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Henny Penny

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The Sky Is Falling, also known as Chicken Little, Chicken Licken or Henny Penny is an old, classical fable of unknown origin about a chicken who believes the sky is falling. The phrase has also become used to indicate a hysterical or mistaken belief that disaster is imminent.

Origin

The origin of this fairy tale is unknown. Sometimes it is listed as one of Aesop's Fables. However, it is not. Also, sometimes it is presented as "a Bulrovian fairy tale", although the country of Bulrovia doesn't exist. The basic motif, and many of the elements of the tale, can be found in one of the stories in the Jataka. That version features a rabbit or hare as the central character, rather than a chicken.

Basic plot

Template:Spoiler There are many versions of the story, but the basic premise is that a chicken called Chicken Little, Chicken Licken or Henny Penny believes the sky is falling down because an acorn (or in some versions a pebble that falls from a roof) falls on his (or, sometimes, her) head. He decides to tell the King, and on his journey meets other animals who join him in his quest. In most retellings, the other animals have similarly rhyming names (See Characters). Finally, they come across Foxy Loxy, a fox who offers to guide them all with the King, but taking them instead into his cave. At this point, there are many endings. In the most famous one, Foxy Loxy kills all of Chicken Little/Licken's friends, but the last one survives enough to warn Chicken Little/Licken and he escapes. Other endings include Foxy eating them all, them being saved by a squirrel or an owl and/or getting to speak to the King, and even one in which the sky actually falls down and kills Foxy Loxy.

Characters

As it is common in fables, all the characters in this tale are animals. Also, they all have rhyming names.

  • Chicken Little (Or Chicken Licken) (Chicken)
  • Henny Penny (When she is not the main character, she is one of the animals Chicken finds in his journey) (Chicken)
  • Cocky Locky (Rooster)
  • Ducky Lucky (Or Ducky Daddles) (Duck)
  • Drakey Lakey (Duck)
  • Goosey Loosey (Or Goosey Poosey) (Goose)
  • Gander Pander (Goose)
  • Turkey Lurkey (Turkey)
  • Foxy Loxy (Fox)
  • The King (Lion)

Moral

Depending on the version, the Moral changes. In the "happy ending" version, the moral is not to be a "Chicken Little" and have courage. In other versions the moral is usually interpreted to mean "do not believe everything you are told". In the latter case, it could well be a cautionary political tale: Chicken Little jumps to a conclusion and whips the populace into mass hysteria, which the unscrupulous fox uses to manipulate them for his own benefit.

Adaptation

The Sky Is Falling has been taken into children books many times, having both Chicken Little and Henny Penny as main characters. Some of those books are in print today.

Walt Disney Studios has adapted this story into animation twice, one in 1943, in the context of the Second World War, and one in 2005. This film is intended to be a sequel of the fairy tale, and so it happens "after the 'sky is falling down' incident". See Chicken Little (1943 film) and Chicken Little (2005 film). The Disney movie however, bears no sort of resemblance to either the fable itself (except for the sky-is-falling concept and a couple of the charaters' names) or the interesting take on the fable that was adapted from the children's book "The Stinky Cheese Man and other Fairly Stupid Tales" by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith. Disney's own original characters in the film include Morkubine Porcupine, Buck Cluck (Chicken Little's dad) Runt of the Litter and Fish Out Of Water, among others.

The animated series Garfield and Friends adaptated the story for the U.S. Acres segment "Badtime Story", in which Bo, Lanolin, Roy, and Wade all fill in for a sick Orson to read the story to Booker and Sheldon. Throughout the story, the characters (played by regulars on the series) blame the sky's falling on "all this tampering with the O-Zone layer". The episode also manages to poke fun at the story's extensive use of rhyming names with a scene in which Wade lists the names of everyone involved in Chicken Licken's quest, among them Catty Fatty (portrayed by Garfield himself) and Beaver Cleaver (a reference to Leave It to Beaver).

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