HAPPILY EVER AFTER: Fairy Tales, Children and the Culture Industry.<i> By Jack Zipes</i> . <i> Routledge: 160 pp., $59.95 cloth, $16.95 paper</i> : EDWARD BEAR, ESQ: The True Story of the Astonishing Achievements of Teddy.<i> By Michele Brown</i> .<i> Stewart, Tabori & Chang: 108 pp., $14.95</i>

Storytelling, in one form or other, has been with us since mankind’s infancy. Consider the cave paintings at Lascaux or the ancient American Indian pictographs in the Southwest. Or take Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey” and Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales.” In “Happily Ever After,” Jack Zipes, a professor of German at the University of Minnesota and the editor and translator of a recent edition of “The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm,” chooses to zero in on “Fairy Tales, Children and the Culture Industry.” Given the perennial dearth of substantive criticism of children’s literature, the reader’s curiosity is immediately piqued by Zipes’ jaunty subtitle and promisingly authoritative voice. We are eager for the author’s explication of the pregnant phrase “the culture industry.” (It is, after all, not in everyday use as is, say, “the tobacco industry.”) But in this and many other expectations, we are to be disappointed.

Webster’s Third New International Dictionary defines culture as “the training or refining of the moral and intellectual faculties” and as “the total pattern of human behavior and its products embodied in thought, speech, action and artifacts and dependent upon man’s capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations. . . .” It is in this latter sense that Zipes takes a hard look at films, television programs, videocassettes and even Internet offerings as artifacts that constitute a shockingly substantial part of our children’s intellectual diet. It is the author’s contention that “the fairy-tale film has become the most popular cultural commodity in America.” In this category, he places not only such Disney animated features as “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” “Pinocchio” and “The Lion King” but also live-action adult films like “Splash,” “Pretty Woman” and “Sleepless in Seattle.” The author names Walt Disney and the Disney studios, as villains of the culture industry. He cites their near-stranglehold on the feature-length animated fairy tale as well as their increasingly saccharine approach to stories once full of harsh yet liberating truths.

Like most of us, Zipes laments the rampant commercial exploitation of children that accompanies each new Disney release: the dolls, toys, T-shirts, games, books and pajamas that suddenly inundate department stores and neighborhood stores. He calls this phenomenon “the continual commodification of culture in America.” Zipes also points out that, in seeking to reach the largest possible audiences of children worldwide, film versions of traditional fairy tales must inevitably be stripped of a good deal of their primeval power and punch. No longer do the stories meaningfully confront the dark side of life--poverty, greed, abandonment, jealousy--nor do they inform children, as they once did, about the ways of the real world. Instead, blandly cheerful entertainment values prevail, and the traditional happily-ever-after ending to each tale is now too easily and too predictably won.

As parents, of course, we bear some responsibility for this “commodification” and commercial exploitation. It is, after all, our consumer dollars that, willingly or reluctantly, continue to support its spread.

A veteran explorer into the magical realm of fairy tales (Zipes has written three books on other aspects of this genre), the author has an unfortunate tendency to lose himself--and his readers--in the dense underbrush of his own verbiage. There are such pronouncements as “Criticism must recapture art and moments of truth despite the manner in which culture is administered to negate history and to make the present banal.” And “The connection between abusive parents in fairy tales and abusive filmmakers who use fairy tales about abusive parents to absolve themselves from the responsibility of taking fairy tales seriously is rarely made, but it is a connection that might help us make distinctions between fairy-tale films as commodities and as art in our present-day struggles to determine what is politically and culturally correct for children.” All too soon, the eyes glaze and the mind boggles. Clarity of statement is as devoutly to be wished in a critical work on children’s books and films as it is in adult fare.

Zipes is at his best (and least doctrinaire) in the first two chapters, in which he traces the development of “Puss in Boots” and “Hansel and Gretel” from their first bare-bones written versions to the more elaborate tellings we are familiar with today. As the audience for fairy tales gradually shifted from illiterate adults to literate ones and then to children, subtle changes in both plotting and characterization occurred. In the first version of “Hansel and Gretel,” written in 1810, the mother of the children was their biological mother. Wilhelm Grimm transformed her into a stepmother for the tale’s second edition, in 1819, perhaps to make that non-parent’s efforts to abandon the children less horrifying to young listeners. Since the genre remains in flux, continuing to respond to changing mores and societal demands, possibly we can look upon Disneyfication as a contemporary aberration with more salubrious influences waiting in the wings.

The author is at his didactic worst in the final two chapters, when fairy-tale considerations recede into the background and Zipes lapses into a quasi-Marxian diatribe against the evils of American capitalism, the globalization of our market economy and the voracious consumerism it engenders--all inimical to art of any sort, storytelling included.

In his closing arguments, Zipes bears a disquieting resemblance to Chicken Little, constantly insisting that “the sky is falling,” though the evidence is far from conclusive. Zipes is consoled by the fact that “millions of people are using the Internet to share experiences, information and knowledge.” His hope is that such verbal exchanges will “lead to reflection and wisdom.”

The hero of Michele Brown’s earnest biography, “Edward Bear, ESQ.: The True Story of the Astonishing Achievements of Teddy,” can be looked upon as yet another manifestation, albeit a relatively benign one, of “the culture industry” at work. Brown’s is a modest work of no literary or intellectual pretensions and seeks only to set the record straight about the birth and subsequent meteoric rise of the toy teddy bear to fame and fortune. The author brings impeccable credentials to her task: She is co-founder of the Teddy Bear Museum in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England.

Between 1902 and 1903, soft-fabric bears with jointed arms and legs arrived on the toy market scene almost simultaneously in Germany and the United States. But there is no question that the term “teddy bear” is of American origin.

The plush toy was named after President Theodore Roosevelt who, on a Florida hunting trip in 1902, gallantly refused to shoot a bear that had been tethered to a tree in order to give him an easy shot. The nonevent was widely publicized, and Clifford Berryman, a Washington Post cartoonist, provided a memorable cartoon of the president and the wide-eyed spared bear. To commemorate the occasion further, a Russian immigrant named Morris Michtom, who owned a candy and stationery shop in Brooklyn, displayed a stuffed bear, made by his wife, in the store window. He labeled it “Teddy’s Bear,” placing the cartoon beside it. It sold immediately. In fact, the Michtoms found they could sell as many bears as they were able to make. They soon abandoned their store to establish the Ideal Novelty and Toy Co.

The teddy bear (the S was soon dropped) had begun its worldwide conquest of the toy market and children’s hearts. Actually, adult hearts had a good deal to do with the phenomenon, as they controlled the purse strings. It was their infatuation that led to the teddy bear’s becoming a necessary adjunct to nearly every child’s early life. The Steiff Co., in Germany, manufactured its own bear, and many other companies there, in England and in the United States--Gund among them--soon followed. In 1907, Steiff sold 974,000 bears. Today, with most teddies being manufactured in the Far East, the numbers of affordable bears on the market is in the millions.

Through two world wars, teddy bears prospered, providing solace to their child owners. During World War II there was an English teddy bear named Monty who was outfitted in the full-battle regalia of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. In the ‘20s, A.A. Milne celebrated his son Christopher Robin’s teddy in “Winnie the Pooh” and its sequels. Who can forget Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh’s 1945 novel, “Brideshead Revisited,” whose constant companion at Oxford is a teddy bear called Aloysius? The bear is celebrated in songs like “The Teddy Bear’s Picnic” and “Me and My Teddy Bear.”

For a long time now, adults, remembering their own teddy bears with affection, have begun to collect them. A Greek name was coined for teddy bear collecting: arctophilia, meaning love of bears. International auction houses like Sotheby’s and Christie’s have been auctioning off vintage bears since the early ‘80s. In 1994 a Japanese collector paid $168,000 for a rare 1904 Steiff teddy.

At the same time, traditional bears by “bear artists” are being manufactured in limited editions, specifically for the adult collectors’ market. There are several magazines that cater to the industry. One British manufacturer, Merrythought, launched an International Collector’s Catalog in 1990.

Bear mania is mushrooming, and this unassuming little book for “all teddy bear lovers everywhere” is probably best directed at beginning adult collectors. Brown draws attention to many of the most sought-after bears, and the book is generously illustrated with photographs in both color and black and white. In some cases, teddies are in the company of celebrity owners. Of absolutely no interest to children are the author’s instructions to would-be collectors on what attributes to look for in a vintage bear. As the author sums it up, “Teddy’s pawprint is almost everywhere.” Talk about “consumerism” and “cultural commodities.” Jack Zipes may well shudder, but perhaps the Disney studio will want to take an option on Teddy’s remarkable story.