Trivia / Faerie Tale Theatre

• Acting for Two
  • "The Tale of The Frog Prince": Candy Clark plays both Queen Gwynneth and Candy. Roberta Maxwell plays both Queen Beatrice and Griselda. Donovan Scott plays both Hendrix and the French chef.
  • "Rapunzel": In the first part of the story, Shelley Duvall and Jeff Bridges play Rapunzel's ill-fated parents; in the second part, they play the now-grown Rapunzel and the prince she falls in love with.
  • "Sleeping Beauty": Bernadette Peters plays both Sleeping Beauty and Princess Debbie. Christopher Reeve plays both the main prince in the episode and "my son, the prince" (the other prince who wanted to marry Sleeping Beauty).
  • "Jack and the Beanstalk": Mark Blankfield plays the old man who gave Jack the beans, the "fairy" that Jack meets while climbing the beanstalk, and he narrates the episode.
  • "Hansel and Gretel": Joan Collins plays both the evil stepmother and the wicked witch.
  • "The Princess and the Pea": Beatrice Straight and Pat McCormick play the couple in the museum and Queen Veronica and King Fredrico. Tim Kazurinsky plays the museum guard and the fool. He also narrates the episode.
  • "The Pied Piper of Hamelin": Eric Idle plays Robert Browning in the framing device and the Piper in the fairy tale itself.
  • "Aladdin" has James Earl Jones playing both the Genie of the Ring and the Genie of the Lamp. He also narrates the episode.
  • Subverted in The Boy Who Left Home to Find Out About the Shivers: at first it seems that Christopher Lee is doubling as King Vladimir and the evil sorcerer haunting the castle, but then it turns out that the sorcerer is King Vladimir in disguise.
• Actor Allusion:
  • In The Boy Who Left Home to Find Out About the Shivers, Christopher Lee (at the time, most famous for playing Dracula) play's Dracula's son Vladimer, complete with a scene where he rises from a coffin in a haunted castle.
  • In The Princess and the Pea, Liza Minnelli plays a young woman who meets a wealthy male twit and his snarky servant/best friend, inspires him to mature, and wins his heart in place of the upper class bride his family wants him to marry.
  • In Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Tatum O'Neal plays Goldilocks as a Little Miss Con Artist, not unlike the role she played in Paper Moon.
  • In Thumbelina, Burgess Meredith as the Mole wears thick glasses and has a prized collection of books, bringing to mind his famous role from The Twilight Zone (1959).
  • In Beauty and the Beast, Susan Sarandon goes to stay at a mysterious castle and faints in shock at her first sight of the strange-looking master. While this detail is taken from Jean Cocteau's film version, it also recalls Sarandon's most famous earlier role.
  • Edie McClurg, who played one of the mean girls in Carrie, which is often viewed as a horror retelling of Cinderella, plays one of Cinderella's stepsisters.
• Actor-Inspired Element: In Beauty and the Beast, the reason why all the Beast's lines are taken verbatim Beauty and the Beast (1946) (albeit translated from French to English), while the other characters' dialogue is less strictly faithful to the earlier film, is because Klaus Kinski insisted on it. He labeled the episode's original script "banal Hollywood trash" and would only speak Jean Cocteau's dialogue instead. The fact that his final Prince Charming form resembles Thomas Gainsborough's painting The Blue Boy was also at Kinski's insistence.
• All-Star Cast: The concept of the show arose from Duvall, during the Popeye shoot, musing on what it would be like if her co-star Robin Williams played the Frog Prince. The very first episode was indeed, "The Tale of the Frog Prince", with Williams as the title character, and Teri Garr as the princess. From there, every episode has a name performer in the lead, and usually a substantial contingent of A and B-list stars in the supporting roles.
• Back Door Pilot: The "Rip Van Winkle" episode can be seen as one to the Tall Tales & Legends spin-off, as the only episode that adapted an American story rather than a European one. Notably, it was the last story and regular episode to be filmed, even if it wasn't the last to air.
• The Danza: Robin Williams as Prince Robin and Candy Clark as Candy in "The Tale of the Frog Prince"; Mary Steenburgen as Mary in "Little Red Riding Hood"; Maurice LaMarche as Mockingbird Maurice and Jackie Vernon as Phlegmatic Jack in "The Princess Who Had Never Laughed".
• Dawson Casting: Almost every episode with child characters (e.g. Little Red Riding Hood, Goldilocks, Cubby Bear, Jack, Pinocchio, Kai and Gerda) casts young adult actors in the roles – sometimes with lines implying that the characters have been aged up to teenagers, sometimes not. The most notable exceptions are Hansel and Gretel, with 13-year-old Rick Schroder and 8-year-old Bridgette Andersen in the title roles, and The Pied Piper of Hamlin, where all the children the Piper leads away are real.
• Early-Bird Release: One of the earlier examples of this trope. All 26 regular episodes made it to VHS by the end of October 1985. By comparison, Showtime didn't finish airing them until 1987. This makes more sense when taking into account the fact that more people had VCRs than pay cable at the time.
• Hostility on the Set: Predictably, Klaus Kinski was angry and demanding throughout the filming of Beauty and the Beast. He loathed the script as it was originally written and insisted that all his lines be verbatim from Jean Cocteau's film version instead, and he disdained Susan Sarandon as "some New York actress" he was "forced" to work with in place of Jessica Lange, the original choice for the role. At one point, when they were filming the scene where the Beast carries Beauty to her room after she faints, Kinski allegedly dropped Sarandon on the floor the moment the director yelled "Cut!"
• Missing Episode
  • The Clip Show that followed on from the first run of shows didn't appear on video or appear in the show's rerun rotation until the second complete series DVD release.
  • "The Boy Who Left Home to Find Out About the Shivers", after its initial CBS/FOX release on VHS, wasn't made available again until the DVD releases began at the Turn of the Millennium, and then only in the complete series sets as opposed to the 4-episode compilation discs, likely because of the largely tongue-in-cheek Nightmare Fuel content.
• Real-Life Relative: Mary Steenburgen played the title role in "Little Red Riding Hood", with then-husband Malcolm McDowell as an Alex-like Big Bad Wolf.
• What Could Have Been:
  • David Bowie was cast as the title character in "The Pied Piper of Hamelin", but scheduling conflicts caused him to abruptly drop out, and Eric Idle took over the part.
  • In ''Susan Sarandon was a last-minute substitute for Jessica Lange in the role of Beauty. Klaus Kinski resented the change, which led to Hostility on the Set.