Hoops, Hogs and High Speeds

THE HONEST VOICE OF LORETTA LYNN JUMPS OUT LIKE a friendly dog from "The Three Little Pigs," the latest installment in HBO's multiculturally/sexually revisionist animated series Happily Ever After: Fairy Tales for Every Child. As porcine country singer Deli Porkchop, whose Camp Piggywood (motto: "You can never be too fat or too dirty") is the setting for this "feminist" version of the old tale of huff, puff and chinny-chin-chin, she is a fresh draught of water, a daisy among orchids, a sunbeam amid the klieg lights. Certainly, she's no stranger to show biz -- I have seen the sequins. But she's no actress, either, and there is something about her husky twang and earnest delivery that commands the ear and draws the mind up the holler, or down the holler, or however it is you go into a holler, to a place past artifice.

The rest of the show's fine, too, if not as primally stirring. I'm all for messing with the old stories; that was the stuff of Shelley Duvall's great Faerie Tale Theater, and some classic Bugs Bunnys, and "Fractured Fairy Tales," to only begin what would be a long and impressive list. The basic social design of Happily Ever After is to get Hansel and Gretel out of the Schwarzwald and into the black-brown-red-yellow-white American melting pot -- for purposes of "empowerment" -- and though it can be a quick trip from there to screed, the talent the series attracts keeps it lively and nonpolemical. The cast of many colors this time includes Friend Courteney Cox (as a spoiled piglet who builds her house of jewels), Tyra Banks (as a fashion-model pig who builds her house of food) and Sandra Oh (of Arli$$), as the practical pig, a Vietnamese potbelly, who builds hers of recycled rubber and knows martial arts. The moral of the story would seem to be that she who kicks ass, laughs last, which I wouldn't care to try to disprove. Comedian Sinbad riffs heavily as the luckless wolf. The animation is fine, and anyway your kids wouldn't care too much if it weren't. Tama Janowitz (Slaves of New York) scripted; the humor is hammy in a most literal sense, but it's a cartoon, after all, cute and colorful and, for all I know, maybe even empowering.

THE THREE LITTLE PIGS | HBO Various times through July 27

THE GREEN MONSTER | PBS Tuesday, June 29, 10 p.m.

THE HOOP LIFE | Showtime Premieres Sunday, July 4, 10 p.m.