Little Red Riding Hood

Little Red Riding Hood, or Little Red Cap, is a fairytale that is featured in ABC's hit television series Once Upon a Time.

Original Plot
The story revolves around a girl called Little Red Riding Hood, after the red hooded cape/cloak or simple cap she wears. The girl walks through the woods to deliver food to her sick grandmother.

A wolf wants to eat the girl but is afraid to do so in public. He approaches Little Red Riding Hood and she naïvely tells him where she is going. He suggests the girl pick some flowers, which she does.

In the meantime, he goes to the grandmother's house and gains entry by pretending to be the girl. He swallows the grandmother whole,(In some stories, he locks her in the closet), and waits for the girl, disguised as the grandma. When the girl arrives, she notices that her grandmother looks very strange. Little Red Riding Hood then says, "What big hands you have!"

In most retellings, this colloquy eventually culminates with Little Red Riding Hood saying, "My, what big teeth you have!" to which the wolf replies, "The better to eat you with" and swallows her whole, too. A lumberjack, however, comes to the rescue and cuts open the wolf with his axe, who had fallen asleep. Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother emerge unharmed.

They fill the wolf's body with heavy stones. The wolf awakens and tries to flee, but the stones cause him to collapse and die. The tale makes the clearest contrast between the safe world of the village and the dangers of the forest, conventional antitheses that are essentially medieval, though no written versions are as old as that.

Show Adaptations

 * Red Riding Hood is much older in the show than in the traditional tale, and has a true love named Peter.
 * Red Riding Hood is a werewolf, and thus is her own Big Bad Wolf.