The new action platform game Fairytale Fights was released in October of this year. Based on the Unreal 3 game engine, it features an unnamed hero who creates a swath of bloody destruction through Little Red Riding Hood, The Naked Emperor and various other Grimm creations.
And thank god. For how long have we all sat home, with nothing-very-much to do, and thought “hey, I would love to fire up the old PS3 and start slicing the innards out of Rumpelstiltskin”. Well, now our afternoons can be complete.
So, obviously this takes the idea of PD characters and their cultural manipulation to a pretty extreme place. Despite the juvenile nature of the characters and animation this is a rated M mature audience game. And yes, it’s stupid. Severely, severely stupid and childish and also kind of fun. And that’s one of the reasons PD is important, because we need to be able to make mistakes with characters, to be stupid and silly with them. Otherwise, how will we know when we have been great with them.
Censorship gives me a rash, and so maybe Mickey Mouse(TM) shouldn’t be depicted getting raped by an angry Scrooge McDuck armed only with the business end of an american flag. But by god, we’ve got to try or we’ll never create the all encompassing commentary on Mickey’s place in our soulless world. We need to get through this kind of silly in order to get to the sweet.
Copyfight is an ongoing series of articles that chronicles the use and abuse of the public domain in our daily lives.
