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The Tortoise and the Hare: "The Hare and the Tortoise" 1947 Encyclopaedia Britannica Films
🕑 Added 2020-01-29 21:30:39 +0000 UTCmore at http://quickfound.net/
PRESENTS THE FABLE BY AESOP IN WHICH THE STEADY TORTOISE DEFEATS THE HARE IN A RACE. USES REAL ANIMALS AS CHARACTERS IN THE FABLE.
Originally a public domain film from the Library of Congress Prelinger Archives, slightly cropped to remove uneven edges, with the aspect ratio corrected, and one-pass brightness-contrast-color correction & mild video noise reduction applied.
The soundtrack was also processed with volume normalization, noise reduction, clipping reduction, and/or equalization (the resulting sound, though not perfect, is far less noisy than the original).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tortoise_and_the_Hare
Wikipedia license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
"The Tortoise and the Hare" is one of Aesop's Fables and is numbered 226 in the Perry Index. The account of a race between unequal partners has attracted conflicting interpretations. The fable itself is a variant of a common folktale theme in which ingenuity and trickery (rather than doggedness) are employed to overcome a stronger opponent...
An ambiguous story
The story concerns a Hare who ridicules a slow-moving Tortoise. Tired of the Hare's arrogant behavior, the Tortoise challenges him to a race. The hare soon leaves the tortoise behind and, confident of winning, takes a nap midway through the race. When the Hare awakes however, he finds that his competitor, crawling slowly but steadily, has arrived before him. The later version of the story in La Fontaine's Fables (VI.10), while more long-winded, differs hardly at all from Aesop's.
As in several other fables by Aesop, the lesson it is teaching appears ambiguous. In Classical times it was not the Tortoise's plucky conduct in taking on a bully that was emphasised but the Hare's foolish over-confidence. An old Greek source comments that 'many people have good natural abilities which are ruined by idleness; on the other hand, sobriety, zeal and perseverance can prevail over indolence'. When the fable entered the European emblem tradition, the precept to ‘hasten slowly’ (festina lente) was recommended to lovers by Otto van Veen in his Emblemata Amorum (1608), using a relation of the story. There the infant figure of Eros is shown passing through a landscape and pointing to the tortoise as it overtakes the sleeping hare under the motto “perseverance winneth.” Later interpreters too have asserted that the fable's moral is the proverbial 'the more haste, the worse speed' (Samuel Croxall) or have applied to it the biblical observation that 'the race is not to the swift' (Ecclesiastes 9.11).
In the 19th century and after the fable was given satirical interpretations. In the social commentary of Charles H. Bennett's The Fables of Aesop translated into Human Nature (1857), the hare is changed to a thoughtful craftsman prostrate under the foot of a capitalist entrepreneur. Lord Dunsany brings out another view in his "The True History of the Tortoise and the Hare" (1915). There the hare realises the stupidity of the challenge and refuses to proceed any further. The obstinate tortoise continues to the finishing line and is proclaimed the swiftest by his backers...
