I thoroughly enjoyed "Rip Van Winkle". I remember watching the Wishbone episode when I was a kid, but the only bit that really stuck with me seems to be the giants playing nine-pins and Wishbone with a long, grey beard. Goofy. Wishbone seems to have watered down the story a bit. "Rip Van Winkle" partially reads like a grandpa should be telling it, with the speaker insisting of the accuracy and legitimacy of the tale yet knowing it's not quite believable. It's full of sarcasm, wit and clever insults; I chuckled at almost anything to do with Rip's wife and especially at her cause of death. The Romantic influence is obvious in the nearly magical descriptions of the landscape. Between Hendrick Hudson and his men and Rip himself, the story is kind of a folk tale within a folk tale. It was a great fiction break from the heavy reading we've been doing in this class and in other classes.
On the other hand, Rip has a deeper side to it that Wishbone didn't even touch. Irving is wrestling through the changes in America and the nature of American identity and commenting on roles and relationships between men and women Rip wakes up after 20 years not as a colonist, but as an American. Who needs morning coffee with that kind of shock? (I would, actually, but that's irrelevant). Instead of sleepy, easy-going colonists dissecting three-month-old news, Rip finds his fellow-villagers to be bustling, busy, anti-Tory, politically minded Americans. Interestingly enough, although identity as a whole had changed and had made changes in every day life, Rip is still largely unchanged. Individual vs society as a whole mentality perhaps?
I totally watched the Rip Van Winkle Wish Bone too and that was what I was thinking of while reading it. You are very right though were was a lot of depth that was left out in the Wish Bone episode (and I suppose, it is a children's show). The story of Rip Van Winkle is so much deeper than just this guy has a twenty year nap and wakes up understandable disoriented. I feel there are many messages that Irving has imbedded with in this writing. One perhaps to make people aware of how much their country had changed, not to condemn the change necessarily but to force the reader to look at the changes and identify whether they felt they were good changes or not.
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