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The Fantastic World of Terry Jones
Fantastic Stories
9 of Terry Jones' fairy tales, published especially for Nestle Cheerios.
83 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 1993
9 people are currently reading
135 people want to read
About the author
Terry Jones
184 books289 followersLibrarian note:
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name
Terence Graham Parry Jones was a Welsh actor, comedian, director, historian, writer and member of the Monty Python comedy troupe.
After graduating from Oxford University with a degree in English, Jones and writing partner Michael Palin wrote and performed for several high-profile British comedy programmes, including Do Not Adjust Your Set and The Frost Report, before creating Monty Python's Flying Circus with Cambridge graduates Graham Chapman, John Cleese, and Eric Idle and American animator-filmmaker Terry Gilliam. Jones was largely responsible for the programme's innovative, surreal structure, in which sketches flowed from one to the next without the use of punch lines. He made his directorial debut with Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which he co-directed with Gilliam, and also directed the subsequent Python films Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life.
Jones co-created and co-wrote with Palin the anthology series Ripping Yarns. He also wrote an early draft of Jim Henson's film Labyrinth and is credited with the screenplay, though little of his work actually remained in the final cut. Jones was a well-respected medieval historian, having written several books and presented television documentaries about the period, as well as a prolific children's author. In 2016, Jones received a Lifetime Achievement award at the BAFTA Cymru Awards for his outstanding contribution to television and film. After living for several years with a degenerative aphasia, he gradually lost the ability to speak and died in 2020 from frontotemporal dementia.
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name
Terence Graham Parry Jones was a Welsh actor, comedian, director, historian, writer and member of the Monty Python comedy troupe.
After graduating from Oxford University with a degree in English, Jones and writing partner Michael Palin wrote and performed for several high-profile British comedy programmes, including Do Not Adjust Your Set and The Frost Report, before creating Monty Python's Flying Circus with Cambridge graduates Graham Chapman, John Cleese, and Eric Idle and American animator-filmmaker Terry Gilliam. Jones was largely responsible for the programme's innovative, surreal structure, in which sketches flowed from one to the next without the use of punch lines. He made his directorial debut with Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which he co-directed with Gilliam, and also directed the subsequent Python films Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life.
Jones co-created and co-wrote with Palin the anthology series Ripping Yarns. He also wrote an early draft of Jim Henson's film Labyrinth and is credited with the screenplay, though little of his work actually remained in the final cut. Jones was a well-respected medieval historian, having written several books and presented television documentaries about the period, as well as a prolific children's author. In 2016, Jones received a Lifetime Achievement award at the BAFTA Cymru Awards for his outstanding contribution to television and film. After living for several years with a degenerative aphasia, he gradually lost the ability to speak and died in 2020 from frontotemporal dementia.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
May 12, 2014
Though unable to speak German I once acquired a modern edition of Sebastian Brandt’s 1494 satire Das Narrenschiff or 'Ship of Fools', mainly because it was illustrated with distinctive woodcuts, many by Albrecht Dürer. A fruitless search for my mislaid copy was prompted by the first story in this short story collection by Terry Jones (whose sobriquet seems destined to forever remain ‘former Python’): naturally this was a tale called ‘The Ship of Fools’. Medievalist that he is, author of Who Murdered Chaucer? and Chaucer’s Knight, he won’t have lightly chosen this tale to head this collection without a reason.
At first the story appears tedious, too childish even for a children’s book: an incompetent crew led by an idiotic Captain, Bosun and First Mate set sail for an unknown destination, accompanied by just one wise young man, Ben. The ship goes from disaster to disaster due to contrary decisions and nonsensical actions until the sensible Ben, faced with no other choice for they won’t listen to reason, abandons them to their fates. And that’s it. What’s the point of this homily? A parody of the British children’s cartoon Captain Pugwash, itself a parody? Maybe it’s a closet criticism of political leadership at the time this book was published following a decade and more of Conservative rule? Or it is merely a whimsically comic tale with no overt message?
For me ‘The Ship of Fools’ is clearly setting out the author’s stall for the following stories (nine in total selected for this edition) with, as their overall theme, the possibility of gaining wisdom from life experiences. Can one learn the right lessons from mistakes, from making the wrong decisions? Or are we, like the supposed adults on the ship of fools, happy to make a hash of life with no thought for the consequences? Is this perhaps too weighty a message to load onto a children’s book? I don’t think so – after all, both the literary fairy tale and the traditional folktale often concluded with a moral, either explicit or implied.
‘The Dragon on the Roof’ concerns an aged Chinese dragon that has landed on the home of a merchant. Concerned to eradicate this ‘threat’ (the dragon is doing little harm, and will soon die anyway) the Emperor seeks a dragon-slayer to ensure that he becomes the most popular ruler ever of China as a result. Is this not a reference to British patriotic fervour attendant on Margaret Thatcher’s defeat of Argentina over the Falkland Islands, the Argentine Malvinas? The moral, surely, is that successful rulers distract the downtrodden population with victory in war.
More parochial tales follow. ‘The Star of the Farmyard’ details the attempts by Charlemagne the cockerel to steer Stanislav the performing farm dog towards a lucrative career, with disappointing if not disastrous results. I see a commentary here on agents ill-advisedly pushing their artists towards inappropriate audiences. Later in the collection ‘Eyes-All-Over’ is about an individual whose ability to see from different parts of his body allow him to view the immediate past, distant events, other people’s mistakes and hopes and, finally, the future that will never happen. Despite all these gifts Eyes-All-Over cares only about gold and riches, not other people. This leads him to severely exploit one particular individual who throws herself on his goodwill; too late he discovers that he should have valued human relationships above material goods. The final piece in the collection -- in the style of a Kipling Just So story – reminds the reader that pride often comes before a fall: ‘How the Badger Got its Stripes’ (and, incidentally, its thief’s mask facial markings) is also in the tradition of Aesop and all those medieval morality tales involving anthropomorphised animals.
Three pieces that come closest to literary fairy tales all have a touch of Joan Aiken about them, taking well-known tropes and subtly subverting them to create beautiful but bittersweet tellings. A variation on the Snow White motif, ‘The Improving Mirror’ relates how a looking-glass has the power to make the viewer see themselves as more beautiful than they are. The already attractive but heartless Queen Pavona – the name, though the same as an Italian town and a kind of coral, is likely to be derived from pavo, the peacock – keeps it to herself. When the distraught king her husband commands the inventor of the mirror to substitute the reflection for the real queen, unforeseen consequences result; one moral is surely Don’t inflate the vanity of those already vain enough, but there are other morals too.
As well as Kipling, Jones invokes Hans Christian Anderson. In ‘The Mermaid who Pitied a Sailor’ we hear how the mermaid Varina (a Slovak word, meaning ‘foreigner’) rescues the Cabin Boy from drowning, trying to keep him as a kind of pet. What she and her kind don’t realised is that it is their siren calls that lure sailors to their doom. Unusually for such as tale, which in Anderson’s telling, la Motte Fouqué’s Undine, folktales and medieval legends about a water sprite often end unhappily, Jones’ version does end with a heart-warming conclusion.
‘Forget-Me-Nuts’ returns to a bittersweet note. The nuts in questions allow one to ignore the trials and tribulations of everyday life, and the king consumes them by the bagful. But such a drug – for drug it surely is – brings a disconnect with the real world. The Key of Memory, an object obtained only after a quest, furnishes the only route to reality, but at a cost: it can bring happiness but also grief. Last but not least is ‘The Snow Baby’, another tale which, as well as having a touch of Raymond Briggs’ The Snowman about it, uses a motif from Snow White: the childless woman who wishes for what she appears unable to have. Set at the magical time of Christmas, the last of Jones’ tales impresses us with the thought that lasting happy memories can come from short-lived miracles: an optimistic message to retain after so many other examples of human foolishness.
This edition was produced for Nestlé, which in 2003 was still sponsoring the Smarties Prize for Children's Literature. While the original 1992 hardback included more tales (and colour, not monochrome, illustrations by Michael Foreman) this selection is exquisite and surprisingly varied, from funny to shocking and silly to serious. To some adults they may be slight but I found them profound; how its target audience finds them I'm no longer of an age to say, but somehow I don't think youngsters would be all at sea with them.
http://wp.me/s2oNj1-jones
At first the story appears tedious, too childish even for a children’s book: an incompetent crew led by an idiotic Captain, Bosun and First Mate set sail for an unknown destination, accompanied by just one wise young man, Ben. The ship goes from disaster to disaster due to contrary decisions and nonsensical actions until the sensible Ben, faced with no other choice for they won’t listen to reason, abandons them to their fates. And that’s it. What’s the point of this homily? A parody of the British children’s cartoon Captain Pugwash, itself a parody? Maybe it’s a closet criticism of political leadership at the time this book was published following a decade and more of Conservative rule? Or it is merely a whimsically comic tale with no overt message?
For me ‘The Ship of Fools’ is clearly setting out the author’s stall for the following stories (nine in total selected for this edition) with, as their overall theme, the possibility of gaining wisdom from life experiences. Can one learn the right lessons from mistakes, from making the wrong decisions? Or are we, like the supposed adults on the ship of fools, happy to make a hash of life with no thought for the consequences? Is this perhaps too weighty a message to load onto a children’s book? I don’t think so – after all, both the literary fairy tale and the traditional folktale often concluded with a moral, either explicit or implied.
‘The Dragon on the Roof’ concerns an aged Chinese dragon that has landed on the home of a merchant. Concerned to eradicate this ‘threat’ (the dragon is doing little harm, and will soon die anyway) the Emperor seeks a dragon-slayer to ensure that he becomes the most popular ruler ever of China as a result. Is this not a reference to British patriotic fervour attendant on Margaret Thatcher’s defeat of Argentina over the Falkland Islands, the Argentine Malvinas? The moral, surely, is that successful rulers distract the downtrodden population with victory in war.
More parochial tales follow. ‘The Star of the Farmyard’ details the attempts by Charlemagne the cockerel to steer Stanislav the performing farm dog towards a lucrative career, with disappointing if not disastrous results. I see a commentary here on agents ill-advisedly pushing their artists towards inappropriate audiences. Later in the collection ‘Eyes-All-Over’ is about an individual whose ability to see from different parts of his body allow him to view the immediate past, distant events, other people’s mistakes and hopes and, finally, the future that will never happen. Despite all these gifts Eyes-All-Over cares only about gold and riches, not other people. This leads him to severely exploit one particular individual who throws herself on his goodwill; too late he discovers that he should have valued human relationships above material goods. The final piece in the collection -- in the style of a Kipling Just So story – reminds the reader that pride often comes before a fall: ‘How the Badger Got its Stripes’ (and, incidentally, its thief’s mask facial markings) is also in the tradition of Aesop and all those medieval morality tales involving anthropomorphised animals.
Three pieces that come closest to literary fairy tales all have a touch of Joan Aiken about them, taking well-known tropes and subtly subverting them to create beautiful but bittersweet tellings. A variation on the Snow White motif, ‘The Improving Mirror’ relates how a looking-glass has the power to make the viewer see themselves as more beautiful than they are. The already attractive but heartless Queen Pavona – the name, though the same as an Italian town and a kind of coral, is likely to be derived from pavo, the peacock – keeps it to herself. When the distraught king her husband commands the inventor of the mirror to substitute the reflection for the real queen, unforeseen consequences result; one moral is surely Don’t inflate the vanity of those already vain enough, but there are other morals too.
As well as Kipling, Jones invokes Hans Christian Anderson. In ‘The Mermaid who Pitied a Sailor’ we hear how the mermaid Varina (a Slovak word, meaning ‘foreigner’) rescues the Cabin Boy from drowning, trying to keep him as a kind of pet. What she and her kind don’t realised is that it is their siren calls that lure sailors to their doom. Unusually for such as tale, which in Anderson’s telling, la Motte Fouqué’s Undine, folktales and medieval legends about a water sprite often end unhappily, Jones’ version does end with a heart-warming conclusion.
‘Forget-Me-Nuts’ returns to a bittersweet note. The nuts in questions allow one to ignore the trials and tribulations of everyday life, and the king consumes them by the bagful. But such a drug – for drug it surely is – brings a disconnect with the real world. The Key of Memory, an object obtained only after a quest, furnishes the only route to reality, but at a cost: it can bring happiness but also grief. Last but not least is ‘The Snow Baby’, another tale which, as well as having a touch of Raymond Briggs’ The Snowman about it, uses a motif from Snow White: the childless woman who wishes for what she appears unable to have. Set at the magical time of Christmas, the last of Jones’ tales impresses us with the thought that lasting happy memories can come from short-lived miracles: an optimistic message to retain after so many other examples of human foolishness.
This edition was produced for Nestlé, which in 2003 was still sponsoring the Smarties Prize for Children's Literature. While the original 1992 hardback included more tales (and colour, not monochrome, illustrations by Michael Foreman) this selection is exquisite and surprisingly varied, from funny to shocking and silly to serious. To some adults they may be slight but I found them profound; how its target audience finds them I'm no longer of an age to say, but somehow I don't think youngsters would be all at sea with them.
http://wp.me/s2oNj1-jones
October 26, 2015
moja prva anglicka kniha precitana a porozumena!!!(slovnik sa nerata, ani ucebnice angliny....) mám 24 a stale sa dokazem nieco nove nauciiiit!:)
JUHUUU!
a navyse sa mi tie pribehy rozpravkove sialene pacili.najviac The snow baby!
JUHUUU!
a navyse sa mi tie pribehy rozpravkove sialene pacili.najviac The snow baby!
February 12, 2020
I read this probably back in the late 90s, but with Terry Jones passing away, I felt compelled to pull it out and reread it. Also, I recall my initial reaction was one of slight disappointment in that I was (quite unfairly, I admit) expecting Pythonesque silliness, and while there is a bit of that, these stories range from madcap to sad and occasionally grim.
Jones follows the basic children’s bedtime story template here, with kingdoms and dragons and dinosaurs and talking animals and magic and mermaids, and usually wraps up everything with a moral to the story, although to his credit sometimes the lesson is that the good guys don’t always win. They’re not all fairy tales – hence the title, according to Jones’ intro – but they do have that feel to them.
After revisiting it with fresh eyes, I think I can appreciate it better now. Naturally, a few stories don't work or have somewhat predictable outcomes – but then I’m not the target audience. These stories are clearly designed to be read aloud to kids, which plays to Jones’ strength as a scriptwriter and a storyteller. If I had kids, I’d definitely read at least some these stories to them.
Jones follows the basic children’s bedtime story template here, with kingdoms and dragons and dinosaurs and talking animals and magic and mermaids, and usually wraps up everything with a moral to the story, although to his credit sometimes the lesson is that the good guys don’t always win. They’re not all fairy tales – hence the title, according to Jones’ intro – but they do have that feel to them.
After revisiting it with fresh eyes, I think I can appreciate it better now. Naturally, a few stories don't work or have somewhat predictable outcomes – but then I’m not the target audience. These stories are clearly designed to be read aloud to kids, which plays to Jones’ strength as a scriptwriter and a storyteller. If I had kids, I’d definitely read at least some these stories to them.
June 19, 2018
Este livro tem algumas histórias disparatadas (por exemplo, logo a primeira, "O Navio dos Locos"), o que me fez considerá-lo um bocadinho inferior ao primeiro livro que li deste autor, Novos Contos de Fadas. Em todo o caso, há uma ou outra história muito boas, como por exemplo " O Bebé de Neve" (maravilhosa história de Natal), ou "Olhos-por-Toda-a-Parte", ou ainda "A Sereia Que Teve Pena de Um Marinheiro" (curiosamente, uma história que tem um final feliz, ao contrário do que eu estava à espera).
Enfim, não é um livro tão bom como Novos Contos de Fadas por ser mais inconstante na qualidade das histórias, mas não seixa de ser um bom livro graças a um ou outro conto que demonstra Terry Jones como alguém com capacidade de criar contos de fadas que continuarão a alimentar os sonhos de miúdos , mas também de graúdos.
Enfim, não é um livro tão bom como Novos Contos de Fadas por ser mais inconstante na qualidade das histórias, mas não seixa de ser um bom livro graças a um ou outro conto que demonstra Terry Jones como alguém com capacidade de criar contos de fadas que continuarão a alimentar os sonhos de miúdos , mas também de graúdos.
August 22, 2022
Confess I hadn't known this book even existed until I came across it in a book sale. Terry Jones is a solid writer. There is creativity, there is humour, there is pathos, there are moments that compel laughter and others that produce tears.
While it may appear to be a child's picture book I'd suggest a mature child & a parent capable of explaining as required.
While it may appear to be a child's picture book I'd suggest a mature child & a parent capable of explaining as required.
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November 27, 2022عنوان فارسی: میترسی یا میخندی؟
انتشارات پرتقال
مجموعهی داستان کوتاه، مناسب ۹-۱۰ سال به بالا
دو تا از داستانهایش را خواندم. بر پایهی افسانهها نوشته شدهاند، زبان طنزی دارند و هیجانانگیز هستند. در انتها هم نتیجهگیری فلسفی(!) دارند و از خواننده پرسش میکنند.
امتیاز دو داستانی که خواندم: ۵ ستاره
انتشارات پرتقال
مجموعهی داستان کوتاه، مناسب ۹-۱۰ سال به بالا
دو تا از داستانهایش را خواندم. بر پایهی افسانهها نوشته شدهاند، زبان طنزی دارند و هیجانانگیز هستند. در انتها هم نتیجهگیری فلسفی(!) دارند و از خواننده پرسش میکنند.
امتیاز دو داستانی که خواندم: ۵ ستاره
May 17, 2021
even though it lacked the deep messages hidden in some of Terry Jone's Fairytales, I found myself enjoying the story plots of this book way more than the other one. It stays fresh and fun and an enjoyable read.
January 2, 2019
Honestly I didn't have high hopes, but I enjoyed it. They're more allegorical than I thought they would be, which I'm usually against.
March 10, 2015
If your feeling lonely don't read snow baby it will reduce you to tears, if your home alone don't read the one about the burglar otherwise an amazing book that my dad used to read to me as a child still got my signed copy
June 21, 2014
A great children's book for when your imagination needs a restart.
March 18, 2022
Read several of these as an adult, was hoping for traditional fairy tales, rather than something so, well, silly. Especially given that Terry Jones wrote the original treatment of Labyrinth.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews