Magyar népmesék

A Hungarian animation series, Magyar népmesék was a collection of animated shorts, each telling a traditional folktale, many being variants of more well-known stories. Many of the shorts can be found on YouTube, where they are getting a somewhat cult following.

The series started in 1977 with a season consisting of 13 episodes. Further seasons were added in 1979, 1984, 1989, 1995, 2002, 2007, and 2009. A total of 89 regular episodes have been released.


 * Adaptation Distillation: Some of the shorts.
 * Animation Bump: Possibly, due to the series being Un Cancelled, shorts tend to have different animation styles, mediums, and qualities.
 * Back From the Dead: If the hero or heroine dies, they will get better.
 * Distressed Damsel: Princesses held captive by a dragon or an evil king in various stories.
 * Gag Dub: Three episodes got hilarious and memetic Hungarian parody dubs by YouTube user Dandozolika.
 * Gender Flip: One fairy tale, "Hamupipőke királyfi", is the Gender Flipped version of Cinderella.
 * Go Seduce My Arch-Nemesis: In one story, the protagonist asks the princess to find out the weakness of the dragon by seducing him.
 * Hair of Gold: Nearly all of the human protagonists and their love interests have this.
 * Mickey Mousing: There is music used instead of sound effects in all shorts.
 * Narrator
 * No Export for You: Averted. While you would think the series would never air in the U.S., a few episodes were actually dubbed for two different episodes of the American TV series Long Ago and Far Away. Some of the shorts were also dubbed into Spanish.
 * Not Quite Dead: In "Cerceruska," the heroine's stepmother tries to drown her. Fortuantely, a fish swallows her whole, and her husband rescues her.
 * Our Dragons Are Different: Dragons in these tales are more or less humanoid, clothed, ride horses and fight with swords. They'll almost always have multiple heads. They often want to marry the princess they keep captive.
 * Pals With Jesus: Hamupipoke (the Magyar's Cinderella) is helped by God to attend Mass, after being forbidden by her stepmother. We all know how it ends
 * Shout-Out: One of the animated shorts, "Hamupipoke," is a variant of the Cinderella story, that traditionally ends with the prince smply recognizing the heroine without any help. The animated short borrows the Disney/Perrault ending with the prince using a glass slipper.
 * Un Cancelled: The first batch of shorts were made in the late 70's. More and more were produced in the 80's and 90's. Finally, even more shorts have been independently produced in the 2000's, after the original production company went bankrupt.