Puff the Magic Dragon - alt. ending #2 - The online computery journal thingy of a turtle
May. 16th, 2008
09:29 am - Puff the Magic Dragon - alt. ending #2
Oh also, while driving over from Chicago in a musicless vacuum, I started thinking about Jeff Wolf's extra verse to "Puff the Magic Dragon", and I was inspired to write my own last verse.
Instead of being an extra verse tacked onto the end, though, this is a substitute for the original last verse:
He missed his little friend
And brooded for a while,
Until another little boy
Showed up to make him smile.
When taken out of context
This verse sounds really wrong,
But it's all innocent, I swear,
It's a family-friendly song!
--KT
If I were a folksinger performing this in concert, I think I'd end with a spoken comment along the lines of: "That's right, there are no hidden double meanings in this song. If you disagree... what have you been smoking?!"
Well, the thing about the original sad ending is, it doesn't make a lot of sense. If dragons live forever, why is Puff letting the loss of this one child ruin eternity for him? Why not just go find another friend?
Although after I wrote this, I thought about it some more, and it occurred to me that the ending does make sense if you assume that Puff is merely a figment of Jackie Paper's imagination.
Bring on the Ingmar! Sad is happy!
> Why not just go find another friend?
Because he only lives in Jacky Paper's imagination, and he's essentially been tossed under the bed forever.
> it occurred to me that the ending does make sense
Ah, I should have read it all the way through before replying. Pan's Labyrinth was much like that, you either get a bittersweet or a horribly depressing ending depending on whether you think it was all in the girl's imagination or not.
Heh. On one of Peter, Paul and Mary's live albums, they add something that's not QUITE a verse and not QUITE a spoken comment, to the effect of "Despite what you have heard/It's just a children's song/and if you do not know the words/[spoken] YOU'D BETTER LEARN THEM."
http://www.snopes.com/music/songs/puff.asp
Edited at 2008-05-16 03:09 pm (UTC)