Another journal

There’s an episode I remember of something that can’t be Jim Henson’s The StoryTeller that’s a version of All-Fur mixed with True Bride, and mingled with some other things. The StoryTeller has an Allerleirauh episode called “Sapsorrow” that has a fabulous fur fit (and a deft rearrangement of reasons for Sapsorrow’s engagement to her father), but it’s missing a specific scene that has stuck in my memory for ages. The show also has its own separate True Bride episode, this one with a troll and a lion.

Here’s what I remember of the episode. Something something princess in a suit of furs, found in the forest by a prince out hunting. I think the prince is her lost love? She goes to work in the palace kitchens and there’s some like?? Giant keyboard with keys much like the Stargate chevrons that the princess uses to alter the soup she serves the prince with her ring in it to remind him of their love. That’s the thing I remember most, the viciously jubilant princess slamming her hands across the keys of the soup making thing as she defies the evil queen who has stolen her prince.

I have drawn the single scene I remember:

So, let us find this thing I remember, if we can.

I’ve tried looking for it before, but I had always assumed it was an episode of The Storyteller. Now though, I have the DVD set of the series and have watched it, plus it’s on Kanopy currently and has been playing in the background. The episode I’m remembering isn’t on it at all. I’d also thought it was a more true form of Allerleirauh (Aarne–Thompson type 510B, unnatural love), and not of True Bride (Aarne-Thompson types: 510, the persecuted heroine, and 884, the forsaken fiancée). First order of business then is figuring out which dang story it is the most based on.

I poked around variants of the AT types associated with True Bride and Katie Woodencloak/Kari Woodengown seems similar. Nicely, it’s related also to Allerleirauh. “Woodencloak” is a pretty solid little keyword so I tried:

-> TV adaptation katie woodencloak: no luck here, mostly just podcast episodes and TV Tropes.
-> TV episode woodencloak: going more specific, I know it was an episode of a larger show. Now here I encountered a show called “Jackanory” which sounded weirdly familiar. The problem is I’m a great reader of episode lists of random television series and went through a bit of reading descriptions of British children’s television series for a bit, so I was unsure why “Jackanory” was familiar.
-> Jackanory: lets see about the show, if that page looks familiar on Wikipedia? It doesn’t! And the show ran until 1996, so it’s very probable I caught some US-syndication of it or something. But looking at screencaps of clips from when the Woodencloak episode aired in 1969, the show was in black and white at the time, so that’s not the one, alas.

Sidetracked: Discovered epguides dot com a charmingly laid out and very intense database of episode lists for different shows. Here’s the page for Scavengers Reign, at this point in time this kind of page design is so refreshing, frankly.

Back to it. Results are getting scummy but let’s keep trying.

-> fairy tale soup woodencloak: this didn’t garner much but! Reminded me that what I watched could have been an adaptation of Donkeyskin (Aarne–Thompson type 510B, unnatural love). It wasn’t this 1970 French musical adaptation though
-> fairytale soup donkeyskin tv episode: not a lot out of this one, but oh wow, Archive.org has a bunch (all?) of Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre episodes.
-> donkeyskin tv episode live action: not a lot here, mostly that 1970s film, an entry on a lost episode creepypasta wiki (with Peter Potamus?!), but then found mention of a 1982 feature. That sadly was not it but it looks great tbh.

I was getting annoyed at how DuckDuckGo was failing at properly excluding terms (nothing truly accepts boolean search now), so I gave Marginalia a go.

Not necessarily the most productive search, as I’m starting to feel this episode remains only in my memory, but I did encounter Sur La Lune’s annotated page for Donkeyskin, which led me to Storybook International’s “Cap O’Rushes.” It, nor any of the other episodes, looked quite right so, alas!

At some point in all this I had encountered the BYU Fairy Tale TV database, because it looks like such a neat thing but the db itself seems like it isn’t working any more. So I sent an email to the project lead, because why not? Of course, so many of these types of projects disappear when the funding does so who knows if it is something that can be fixed–and if it is, if it will answer my question. [note, months later: I never heard back! alas.]

Something I hadn’t anticipated was how much the TV Show Once Upon A Time muddies the results. See also: the anime “Fairy Tail.”

Anyway, this has sat in my writing program forever. I really wanted an answer to finish it with but: I don’t think I’m ever finding this thing. I did, in my last desultory searching, learn another keyword: “thousandfurs,” which I learned thanks to a tumblr post with a Hunger Games AU concept. The keyword brought up nothing new in searches, booo.

One thing I did find during this searching is that there is a Reddit for finding things one can’t quite remember, so I made an account and put what I knew in an ask (and what I knew it wasn’t) up and maybe someday somebody will answer it, one can hope!

Anyway: THE END.

Also note: I didn’t list every search query variant I tried here, just the ones that brought up anything of note. Alas, alas, alas.