Most Over-the-Top Morality Fable for Children or Teens

[BrainGlutton]

In Hans Christian Andersen’s tale, the fate of “The Girl Who Trod on a Loaf” is quite astonishingly cruel compared to her offense.

[BrainGlutton]

And now for some homegrown American over-the-top-morality: “Little Orphan Annie” (a/k/a “The Goblins Will Get Ya”), by James Whitcomb Riley (d. 1916 – the Little Orphan Annie comic strip did not begin until 1924, so, if there is any connection, Harold Gray got the name from Riley, not vice-versa).

Once there was a little boy who wouldn’t say his prayers,
and when he went to bed at night away up stairs,
his mammy heard him holler and his daddy heard him bawl,
and when they turned the covers down,
he wasn’t there at all!
They searched for him in the attic room
and cubby hole and press
and even up the chimney flu and every wheres, I guess,
but all they ever found of him was just his pants and round-abouts
and the goblins will get ya if ya don’t watch out!!

[Sam_A.Robrin]

@BrainGlutton

And now for some homegrown American over-the-top-morality: “Little Orphan Annie” (a/k/a “The Goblins Will Get Ya”), by James Whitcomb Riley (d. 1916 – the Little Orphan Annie comic strip did not begin until 1924, so, if there is any connection, Harold Gray got the name from Riley, not vice-versa).

That part about the pants still freaks me out some fifty+ years later…!

[BrainGlutton]

This has gotta win the thread. Found this on the TVTropes page Fire and Brimstone Hell:

In a series of books for children, the nineteenth-century missionary priest John Furniss (pronounced “furnace”?) provided vivid word-pictures of Fire And Brimstone Hell:

See! It is a pitiful sight. The little child is in this red hot oven. Hear how it screams to come out. See how it turns and twists itself about in the fire. It beats its head against the roof of the oven. It stamps its little feet on the floor of the oven. You can see on the face of this little child what you see on the faces of all in hell — despair, desperate and horrible! … God was very good to this child. Very likely God saw that this child would get worse and worse, and would never repent, and so it would have to be punished much more in hell. So God, in His mercy, called it out of the world in its early childhood.

Perhaps at this moment, seven o’clock in the evening, a child is just going into hell. To-morrow evening at seven o’clock, go and knock at the gates of hell, and ask what the child is doing. The devils will go and look. Then they will come back again and say, the child is burning! Go in a week and asked what the child is doing; you will get the same answer — it is burning! Go in a year and ask; the same answer comes — it is burning! Go in a million of years and ask the same question; the answer is just the same — it is burning! So, if you go for ever and ever, you will always get the same answer — it is burning in the fire!

Note that the child’s transgressions are not even specified. Such piccadillos of which a child is capable are deserving, not merely of a visit from the Boogeyman, but of eternal torment without hope of release.

This John Furniss was a Catholic priest. Protestants of the day could get even fiercer. Many still do.

[carm]

While they may have happened to fictional people, my favourite morality tales are from Arrested Development:

Young George Sr.: We’re out of milk. I could have got it earlier if someone would have left a note. Will you kids keep it down in back?!

[Car hits pedestrian, whose secretly prosthetic arm is severed and lands on bonnet of car. Screams from Bluth siblings.]

Young George Sr.: Oh my God! This innocent man’s arm has come off! This would never have happened if we hadn’t had to go out for milk!

J. Walter Weatherman: And that’s why you always leave a note.

and

Michael Bluth: I need the guy with the fake arm, J. Walter Weatherman.

George Bluth, Sr.: Oh, he’s dead. You killed him when you left the door open with the air conditioning on.

[Leaper]

I’ve always had a special place in my heart for “The Little Mermaid” (the original story, of course).

“Mermaids don’t have souls, 'cause only humans can have them (well, maybe not the brown ones, but the white ones, at least). But don’t worry! They can get them… sorta. But only if you’re all good little boys and girls and listen to your parents and don’t make the mermaids cry! Oh, and God exists. Definitely.”

[jackdavinci]

Whenever I see the TSA stuff on the news I think of this thread. “If you don’t let strangers either see you nude or grope your sexual parts, then terrorists will blow up your plane!” seems too outlandish even for a Brothers Grimm story.