Intro example 1: start with a key similarity (or difference)

Roald Dahl’s 1982 poem “Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf” and the Once Upon a Time episode “Red Handed” share one key feature: both depict a seemingly innocent young lady who turns out to be a predator. Despite this surface similarity, the girls in the two versions of this classic fairy tale are very different from one another. Keep going…how are they different? What are you going to argue?

Intro example 2: start with historical context

The oral folktale “The Story of Grandmother,” the earliest known version of the fairy tale “Little Red Riding Hood,” circulated four centuries before the TV series Once Upon a Time reinvented the tale in the episode “Red Handed.” Yet both versions address a common theme, the idea of coming of age. While the protagonists of both stories come of age, however, they develop very different types of self-knowledge: the girl in the folktale learns ______________ while the young woman in the television episode discovers ___________________.

Intro example 3: start with a shocking detail from the story (notice that I included historical context here too)

In a startling moment in the 16^th century oral folktale “The Story of Grandmother,” Little Red Riding Hood strips off her clothes one by one and throws them in the fire on the orders of the wolf. This act, with its sexual overtones, seems inappropriate for a protagonist described as a little girl. However, the scene symbolizes a significant transformation in Little Red Riding Hood. A similar transformation occurs in ______________ (insert title here). In both texts, the young woman starts the story as ________________, but she becomes ________________ as a result of ______________.

Intro example 4: Start with a shocking historical fact

A little known aspect of European history is that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it was not unheard of for rural communities to conduct werewolf trials, similar to the Salem witch trials infamous in American history. Transition into role of wolf in RRH’s coming of age or role of RRH as wolf…