Children’s Folklore Recent Titles in Greenwood Folklore Handbooks Myth: a handbook

Charlie’s Angels
Three girls each took a name: Sabrina, Kelly, and Chris. Those names correspond with 
the ever-popular actresses on 
Charlie’s Angels.
Their mission was to save their friend being 
held captive by a boy. They did a great deal of running, hiding, and quite a bit of acting 
which consisted of imitation of the actual actresses in the television show. It was all very 
exciting to watch. The interesting part of the game was that it didn’t seem to end, rather it 
seemed as though a new episode would be played each day. The friend was finally rescued, 
and all the children began to scream “yeah” for the three heroines.
Melinda Ames, a student fieldworker, recorded these observations of three 12-
year-old girls playing their favorite game in a park in Binghamton, New York, 
in the spring of 1979. By the late 1970s, imaginative role-playing games based 
on TV shows had become common. Significantly, the three girls who played the 
roles of Sabrina, Kelly, and Chris did not take directions from an invisible man 
named Charlie, as the three actresses did in the original TV show. Exercising their 
own power of choice, the girls dispensed with the male direction that did not ap-
peal to them: a small but important change.

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70 Children’s 
Folklore
Hippie and the Cop
Lisa: I know a game we play together. We call it “Hippie and the Cop.” I’m the 
hippie.
Bobby: Guess who I am? (sarcastic intonation). Here, let me tell you the rules. 
Since I’m the cop, I beat up Lisa with this plastic tubing. If she tries to fi ght 
back, I beat her up some more. Then I throw her in jail, a dark room in our 
cellar. Lisa gets away and then we start all over again. Throughout the game 
I call her names like “long-haired hippie freak,” “pinko turkey,” and things 
like that.
Nine-year-old Lisa and her 11-year-old brother Bobby explained how they played 
this game in Massapequa, New York, in the spring of 1979. While “Hippie and 
the Cop” demonstrates creative role-play, it also shows the influence of police 
dramas on television. Using materials that they could find easily, Lisa and Bobby 
acted out conflict that was typical of a sensation-oriented TV show. Bobby’s ver-
bal abuse of the hippie dramatizes mainstream society’s criticism of countercul-
tural lifestyles in the late 1960s and 1970s.
Finger Game