermaid!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"Go and you will see that nothing is as wonderful as our dreams can make it." In our second week of Little Mermaid Month, we are looking at Mermaid by Carolyn Turgeon. This 2011 novel alternates points of view between Lenia, the mermaid, and Margrethe, the princess on the beach who finds the prince, as their lives entwine closer and closer together until they reach an unexpected ending to the classic tale. We discuss the relationship between the two leading women, the not-so-charming prince, parallels within the two narratives, speculation on Margrethe's lineage and prophecy, the book's title, the complexity of the sea witch, and much more! Plus, we have many thoughts on the controversial conclusion to this tale!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"You will be will be eternal like a dream." We open our month of discussing The Little Mermaid with the 1976 live action Russian film, Rusalochka. This movie makes some big - and often bizarre - changes to the original tale, and we're here to break it down! We talk about a little mermaid who keeps her voice, the random isolated musical numbers, new characters, whiplash plot points, the mermaid's agency as a character, and much more!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

It's time to close the book on Beauty and the Beast and dive into The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen! We first discuss our main takeaways from Beauty and the Beast and how we would like to retell it as writers ourselves. Then we break down the original story of The Little Mermaid, including discussion of birthday buddies, the tale's true ending, the time Drew played the Prince, Cassie's pattern of twisting her ankle on Wednesdays, and the beginnings of what is sure to be a month-long debate about the nature of the Sea Witch. Plus find out which retellings of The Little Mermaid we'll be looking at this month!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"Now I know she'll never leave me, even as she runs away..."  We're back for Part 2! In the second helping of our conversation about Disney's Beauty and the Beast, we break down the 2017 live action reboot, the movie's presence in the theme parks, and our adaptation criteria. This time we talk about changes both big and small, character revisions, the yellow dress, the novelization, French characters who speak with British accents and apparently don't know French, object design, Gaston stomping cabbages, new curse specs, the mistakes made with the revision of Lefou, symbolic choreography, Evermore vs. If I Can't Love Her, the direct-to-video sequels, the time Drew saw three Belles in one theme park, plus find out which fairy tale we will be talking about in January!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"For who could ever learn to love a beast?"  We could! This episode begins our discussion of a masterpiece among the Disney animated canon and a masterpiece when it comes to adapting Beauty and the Beast. In fact, our conversation went so long that we're bringing it to you in two parts! In today's episode, we recap the 1991 animated classic and discuss how it was reimagined for the Broadway stage in 1994. We talk about our adoration for the film's music and visuals, the first Disney movies we saw in theatres, fun facts and history, Susan Egan's audition process, neglected teacup children, Stockholm Syndrome, important lyrical choices, changes from the fairy tale, Prince "Adam," curse specs, the additional songs from the musical, our experiences working with Broadway actress Jenni Barber, and much more!  We'll be back with Part 2 of our discussion of Disney's Beauty and the Beast on Friday, January 1st!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"I am a lion. and I will die a lion, for no human woman will ever love me."  We head to Persia this week to discuss the novel Beast by Donna Jo Napoli! Our fourth Beauty and the Beast retelling this month explores the Beast's point of view, here the scholar prince Orasmyn, transformed into  a lion as punishment for a hubristic mistake. We explore Orasmyn's antics as he's stuck in the body of a lion, his relationship with religion, his dynamic with this version of Belle, the use of language, and our frustration with ending of this book.  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"Just because something is beautiful doesn't mean it's good." This week, we are joined by special guest Bethanie A. Finger from Prince Kai Fan Pod to discuss our first contemporary retelling of a fairy tale, Beastly by Alex Flinn! This book is told from the perspective of the beast character, now a popular and arrogant teenage boy from New York City, and explores how the story of Beauty and the Beast translates to the modern world of 2007. We talk about MySpace and Xanga, Love, Simon, the pitfalls of writing contemporary fiction, the end of the Harry Potter movies, Neil Patrick Harris, high school dances, Jane Eyre spoilers, and so much more!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"Try to find me and know me... no matter how I may be hidden from you." We read a lot of books and watch a lot of movies that we dearly love on this podcast, but every once in a while we throw a wild card into the mix, and that's what we're doing this week! We dive into the Cannon Movie Tales' 1987 movie musical version of Beauty and the Beast starring Rebecca De Mornay and John Savage. We talk about wacky character choices, bizarre music, rough acting, brutal dialogue, and admittedly decent costumes. Plus, for the first time we ponder whether an adaptation actually sticks too close to the original story!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"He cannot be so bad if he loves roses so much." Beauty by Robin McKinley is one of the first modern fairy tale retellings as we know them today, so there's no better way to start our Beauty and the Beast Month!  Truly, this novel helped shape the genre that this podcast is all about. Drew's friend, Laura, joins us to talk about this formative adaptation of one of her favorite tales! Along the way we discuss the importance of names in this novel, the strength of Beauty's characterization, and much more. Plus, we drool over the particular magic of the castle library McKinley created!  As always, this podcast is not spoiler-free for the book being discussed, but this week we also mention a few spoilers for Robin McKinley's second retelling of Beauty and the Beast, Rose Daughter. We talk about Rose Daughter from 1:09:30-1:14:55 so please feel free to skip through that segment if you would like to avoid those spoilers!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

It's time to say goodbye to Rapunzel for now and hello to Beauty and the Beast! Drew and Cassie give their final thoughts on the adaptations of Rapunzel we looked at this month and as always, offer some ideas on how we would retell this story ourselves. Then we jump right into the history of Beauty and the Beast and summarize the fairy tale as we know it today, offering plenty of commentary on the way. We also reveal the five adaptations of Beauty and the Beast we will be exploring throughout the month of December!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"Flower gleam and glow, let your power shine..."We are joined again by Drew's sister, Daurie, to talk about her favorite movie, Tangled! We discuss the Disneyfication of the Rapunzel tale, Cassie's out-of-the-box first time watching this movie, Daurie's friend who had to ban the movie from her house, real-life lantern launches, Percy Jackson, 20th Century Fox's Anastasia, anonymous penpal stories, and so much more. Plus, we reveal the fairy tale we will be discussing in December!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

In the third week of Rapunzel Month, we head into the Swiss Alps in the 1500s to discuss Zel by Donna Jo Napoli. This literary retelling of the tale dives into the psychology of not just Rapunzel but also the prince and witch characters by alternating perspectives through its text.  This novel was fascinating to cover, because it was one of the first fairy tale retellings for both Cassie and Drew! Plus this week you'll experience Drew coming up with a conspiracy theory about a goose, and you'll hear the tragic tale of Cassie's elementary school first love!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"WANTED: DEAD OR ALIVE: RAPUNZEL. For horse thieving, kidnapping, jail breaking, and using her hair in a manner other than nature intended!" Yee-haw! We're puttin' on  our cowboy hats and fancy boots and shiny spurs as we're fixin' to head into the Wild West! This week we're talking about Rapunzel's Revenge by Shannon and Dean Hale and illustrated by Nathan Hale. Just like last week, we see Rapunzel team up with Jack (of Beanstalk fame), this time in a graphic novel that transforms our tower-trapped maiden into a spirited cowgirl who uses her famously long braids as whips and lassos! It's sure to be a rootin'-tootin' good time!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"'Look around you as you as you travel,' she said. 'Listen and be willing to hear. Because the Redlands itself is at steak, prisoner child, and when it is threatened, so is Tyme.'" We launch Rapunzel Month with an exploration of the first book in the Tyme series, Grounded: The Adventures of Rapunzel by Megan Morrison. Rapunzel meets Jack the Beanstalker in this remarkably creative retelling full of magic, fairies, witches, giants, adventures, kidnappings, reunions, redemption, incredible world-building, complex relationships, and a jack tournament. Cassie and Drew spend the hour gushing over their love and adoration for this book, this series, and Morrison's genius imagination, and we speculate about which fairy tales could lie ahead in the murky future of the Tyme series.  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

We're abandoning one princess in a tower for another! It's already the end of our time discussing Sleeping Beauty! We cap off this month by giving our final thoughts on this tale, talking about the Sleeping Beauty musical we performed in as children, and revealing how we would retell this story ourselves. Then it's time to move into our fairy tale for November: Rapunzel! We deep dive into the major changes the Brothers Grimm made between the two editions of the story they published in 1812 and 1857, looping in discussion of one of its predecessors, Petrosinella by Giambattista Basile. We also reveal the four adaptations of Rapunzel we'll be reading and watching over the next month and the criteria we'll be using to examine them. All of this, plus discussion of dinosaurs, National Novel Writing Month, and so much more!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"They say if you dream a thing more than once, it's sure to come true." In the final week of Sleeping Beauty Month, Drew and Cassie explore two adaptations of the fairy tale from the Walt Disney Company. First up is the 1959 animated feature, including discussion of the fairies as the true leads and the pronunciation of the word "homage." Then we examine Maleficent, the 2014 live action reimagining of the original film starring Angelina Jolie and Elle Fanning, which differs in major ways and delves into some deeper themes and concepts. And at the end of the episode, we reveal which fairy tale we will be discussing in November!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

In the third week of Sleeping Beauty Month, we dive into the middle grade book Sleeping Beauty: The One Who Took The Really Long Nap by Wendy Mass. We explore Mass's inclusion of the ogre mother-in-law from the Charles Perrault version of Sleeping Beauty, overprotective parents, twin castles, and questions of identity that we would love to see explored more in this tale!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"We may not like it, but we need human friends, because we have human enemies whether we will or nay." After a struggle spanning multiple decades, Cassie has finally managed to swindle Drew into reading Spindle's End by Robin McKinley. As we continue on into the second week of Sleeping Beauty Month, we discuss the clever ways in which McKinley breathes life into this tale while simultaneously twisting and maintaining the story's origins. We discuss the book's relationship dynamics, the permeation of magic through the story, and much more, plus Cassie sheds light on the novel's dreamlike final battle for Drew because he's very confused.  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"Do I dare to awake you to reality?" This week, Drew and Cassie themselves break down as they break down the Sleeping Beauty episode of Shelley Duvall's Faerie Tale Theatre. This television episode from 1983 features an all-star cast, including Bernadette Peters, Christopher Reeve, and Carol Kane, but oh boy, does this script go off the rails! Cassie has to lead Drew through several portions of this one because he has no idea what's going on. We discuss virtuous characters in a script full of inappropriate jokes, a character named Squire Tuck, a villain who is defeated by breaking their fingernails, and so much more.  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

We're fleeing from the ball and heading into a tower wrapped in thorns! In the first-ever monthly Sunday Bonus Episode, Drew and Cassie conclude Cinderella Month with final thoughts and observations, and Drew confesses his first and only missed stage entrance which just so happened to be in a play that brought together multiple versions of Cinderella from across different cultures. Before we leave Cinderella behind, we each talk about versions of Cinderella that we have written ourselves! Then, we launch Sleeping Beauty Month by tracking its history through the Italian, French, and German reincarnations of the story, including discussion of some of the more sinister elements this tale has included over the years. Plus, learn which adaptations of Sleeping Beauty we will be reading and watching this month and what criteria we will be using to analyze them!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"A dream is a wish your heart makes..." In the final week of Cinderella Month, Drew and Cassie discuss Disney's versions of Cinderella! First we talk about the 1950 animated feature and its two sequels, and in the second half we gush over the incredible live action reboot from 2015 starring Lily James and Cate Blanchett. Then we go on to talk about Cinderella's presence in the Disney theme parks, and even more! We find cinematic parallels, break down important and poignant moments, and admired Richard Madden's alarmingly blue eyes. Perhaps most importantly, Drew reveals a surprising connection to one of the characters from Disney's Cinderella, and we reveal the fairy tale we'll be talking about next month!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"A bird may love a fish, seniore, but where would they live?" Cinderella Month continues as Drew and Cassie discuss the 1998 blockbuster Ever After, starring Drew Barrymore and Anjelica Huston. This week, we discuss how this film brilliantly addresses the plot transgressions of the original fairy tale as it gives its Cinderella new agency, develops a narrative for the prince, breathes life into the stepmother's motivations, and casts the one and only historical Leonardo da Vinci in the role of the fairy godmother. Plus, you can enjoy our complaints of historical inaccuracy in Hollywood!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"She was a cyborg, and she would never go to a ball." Cyborgs and androids and Roombas, oh my! What happens when you replace the famous glass slipper with a robotic foot? Cinderella Month continues as Drew and Cassie discuss the first book in The Lunar Chronicles series, Cinder by Marissa Meyer. We talk about the ways in which this retelling takes the tale back to its Chinese roots while also projecting forward into the sci-fi future, the clever dynamics and parallels between this Cinderella and her prince, our favorite nods to the French version of Cinderella, and the many forms the fairy godmother takes!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"Impossible things are happening every day!" In the second week of Cinderella Month, Cassie and Drew are joined by Drew's sister, Daurie, to talk about the musical adaptation of the fairy tale by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. We examine the ways this classic musical has evolved the years, from Julie Andrews's performance to Brandy Norwood's and more. Hear about the choices Cassie made as a fairy tale enthusiast when she directed the show, Daurie's experience playing Queen Constantina, and how the stepsisters traumatized Drew as a child!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

"'My gift is obedience. Ella will always be obedient. Now stop crying, child.' I stopped.” Cassie and Drew break down the first retelling of Cinderella Month as we gush over the novel Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine and critique the infamous movie adaptation starring Anne Hathaway and Hugh Dancy. Is the novel the best Cinderella adaptation of all time? Is the movie version even a Cinderella retelling? Plus, which Shrek character does Heidi Klum parallel as Brumihlda the Giant?  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

They say a pair of shoes can save your life, just ask Cinderella... or Cendrillon... or Aschenputtel or Cinder-Maid or Rhodopis or Ye Xian or Tam or Cenerentola or any of the many heroines dating as far back as the first century A.D. who fit the profile of the young woman who rises above her station thanks to the loss of a piece of footwear. Drew and Cassie kick off Cinderella month by discussing the basic elements of this classic tale, comparing the differences of the two most popular versions, and revealing which book and film adaptations they will be surveying throughout the month. Also up for discussion, are magical sports more interesting than real-life sports?  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com 

In Of Slipper and Spindle's inaugural episode, Drew and Cassie discuss the origins of their friendship, their introductions to fairy tale retellings, and the reasons they love fairy tales so much! Along the way, they also reveal their favorite fairy tales, explore what exactly is the difference between myths, legends, fables, folk tales, and fairy tales, and set up the mission and future format of this podcast!  Join our community! View all of the benefits of joining our Patreon including the Official Of Slippers and Spindles Book Club, exclusive polls, monthly bookmarks, Zoom hangouts, and more! https://patreon.com/ofslippersandspindles  Visit our our new merch story, Facebook group, Instagram, and more! https://linktr.ee/ofslippersandspindles  We love to hear from you! You can reach us at [email protected] Music: Through The Woods by Shane Ivers - https://www.silvermansound.com