This paper investigates the translation of fairy tales into Portuguese, more specifically forty versions of the tale Little Red Riding Hood, published in Brazil since 1953. Trying to analyze the peculiarities of the several translations, each was compared to Perrault’s French model and to the Grimm Brothers’ German model. Such a research led the author into this conclusion: instead of the traditional tale, children are offered gross adaptations of the classical story, marked, in their vast majority, by the omission of scenes that are important to the narrative in favour of descriptions that idealize the child’s universe. The emphasis on the moralizing tone and the oversimplification of the language are also characteristics of these translations, traits that presuppose a naïve reader, very different from today’s children who have gradually been inserted in the computer universe and exposed to the national and international problems of an era of globalization.