A series of shorts created and produced by Dave Wasson with Frederator Studios for Nickelodeon's Oh Yeah! Cartoons.
The show focuses on siblings Dot and Randy, who are actively trying to do good in school but are constantly being tormented by the Fairy Goose Lady, and her talking wand Juanito. The Goose Lady always appears when they least want her around, often when they are already in trouble (usually directly because of her meddling) and sometimes goes to insane lengths to make sure they listen to her tales. The fairy tales Juanito spins are "twisted" versions of classic stories including Hansel and Gretel (who are portrayed as fat, greedy children who torment the witch). The Goose Lady always gives the kids a very stupid moral at the end of the stories, which leave Dot and Randy to point out the flaws in her logic. In the end the Goose Lady usually leaves the kids getting into trouble with an adult figure who happens to come in at the wrong time.
Tales from the Goose Lady is in a similar position as another Oh Yeah! Cartoons program, Mina and The Count, in that a limited number of episodes were made (nine), making it a kind of Mini Series. The series is available through Itunes and Amazon Video.
This Miniseries contains examples of:
- Ambiguously Gay: The Woodsman in "Hamsel and Grande" is a big, burly ax-wielding man with a strong effeminate lisp and skips his way through the woods to save the "innocent" children from the "evil" witch.
- Art Evolution: The debut cartoon "Jack and the Beatstalk" used hand-painted cels while all subsequent cartoons used digital ink and paint.
- Beanstalk Parody: "Jack and the Beatstalk" is a take-off of the story of Jack and the Beanstalk where Jack is a beatnik whose mother owns a coffee shop and the giant is a hippie who owns a magic coffee machine.
- Book Ends: "The Little Pigs 3" begins and ends with someone making a bad pun about how Dot and Randy have fallen down a hole in the ground (the Goose Lady in the beginning, the truant officer in the end).
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Broken Aesop: The stories' morals are often nonsensical and terrible, as Dot and Randy often point out. - Butt-Monkey: Dot and Randy are always forced to listen to the Goose Lady's stories and, in the process, have their attendance and performance rates at school being put in jeopardy, whether from the Goose Lady keeping them up at night when there is an exam tomorrow or from the Goose Lady making them miss the school bus. To make things worse, the Goose Lady always gets away so the authority figures who show up blame the children for the destruction the Goose Lady causes and the children's pleas that the Goose Lady is to blame are never believed.
- Comically Missing the Point: Dot and Randy eventually give the Goose Lady a taste of her own medicine in the final short "Dot and Randy's Sad Tale of Woe" by tying her to a tree and reading a story to her that casts them as a pair of gifted children who are supposed to remove a golden abacus from a stone to start an age of enlightenment, only to fail to make it to the stone before it disappears for another 500 years due to being exhausted from an unflattering representation of the Goose Lady distracting them with her stories. All the Goose Lady learns from this is that Dot and Randy are lousy storytellers and that she should never let them tell their own story again.
- Disproportionate Retribution: In "The Egg Who Would Be King", Humpty Dumpty orders his advisor to be executed for the trivial offense of telling him to do something about his subjects' problems.
- Egg Folk: "The Egg Who Would Be King" consists of the Goose Lady's take on Humpty Dumpty, where it is established that the nursery rhyme character was laid by a chicken who was jealous of the goose that lays golden eggs and then booted out by his mother because she considered him another failure in laying valuable eggs. Humpty then decides to become King of Fairy Tale Land, but his people grow so sick of his laziness that they knock him off his wall by throwing vegetables at him.
- Fat Bastard: The title characters of "Hamsel and Grande" are a pair of overweight children who eat the witch's gingerbread house in spite of her pleas and sic a woodsman on her whenever she tries to stop them.
- Fractured Fairy Tale: The series consists of the Goose Lady forcing two children to listen to bizarre versions of famous fairy tales. She and Juanito claim that it's what truly happened in each story.
- Groin Attack: In "The Egg Who Would Be King", Humpty Dumpty ends up falling from his wall after a tossed tomato hits him in the crotch.
- Hypocritical Humor: In "Three Bears and a Blonde", Goldilocks responds to Papa Bear telling her to leave by calling him a jerk, when the way she'd been acting hardly makes her a respectable guest to the Three Bears. Before leaving, she even gloats that she's glad she destroyed Baby Bear's chair.
- Joke of the Butt: "Three Bears and a Blonde" has Goldilocks rebuke Papa Bear after sitting in his chair by rhetorically asking if he thought little girls have iron bottoms, plus the size of Mama Bear's backside is commented on by her son after Goldilocks sinks into Mama Bear's chair.
- Kafka Komedy: "Hamsel and Grande" is essentially a send-up of Hansel and Gretel where the story is played for misery-based Black Comedy. Hamsel and Grande are two greedy fat kids who keep trying to eat the Witch's candy house. Every time the Witch tries to stop them, they cry for help and a nearby Woodsman, assuming the Witch is trying to eat the kids, attacks her with his ax. The pattern repeats itself until the Witch's home is nearly entirely gone. She then constructs a new house made out of liver, which repulses Hansel and Gretel... but it turns out the Woodsman loves liver and starts eating the house while the Witch breaks down into tears.
- Karma Houdini: The Goose Lady never gets punished for interfering with Dot and Randy's attempts at doing well in school in order to force them to listen to her stories. Even when they turn the tables on her by tying her to a tree and forcing her to listen to a story they wrote that blatantly calls her out for ruining their lives by distracting them with her stories in the final short "Dot and Randy's Sad Tale of Woe", she doesn't learn a thing and continues getting away with it.
- Kids Are Cruel: Hamsel and Grande are awful brats who get the witch cut in two repeatedly by the woodsman and laugh about it.
- Lazy Bum: When Humpty Dumpty becomes king in "The Egg Who Would Be King", his subjects grow to despise him because he'd rather laze around eating junk food and watching TV than do anything to help with their problems.
- Look Behind You: At the end of "A Fisherman, A Fisherman's Wife and a Fish", Dot and Randy get the security guard to turn away from them by claiming to see Ed Asner.
- Losing Your Head: The witch has the unfortunate predicament of having the Woodsman chop off her head with an ax, and having to sew it back to her neck.
- Mirror-Cracking Ugly: The show's take-off on The Ugly Duckling, entitled "The Ugly Duck-Thing", had the title character use his ugliness to break stuff and help people, like shattering a baby bottle to free an infant who got its head stuck in the bottle and defusing a bomb by staring at the timer.
- Orphaned Punchline: In "The Tortoise and the Hairpiece", we only get to hear the punchline of the joke the toupee tells his co-workers.Toupee: So then the elephant says "That's alright, that's not my trunk!"
- Politicians Kiss Babies: Humpty Dumpty kisses a baby during his campaign to be made King of Fairy Tale Land in "The Egg Who Would Be King".
- Produce Pelting: King Humpty Dumpty's subjects knock him off his wall by throwing vegetables at him in "The Egg Who Would Be King".
- Punny Name: The Goose Lady's version of Hansel and Gretel has the children named Hamsel and Grande as puns on the fact that they are ridiculously obese.
- Seadog Pegleg: The Fisherman in "A Fisherman, A Fisherman's Wife and a Fish" has a peg leg.
- Spoof Aesop: When the morals to the Goose Lady's stories aren't contradicted by how the actual story unfolds, then they're just nonsense that is barely relevant to the story at all (e.g. "Three Bears and a Blonde" ending with the Goose Lady invoking the old saying that blondes have more fun and "A Fisherman's Wife and a Fish" giving the moral that your wishes can always come true as long as you make sure you wish on a magical fish).
- Stepford Smiler: The Goose Lady appears to be one, leading in to her having a breakdown in the beginning of "The Egg Who Would Be King".The Goose Lady: You think this is easy for me? Look at me LOOK AT ME! I'M A TALKING GOOSE WITH FAIRY WINGS! I'm an outcast! All I have are these stories! (sobs hysterically)
- Throw the Dog a Bone: "A Fisherman, A Fisherman's Wife and a Fish" ends with the Goose Lady yet again running away before she can face repercussions for her actions, but Dot and Randy are at least able to get away before getting wrongly punished for the Goose Lady scribbling on the museum's paintings.
