Hansel and Gretel - Other Media

Other Media

• Hansel and Gretel appear in the 1954 Looney Tunes short Bewitched Bunny with Hansel voiced by Mel Blanc and Gretel voiced by Bea Benederet.

• Hansel and Gretel were featured in episodes of Sesame Street with Hansel performed by Peter Linz in Episode 4093, Heather Asch in Episode 4010, and by Matt Vogel in Episode 4025 while Gretel was performed by Noel MacNeal in Episode 4093 and by Leslie Carrara-Rudolph in Episode 4125.

• In the TV series Once Upon A Time, Hansel and Gretel are gathering kindling as their father cuts wood, but the father disappears. The wicked queen captures the children and, in return for their being returned to their father, orders them to visit the blind witch (who lives in a gingerbread house) and retrieve a satchel. The witch is thrown in the oven, and the children return with the satchel, containing a poisoned apple. The children are offered a home but would rather be with their father, so the queen throws them out. The queen has their father but refuses to release him. In the real world, the children Nicholas and Ava are homeless after their mother's death, while their biological father is a mechanic in Storybrooke and reluctant to be a parent.

• The young adult novel "Pretty Bad Things" by C.J. Skuse was strongly inspired by the tale of Hansel and Gretel and there are many nods to it throughout the book. Main characters, twins Paisley and Beau, are abandoned by their parents as children and become lost in woodland. They have a witch-like grandmother whose house is burned down by the girl twin, Paisley. There is also a media 'trail of breadcrumbs' (in the shape of the crimes the teen protagonists commit as teenagers), and both twins are obsessed with candy.

• In the 2011 animated film Hoodwinked Too! Hood vs. Evil, Hansel and Gretel, voiced by Bill Hader and Amy Poehler respectively, are portrayed as two fat German children who have been kidnapped by an evil witch, thought to be the main antagonist. It is later revealed that Hansel and Gretel are actually the real villains of the film, as they pretended to be kidnapped in order to coerce the heroes into making the goodies that will make them powerful.

• In the BBC TV series Sherlock, the final episode of Series 2, The Reichenbach Fall features a fairy tale theme with Moriarty as the classic villain. When the son and daughter of an influential American politician get kidnapped from a pricey boarding school, it is up to Sherlock and Dr. Watson to find them. Sherlock soon makes the connection between Jim Moriarty's allusion to The Grimm Fairy Tales and his current case, allowing him to realize that he has just come across the story of Hansel and Gretel. The children are found eating candy laced with mercury in an abandoned sweet factory in Addlestone.

• Terror Toons 2: The Sick and Silly Show - The witch planned to poison them with a rat and a bottle containing Nitroglycerine, but instead of killing them, it turns them into big headed, crazy cartoon characters: Hansel becomes a giant Demonic anthropomorphic rat, and Gretel becomes a criminally insane girl with ugly teeth and a big head. They rip the witch in half and almost immediately they are pulled from their world, to reality and began watching it.

• Mickey and Minnie started as Hansel and Gretel in The House of Mouse.

• The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror XI Scary Tales Can Come True are peasants living in a pumpkin cottage. When Homer comes home with news that he has been fired as the village oaf, he abandons Bart and Lisa in the woods to solve the family's food shortage. With the help of Lisa's copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales, Bart and Lisa journey through the woods' many dangerous creatures, including a troll-like Moe and the Three Bears (who viciously maul Goldilocks after Bart and Lisa leave the Three Bears' cottage, locking her inside). Meanwhile, Marge admonishes Homer for throwing out the kids, telling him they could sell them instead, and orders him to get them back. While Homer is looking for his children, he finds Rapunzel's tower. Rapunzel asks Homer to rescue her and lowers her hair so that he can climb up to her window, but Homer only succeeds in ripping Rapunzel's hair and scalp off her head. Meanwhile, Bart and Lisa find shelter in a gingerbread house owned by a witch. Lisa is wary, as she knows that the scenario Bart and Lisa are in is exactly like that from the story "Hansel and Gretel," but Bart is too busy eating treats to care. Lisa tries to stall the witch by claiming she is lonely and has no love-mate. The witch denies this, stating that there is a man named George Cauldron coming to pick her up for a date, which Lisa does not believe. Before the witch can attack Lisa and Bart, Homer comes to the rescue, eating his way through the gingerbread house's walls. The witch turns Homer into a half-chicken, half-fish creature with donkey ears and brooms as arms, then tries to roast him in the oven, but Homer overpowers her and shoves the witch inside instead. As the witch screams in pain, the spell breaks and Homer turns back to normal. A man named George Cauldron comes by, asking Homer, Bart, and Lisa if they have seen a woman named Suzanne. Homer remarks that "she'll be ready in twenty minutes", turning up the oven. Cauldron complains that "the concert's at eight." The peasant Simpsons are reunited, and are now living happily ever after with Homer still having a chicken's half-body to produce eggs for the family