Ask The Five-Year-Old: “Could the Twilight vampires take down Shaun the Sheep?”
Shaun’s the skinny one. If you like Wallace & Gromit, it’s a fair bet you’ll enjoy Shaun the Sheep. (Image via Wikipedia)
This Halloween, The Five-Year-Old discovered vampires. We’ve not read any vampire stories to her, of course, but when she asked on Halloween night why that boy she just passed was sporting fangs, white makeup, a red smudge, and a black cape, naturally I told her. Since then I’ve been fielding at least one question a day about these “after-life creatures” as The Five-Year-Old calls them.
I won’t bore you with most of those questions, but yesterday’s conversation took a fun turn. We were talking about the recent redemption trend in vampire literature which has transformed these stock characters from one-dimensionally evil types into far more interesting folk that are as mixed a package of good and evil as your average human being.
The Cullen family from the movie version of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight trilogy. (Photo: Summit Entertainment via Stephanie Meyer’s website).
Which is how the Cullen family came up.
Some days it seems like all a vampire has to do to prove his moral worth is to hunt animals instead of humans.
“And sparkle in the sun,” Daddyo pointed out.
The Five-Year-Old was fascinated by the idea of a glittery vampire that hunted animals for food. But she quickly spotted the flaw in that strategy.
All that sparkle could give away a hunter’s position, especially if you’re hunting a wily sort of prey.
Such as Shaun the Sheep.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Shaun the Sheep is a stop-motion animated British sitcom theoretically targeted to children, but rather good fun to watch as an adult. Most of the sheep are just as silly as you’d expect and create all sorts of slapstick havoc on the farm. But Shaun is rather brilliant and manages to get them all safely corralled again at the end of each episode. In his world, Shaun the Sheep is the smartest creature by far. No one stands a chance against him, not the dog, cat, evil trio of pigs, or the questionably skilled farmer.
So in gauging the fierceness of a glittery vampire, naturally The Five-Year-Old wanted to know:
“Could the Twilight vampires take down Shaun the Sheep?”
As The Five-Year-old is our resident expert on Shaun the Sheep, I deflected the question back to her. “What do you think, The Five-Year-Old?”
The Five-Year-Old pondered for a while. Finally she said, “No, because he’s got all those other sheep and they couldn’t take down all of them. And Shaun can make all kinds of things out of the junk lying around on his farm.”
So there you have it. The Cullen family is no match for Shaun the Sheep.
Related articles
- ‘The Twilight Saga’: A refresher course (cnn.com)
- Science Behind Vampire Myths (science.kqed.org)
- “Could a T. Rex lift a woolly mammoth?” (Caterpickles)
- More Funny Stuff My Daughter Says (Caterpickles)
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