- Henny Penny
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For other uses, see Henny Penny (disambiguation)."Chicken Licken" redirects here. For the African fast food chain, see Chicken Licken (restaurant)."Chicken Little" redirects here. For films by that name, see Chicken Little (1943 film) and Chicken Little (2005 film).
Henny Penny, also known as Chicken Licken or Chicken Little, is a fable in the form of a cumulative tale about a chicken who believes the world is coming to an end. The phrase The sky is falling! features prominently in the story, and has passed into the English language as a common idiom indicating a hysterical or mistaken belief that disaster is imminent.
Contents
The story and its name
The story is listed as Aarne-Thompson-Uther type 20C, which includes international examples of folktales that make light of paranoia and mass hysteria.[1]
Illustration for the story "Chicken Little", 1916
There are several Western versions of the story, of which the best-known concerns a chick that believes the sky is falling when an acorn falls on its head. The chick decides to tell the King and on its journey meets other animals which join it in the quest. After this point, there are many endings. In the most familiar, a fox invites them to its lair and there eats them all. Alternatively, the last one, usually Cocky Lockey, survives long enough to warn the chick, who escapes. In others all are rescued and finally speak to the King. In most retellings, the animals have rhyming names, commonly:
- Chicken Licken / Chicken Little
- Henny Penny or Hen-Len
- Cocky Lockey
- Ducky Lucky (some versions have the non-rhyming Ducky Daddles)
- Drakey Lakey
- Goosey Loosey, Goosey Poosey or Gander Lander
- Turkey Lurkey
- Foxy Loxy or Foxy Woxy
The moral to be drawn changes, depending on the version. Where there is a 'happy ending', the moral is not to be a 'Chicken' but to have courage. In other versions the fable is interpreted as a warning not to believe everything you are told.
In the United States the commonest name for the story is "Chicken Little", as attested by illustrated books for children going back to the early 19th century. Alternative names - by which it is better known in Britain and its former colonies - include "Henny Penny" and "Chicken Licken". These are also known in the U.S.[note 1], but used more rarely.
Idiomatic usage
The names of the main characters in the fable - Chicken Little/Chicken Licken and Henny Penny - and the fable's central phrase - The sky is falling! - have been applied to people accused of being unreasonably afraid, or those trying to incite an unreasonable fear in those around them. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary records the first application of the name Chicken Little to 'one who warns of or predicts calamity, especially without justification’ as dating from 1895,[2] although idiomatic use of the name significantly predates that attestation.[3] Because of this association, the tale has became politicised.
Fear mongering - whether justified or not - can sometimes elicit a societal response called Chicken Little syndrome, described as "inferring catastrophic conclusions possibly resulting in paralysis".[4] It has also been defined as "a sense of despair or passivity which blocks the audience from actions".[5] The term began appearing in the 1950s[6]and the phenomenon has been noted in many different societal contexts.
See also cry wolf, a similar idiom related to the fable The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
Adaptations
Walt Disney Studios has made two animated versions of the story:
- The first adaptation was an animated short released during World War II.[7] It tells a variant of the parable in which Foxy Loxy takes the advice of a book on psychology by striking the least intelligent first and convinces dim-witted Chicken Little that the sky is falling. It was one of a series of four cartoons produced by the Walt Disney Studios at the request of the U.S. government during World War II for the purpose of discrediting totalitarianism in general and Nazism in particular. Its dark comedy is used as an allegory for the idea that fear-mongering weakens the war effort and costs lives.[8] In it, Chicken Little jumps to a conclusion and whips the populace into mass hysteria, which the unscrupulous fox manipulates for his own benefit.
- The second Disney adaptation, released in 2005, is a feature-length computer-animated film. It tells an updated science fiction sequel to the original fable in which Chicken Little is partly justified in his fears.[9]
Another film adaptation was the animated TV episode "Henny Penny" (1999), which was part of the series Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales for Every Child. In this modern update the story is given a satirical and political interpretation.
There have also been a number of musical settings and adaptations. American composer Vincent Persichetti used the fable as the plot of his only opera The Sibyl: A Parable of Chicken Little (Parable XX), op. 135 (1976), which premiered in 1985. In 2007 American singer and composer Gary Bachlund set the text of Margaret Free’s reading version of “Chicken Little” (The Primer, 1910) for high voice and piano. In his note to the score Bachlund makes it clear that he intends a reference to alarmism and its tragic consequences.[10]
On the sitcom The Golden Girls, there was a 1991 episode in which the characters perform a short musical based on the fable (here titled "Henny Panny") at a school recital.[11] This was followed in 1998 by Joy Chaitin and Sarah Stevens-Estabrook's equally light-hearted musical version of the fable, "Henny Penny".[12] 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).
In Singapore a more involved musical was performed in 2005. This was Brian Seward's The Acorn - the true story of Chicken Licken. It is a tale of mixed motivations as certain creatures (including some among the 'good guys') take advantage of the panic caused by Chicken Licken.[13]
Popular references
An 1865 edition of the story originally published in Boston in 1840There are many novels, films, CDs 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. The following are some lyrics which genuinely refer or allude to the story:
- During the later 1940s, Lightnin’ Hopkins had a song titled "Henny Penny Blues", largely on the strength of the line 'She's my little chicken, she's my honey pie'. In 2005 the Canadian poet David Pekrul borrowed the title for a lyric of his own satirising those too quick to believe prophecies of doom.
- British band Happy Mondays have the lines "Henny Penny, Cocky Locky, Goosey Loosey, Turkey Lurkey, Ducky Lucky, Chicken Little, It seems they are all on the move when the sun is falling in" in the song "Moving in with" on their second album, Bummed (1986).[14]
- The Aerosmith song "Livin' on the Edge" (1993) has the lines "If Chicken Little tells you that the sky is falling, Even if it wasn't would you still come crawling back again?"[15]
- "Chicken Little" is a song from the 1997 album Fancy, by the California avantrock band Idiot Flesh; it contains the line 'The sky is falling, gotta tell the king'.[16]
- "The Sky Is Falling" is a song by Owsley from the 1999 debut album Owsley; it includes the line "Chicken Little had a big day today".[17]
- British band Radiohead used the line "Go and tell the King that the sky is falling in" in their song "2+2=5", included on the album Hail to the Thief (2003).[18]
Related stories
A very early example containing the basic motif and many of the elements of the tale is some 25 centuries old and appears in the Buddhist scriptures as the Daddabha Jataka (J 322).[19] In it, the Buddha, on hearing about some particular religious practices, comments that there is no special merit in them, but rather that they are "like the noise the hare heard." He then tells the story of a hare disturbed by a falling fruit who believes that the earth is coming to an end. The hare starts a stampede among the other animals until a lion halts them, investigates the cause of the panic and restores calm. The fable teaches the necessity for deductive reasoning and subsequent investigation. The Tibetan version of the Jataka tale has been told in rhyme by Australian author Ursula Dubosarsky in her book "The Terrible Plop" (2009), which has since been dramatised. In this, the animal stampede is halted by a bear, rather than a lion. The ending has been changed from the Tibetan original as well.[20]
There also exists a Brer Rabbit story that is closer to the Eastern versions. In this story, Brer Rabbit initiates the panic but does not take part in the mass flight, although Brer Fox does. In this case it is Brer Terrapin that leads the animals back to question Brer Rabbit.[21]
Notes
- ^ Before Lightnin' Hopkins' "Henny Penny Blues" from the 1940s, there was a 1906 comic strip version - C365 in the Opie collection; a more recent instance is the Golden Sisters' TV skit titled "Henny Penny" (1991). The Yale Book of Quotations cites the nursery tale "Chicken Licken" as the source for 'the sky is falling' (page 21) and the character is mentioned in John Cheever's short story "The 5.48".
References
- ^ http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type2033.html
- ^ Available at Google Books
- ^ See, e.g., Francis, Convers, "A Discourse Delivered at Plymouth, Mass. Dec. 22, 1832, in Commemoration of the Landing of the Fathers", p.29, Allen Danforth, 1832.
- ^ Landry, John R. "Can Mission Statements Plant the "Seeds" of Dysfunctional Behaviors in an Organization's Memory?", Proceedings of the Thirty-First Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, p.169, 1998.
- ^ Li, Xinghua, "Communicating the "incommunicable green": a comparative study of the structures of desire in environmental advertising in the United States and China", PhD diss., p.81, University of Iowa, 2010.
- ^ See, e.g., Audio Visual Communication Review, v.3-4, pp. 226-227, National Education Association of the United States Dept. of Audiovisual Instruction, 1955
- ^ Walt Disney (1943). Chicken Little.
- ^ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYgOFqpRIlA
- ^ The opening sequence can be seen on YouTube
- ^ http://www.bachlund.org/Chicken_Little.htm
- ^ Avaialble on YouTube
- ^ [1]
- ^ There are excerpts on the publicity trailer available on YouTube
- ^ Audio on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRZjWnlboBg
- ^ Audio with lyric on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABGAbthvSRs
- ^ Audio on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3TzCgFqrcA
- ^ Audio version by The Semantics on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5b3J5FXazI
- ^ Audio on YouTube with the lyrics underneath: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waJWRYa7weo
- ^ http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/kawasaki/bl142.html#jat322
- ^ http://weheartbooks.com/2009/04/23/the-terrible-plop
- ^ Joel Chandler Harris, Nights with Uncle Remus: Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, 1883), no. 20, pp. 108-13. Online version at http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type2033.html#harris
External links
- The Remarkable Story of Chicken Little printed in Boston between 1865-71.
- SurLaLune Fairy Tale Site, Henny-Penny as collected by Joseph Jacobs, 1890
- The Cock and Hen That Went to the Dovrefell a Norwegian variant, 1888
- Happy Ending Version
Categories:- Fairy tales
- Fictional chickens
- Literature featuring anthropomorphic characters
- Jataka
- Idioms
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