Tear Jerker / Faerie Tale Theatre

• Of the 26 episodes of this series, 23 have Happy Endings, "The Little Mermaid" and "Rip Van Winkle" have Bittersweet Endings...and then there's "The Pied Piper of Hamelin", one of the saddest pieces of media aimed at a family audience in The '80s. As a direct adaptation of the Robert Browning poem to the point that it's a Rhyming Episode, that it will have a Downer Ending is a given — and the sheer scale of the loss of the children of Hamelin and the resultant grief and guilt of the adults lands heavily — but the Adaptation Expansion actually makes the denouement even sadder with regards to the lame boy, the only one who doesn't make it through the portal. It's bad enough he spends the rest of his life pining for the nonexistent paradise that lay within the mountain, but to make things much worse he never realizes that he was being spared the exile in a foreign land the other children were actually sent to — the Piper made sure the portal closed before he could reach it. Why? The boy was, unlike the others in the town, polite to the Piper when he first arrived there. With this in mind, he promised the boy that he would be protected from "unnatural selection", and even cryptically warned him that "The rainbows that we chase are no more real/Than the idea your foot will heal"; as the Piper's Mind-Control Music lures its targets away by inducing visions of whatever their idea of Paradise is, he was warning the boy to see through that illusion. In any case, and in a tragically stark contrast to the Mayor and Corporation, the Piper kept his word.
• "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" has the dwarfs' discovery of Snow White's "dead" body after she eats the poisoned apple. While at first their reactions are slightly Played for Laughs ("She's just fakin' it!"), by the end of the scene they're forced to accept that she's really dead, and they all break down sobbing. Then their next scene shows them all gathered sadly around her bier, agreeing that she's too beautiful to bury. While it might not be quite as heart-tugging as the corresponding scene in the Disney version, the poignancy is still there.

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