Henny Penny
The story was part of the oral folk tradition and only began to appear in print after the Brothers Grimm had set a European example with their collection of German tales in the early years of the 19th century.
One of the earliest to collect tales from Scandinavian sources was Just Mathias Thiele, who in 1823 published an early version of the Henny Penny story in the Danish language.
[9] In this Chicken-licken was startled when "an acorn fell on her bald pate" and encounters the characters Hen-len, Cock-lock, Duck-luck, Drake-lake, Goose-loose, Gander-lander, Turkey-lurkey and Fox-lox.
[12] However, a much earlier oration delivered to the city of Boston on July 4, 1844 contains the passage: To hear their harangues on the eve of the election, one would suppose that the fable of Chicken Little was about to become a truth, and that the sky was actually falling.
[13]Behavioural scientists have recognised that such typical fearmongering can sometimes elicit a response called Chicken Little syndrome, described as "inferring catastrophic conclusions possibly resulting in paralysis".
In support it quotes Christian Connection's Herald of Gospel Liberty for 2 November 1922 as referring to another character in the tale too: "Those who encourage nostrums and quacks are Goosey Pooseys and Chicken Lickens.
Round about 1900, Florence Hoare included "Henny Penny" as part of her suite of "Seven Children's Songs" written to fit music originally arranged by Johannes Brahms in 1858.
[19] And in their song "Moving in with" (from Bummed, 1986), the English band Happy Mondays included the refrain: "Henny Penny, Cocky Locky, Goosey Loosey/ Turkey Lurky, Tricky Licky, Ducky Lucky/ I'd say we're all on the move when the sound's falling in.” [20] In the US there are many CDs, films, novels, and songs titled "The Sky is Falling", but the majority refer to the idiomatic use of the phrase rather than to the fable from which it derives.
[21] However, the song "Livin' on the Edge", from the album Get a Grip (1993) by Aerosmith, goes much further in the lines "If Chicken Little tells you that the sky is falling,/ Even if it wasn't would you still come crawling/ back again?
"[22] A further example is the song "Chicken Little" (Fancy, 1997) by Idiot Flesh, especially in the refrain "The sky is falling, gotta tell the king" and the inclusion of the names of other characters from the story at the end.
The first was Chicken Little, a 1943 animated short released during World War II as one of a series produced at the request of the U.S. government for the purpose of discrediting Nazism.
It tells a variant of the parable in which Foxy Loxy takes the advice of a book on psychology (on the original 1943 cut, it is Mein Kampf) by striking the least intelligent first.
Another film adaptation was the animated TV episode "Henny Penny" (1999), which was part of the HBO series Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales for Every Child.
[24] Then in 2007 the singer and composer Gary Bachlund used the text of Margaret Free's reading version of "Chicken Little" (The Primer, 1910) with a similar teaching aim.
[25] The folk tale's educative potential was also illustrated in the final episode of season 6 of the American TV sitcom, The Golden Girls (May 4, 1991), where Dorothy, Blanche, Rose and Sophia perform a musical version of Henny Penny ending in increasing literacy in the school where one of them teaches.
[27] Designed for between six and a hundred junior actors, it has additional characters as optional extras: Funky Monkey, Sheepy Weepy, Mama Llama, Pandy Handy and Giraffy Laughy (plus an aggressive oak tree).
This was a participatory exercise whereby children took part in a production adapted in various European languages - French (Cocotte Chocotte), German (Hennig Pfennig), Spanish (Pollita Chiquita), Italian (Sabrina Gallina) - as well as using English.
