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One bright day in late autumn a family of Ants were bustling about in the warm sunshine, drying out the grain they had stored up during the summer, when a starving Grasshopper, his fiddle under his arm, came up and humbly begged for a bite to eat.
"What!" cried the Ants in surprise, "haven't you stored anything away for the winter? What in the world were you doing all last summer?"
"I didn't have time to store up any food," whined the Grasshopper; "I was so busy making music that before I knew it the summer was gone."
The Ants shrugged their shoulders in disgust.
"Making music, were you?" they cried. "Very well; now dance!" And they turned their backs on the Grasshopper and went on with their work.
There's a time for work and a time for play
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Comments
Alternate versions
Bowdlerized, happier versions of the fable show the ants taking pity and giving the grasshopper some food.
In a 1934 animated short subject produced by Walt Disney, the Queen of the Ants decrees that the grasshopper may stay in the ant colony, but he must play his fiddle in return for his room and board. He agrees to this arrangement, and the ant tunnels become a grand ballroom where all the ants happily dance to the music of the grasshopper, who finally learns that he needs to make himself useful. Notably, this short introduced the song "The World Owes Me a Livin'", which would later become a signature tune for Goofy.
In the film Things Change, Don Ameche recalls an alternate version where the grasshopper eats the ant in the end.
The fable was retold on The Muppet Show in the episode guest-starring Bernadette Peters. Sam the Eagle narrates the story which ends with the ant being stepped on and the grasshopper driving his sports car to Florida.
Elements of the fable were loosely adapted as part of the storyline of the Pixar film A Bug's Life. In this instance, though, there are multiple grasshoppers, and they act as Mafia-like tyrants who demand a tribute of food from the ant colony.
The Ant and the Grasshopper was made into a song by Leon Rosselson in the 1970s. The song tells the story much as Aesop did.
Author Toni Morrison wrote the 2003 children's book "Who's Got Game?: The Ant or the Grasshopper?" in which the old fable is given a new spin in order to provoke a discussion about the importance of art. The grasshopper represents the artisan. Some times the Leo Lionni book "Frederick" touches upon similar issues of art versus gathering winter food stores.
The story is briefly alluded to in the song STALKER, by the Japanese band the pillows. The line can be translated as "A rocker working like an ant/ Are you harvesting for the winter?". In comparison to the story, this line (spoken by the Last stalker in the song, who claims to always have time for fun) could easily be attributed to the grasshopper.
In the Futurama episode My Three Suns, Fry recounts the story of The Grasshopper and the Octopus as a rationalization for laziness: "All year long the grasshopper kept burying acorns for the winter, while the octopus mooched off his girlfriend and watched TV. But then the winter came, and the grasshopper died, and the octopus ate all his acorns. And also, he got a racecar."
Lee and Herring parodied the fable on their series Fist of Fun. In which Richard Herring references the fable to illustrate his diligence to writing the script whereas Stewart Lee would lazily leave all his work. Stewart Lee then recites his ammended fable of The Ant and the Man, which demonstrates that tales involving animals have no bearing on human behaviour as we are capable of rationalised thought above natural instinct.
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