Comparing Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle

Many of today’s film are born from literary works of art before making it to the famed silver screen. In general, though not always the case, written stories carry far more detail than their visual counterparts. On the flip side, a single screen shot from a movie could paint a picture worth a paragraph of writing. Rip Van Winkle is the story of a lazy man from the Catskill Mountains in New York, hen pecked by his wife he heads into the mountains and falls asleep for twenty years. It was adapted as a screen play in a popular kid’s television show, Faerie Tale Theater, which aired between 1982 and 1987. The writing and screen play tell the same story, though they differ in areas of detail, and some depiction of character.

Written by Washington Irving in 1819, Rip Van Winkle is described as a kind hearted man, quick to help his neighbors

However they are also very different in presentation and depiction of character. Washington Irving paints a picture of a lazy man who is loved by all in the village and willing to give the shirt off his back to help his fellow man. “He would never refuse to assist a neighbor even in the roughest toil” (Irving 198), yet in the Shelley Duvall production he appears even more simple minded and perhaps even taken advantage of when it comes to painting his neighbor’s fence. Almost as if his ladder is held for hostage for the ransom of painting, and once finished it is revealed that the neighbor no longer has Rip’s ladder anyway. (Duvall, Rip Van Winkle). Irving briefly describes the strange men in the mountain and Rip’s time with them is limited to less than two paragraphs, while Duvall devotes a healthy portion of the screen play to showing the men of the mountain. The sequence of events with Rip serving the ghostly men of Hudson’s crew, and drinking the strange liquor from their flagons is shown in detail as the narrator