Jack the Giant Killer (DIJOEWAL)

Judul : Jack the Giant Killer
Karya : ?
Tahun Cetak : 70-an awal atau akhir 60-an
Produksi : Jawa Tengah

sebuah film bikinan tahun 1962 dan diremake (dibuat ulang) pada bulan desember 2011 kemarin. kisah kegigihan seorang anak lelaki dalam melawan sihir dan mahkluk2 aneh. menurut wiki begini :

"Jack the Giant Killer" is a Cornish fairy tale about a plucky lad who slays a number of giants during King Arthur's reign. The tale is characterized by violence, gore, and blood-letting. Giants are prominent in Cornish folklore and Welsh Bardic lore. Some parallels to elements and incidents in Norse mythology have been detected in the tale, and the trappings of Jack's last adventure with the giant Galigantus suggest parallels with French and Breton fairy tales. Jack's belt is similar to the belt in "The Valiant Little Tailor", and his magical sword, shoes, cap, and cloak are similar to those owned by Tom Thumb or those found in Welsh and Norse mythology.

Neither Jack or his tale are referenced in English literature prior to the eighteenth century, and his story did not appear in print until 1711. It is probable an enterprising publisher assembled a number of anecdotes about giants to form the 1711 tale. One scholar speculates the public had grown weary of King Arthur – the greatest of all giant killers – and Jack was created to fill his shoes. Henry Fielding, John Newbery, Dr. Johnson, Boswell, and William Cowper were familiar with the tale.

In 1962, a feature-length film based on the tale was released starring Kerwin Mathews. The film made extensive use of stop-motion animation in the manner of Ray Harryhausen.

Tales of monsters and heroes are abundant around the world, making the source of "Jack the Giant Killer" difficult to pin down however the ascription of Jack relation to Cornwall suggests a Brythonic (Celtic) origin. The early Welsh tale How Culhwch won Olwen (tentatively dated to c. 1100), set in Arthurian Britain places Arthur as chief among the kings of Britain.[1] The young hero Culhwch ap Cilydd makes his way to his cousin Arthur's court at Celliwig in Cornwall where he demands Olwen as his bride; the beautiful daughter of the giant Ysbaddaden Ben Cawr ('Chief of Giants'). The Giant sets a series of impossible tasks which Arthur's champions Bedwyr and Cai are honour-bound to fulfill before Olwen is released to the lad; and the Giant King must die. Folklorists Iona and Peter Opie have observed in The Classic Fairy Tales (1974) that "the tenor of Jack's tale, and some of the details of more than one of his tricks with which he outwits the giants, have similarities with Norse mythology." An incident between Thor and the giant Skrymir in the Prose Edda of ca. 1220, they note, resembles the incident between Jack and the stomach-slashing Welsh giant. The Opies further note that the Swedish tale of "The Herd-boy and the Giant" shows similarities to the same incident, and "shares an ancestor" with the Grimms's "The Valiant Little Tailor", a tale with wide distribution. According to the Opies, Jack's magical accessories – the cap of knowledge, the cloak of invisibility, the magic sword, and the shoes of swiftness – could have been borrowed from the tale of Tom Thumb or from Norse mythology, however older analogues in British Celtic lore such as Y Mabinogi and the tales of Gwyn Ap Nudd, cognate with the Irish Fionn Mac Cumhaill, suggest that these represent attributes of the earlier Celtic gods such as the shoes associated with triple-headed Lugus; Welsh Lleu Llaw Gyffes of the Fourth Branch, Arthur's invincible sword Caledfwlch and his Mantle of Invisibility Gwenn one of the Thirteen Treasures of Britain mentioned in two of the branches; or the similar cloak of Caswallawn in the Second Branch.[2][3] Ruth B. Bottigheimer observes in The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales that Jack's final adventure with Galigantus was influenced by the "magical devices" of French fairy tales.[4] The Opies conclude that analogues from around the world "offer no surety of Jack's antiquity."[3]

The Opies note that tales of giants were long known in Britain. King Arthur's encounter with the giant of St Michael's Mount - or Mont Saint Michel in Brittany[5] - was related by Geoffrey of Monmouth in Historia Regum Britanniae in 1136, and published by Sir Thomas Malory in 1485 in the fifth chapter of the fifth book of Le Morte d'Arthur:[3]

Then came to [King Arthur] an husbandman ... and told him how there was ... a great giant which had slain, murdered and devoured much people of the country ... [Arthur journeyed to the Mount, discovered the giant roasting dead children,] ... and hailed him, saying ... [A]rise and dress thee, thou glutton, for this day shalt thou die of my hand. Then the glutton anon started up, and took a great club in his hand, and smote at the king that his coronal fell to the earth. And the king hit him again that he carved his belly and cut off his genitours, that his guts and his entrails fell down to the ground. Then the giant threw away his club, and caught the king in his arms that he crushed his ribs ... And then Arthur weltered and wrung, that he was other while under and another time above. And so weltering and wallowing they rolled down the hill till they came to the sea mark, and ever as they so weltered Arthur smote him with his dagger.

Anthropophagic giants are mentioned in The Complaynt of Scotland in 1549, the Opies note, and, in King Lear of 1605, they indicate, Shakespeare alludes to the Fee-fi-fo-fum chant (" ... fie, foh, and fumme, / I smell the blood of a British man"), making it certain he knew a tale of "blood-sniffing giants". Thomas Nashe also alluded to the chant in Have with You to Saffron-Walden, written nine years before King Lear.,[3] the earliest version can be found in The Red Ettin of 1528.[6]

The Opies observe that "no telling of the tale has been recorded in English oral tradition", and that no mention of the tale is made in sixteenth or seventeenth century literature, lending weight to the probability of the tale originating from the oral traditions of the Cornish (and/or Breton) 'droll teller'.[7]
The History of Jack and the Giants

"The History of Jack and the Giants" (the earliest known edition) was published in two parts by J. White of Newcastle in 1711, the Opies indicate, but was not listed in catalogues or inventories of the period nor was Jack one of the folk heroes in the repertoire of Robert Powel, a puppeteer established in Covent Garden. "Jack and the Gyants" however is referenced in The Weekly Comedy of 22 January 1708, according to the Opies, and in the tenth number Terra-Filius in 1721.[3]

As the eighteenth century wore on, Jack became a familiar figure. Research by the Opies indicate that the farce Jack the Giant-Killer was performed at the Haymarket in 1730; that John Newbery printed fictional letters about Jack in A Little Pretty Pocket-Book in 1744; and that a political satire, The last Speech of John Good, vulgarly called Jack the Giant-Queller, was printed ca. 1745.[3] The Opies and Bottigheimer both note that Henry Fielding alluded to Jack in Joseph Andrews (1742); Dr. Johnson admitted to reading the tale; Boswell read the tale in his boyhood; and William Cowper was another who mentioned the tale.[3][4]

In "Jack and Arthur: An Introduction to Jack the Giant Killer", Thomas Green writes that Jack has no place in Cornish folklore, but was created at the beginning of the eighteenth century simply as a framing device for a series of gory, giant-killing adventures. The tales of Arthur precede and inform "Jack the Giant Killer", he notes, but points out that Le Morte d'Arthur had been out of print since 1634 and concludes from this fact that the public had grown weary of Arthur. Jack, he posits, was created to fill Arthur's shoes.[8]

Bottigheimer notes that in the southern Appalachians of America Jack became a generic hero of tales usually adapted from the Brothers Grimm. She points out however that "Jack the Giant Killer" is rendered directly from the chapbooks except the English hasty pudding in the incident of the belly-slashing Welsh giant becomes mush.[4]

Child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim observes in The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (1976) that children may experience "grown-ups" as frightening giants, but stories such as "Jack" teach them that they can outsmart the giants and can "get the better of them." Bettelheim observes that a parent may be reluctant to read a story to a child about adults being outsmarted by children, but notes that the child understands intuitively that, in reading him the tale, the parent has given his approval for "playing with the idea of getting the better of giants", and of retaliating "in fantasy for the threat which adult dominance entails."[9]
1962 film
Main article: Jack the Giant Killer (1962 film)

In 1962, United Artists released a middle budget film produced by Edward Small and directed by Nathan H. Juran called Jack the Giant Killer. Kerwin Mathews stars as Jack and Torin Thatcher as the sorcerer Pendragon. Jim Stafford of TCM notes that the four men made The 7th Voyage of Sinbad an artistic and commercial triumph in 1958, and hoped Jack would be just as successful. The film performed moderately well at the box office, despite a review in The New York Times that slammed the acting, the dialogue, and the "rubber" monsters.[13] Many would say that the movie was a Ray Harryhausen film, but in truth, it was not. The special effects were handled by, among others, animators Wah Chang, Gene Warren and Jim Danforth. In their defense, they didn't build the models themselves and, therefore, they weren't as mobile as they'd have liked, limiting the model's movements somewhat and reducing the smoothness of the animation.

Stafford points out that the screenplay is based on Cornish folklore, but the plot resembles the damsel in distress theme of 7th Voyage: a hero battles giants and monsters to rescue a princess held captive by a sorcerer. Some elements appear to be borrowed from other films Stafford notes. The disembodied torch-carrying arms, for example, recall those in Cocteau's La Belle et La Bête, the dragon suggests that in Walt Disney's Sleeping Beauty, and Pendragon's witches and demons were probably inspired by the banshees in Disney's Darby O'Gill and the Little People. At a later date, producer Small added songs and the film was rereleased as a musical.[13]

According to imdb.com, the film went unreleased in the UK until 1967 and even then received cuts for an 'A' (now a PG) certificate to edit the witch attack on the ship, Princess Elaine being attacked by the giant, and Jack's fight with the dragon. Versions that were shown on UK television in the early 1990s had further cuts in the scene where Jack kills Cormoran with a scythe, rendering the scene almost unintelligible. It has since been shown uncut on Channel 4 and The Sci-Fi Channel.