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As far as I can tell if copyright became perpetual, there would be four initial possibilities upon death of the initial creator(s).
a) The creator is a careful person and sets up some sort of legal entity that will care for their works as long as possible. As long as is feasible the creator's stated wishes for the publication of their works will be followed. At some point the legal entity will cease to exist and the copyrights will either linger in limbo or be purchased someone else (likely a publishing/production company).
b) The creator gives the copyright to one or more people in their will. Anyone hoping to publish the works will have to discuss it with the heir(s) who may or may not care about the wishes of the creator. Given normal levels of will making and the laws dealing with the assets of someone who dies without a will the copyright will eventually be either shared between a cumbersome number of heirs or become the property of the state (if there is no traceable heir). In either case the chances are that the copyright will linger in limbo unless someone manages to buy the copyright which may be difficult, particularly if no one has been bothering to keep track of ownership.
[A interesting problem with intangible assets is the need for good records to maintain knowledge of the asset so that it can be passed on, something that tends to be less of a problem with physical assets. As copyright is of international concern the ability to provide reasonably available records of copyright is not simple, hence the current rules under which we can normally figure out the status of a particular work.]
c)The author doesn't bother to make a will. See b
d) The author has no heirs. See b
The most likely result of perpetual copyright is that the best chance for a creation to be available to consumers after the creator is dead would be in being bought by a business with little to no connection to the original creator for a publish on demand catalog (ebooks/mp3s/vids are essentially very cheap to make publish-on-demand products). However given the amount of trouble vs the low chance of making money I doubt most creations would be worth the bother. Or to put it bluntly most businesses probably wouldn't bother to go around obtaining copyrights for old creations except for the sort of creation worth publishing even when public domain.
In the end I expect we'd either get de facto public domain for works too old or obscure to bother figuring out who actually has copyright or they would disappear at an even greater rate then they already do with our current copyright lengths (think about what will happen to our knowledge of history if the second happens and all but the most popular original sources disappear forever).
That's assuming that the laws are followed however, given the popularity and abundance of reworked folktales, legends and myths in all available mediums, I think that it is safe to say that the ability to freely retell tales is something that appears to be value to humanity as a whole. Given that such has been done since the beginning of history (and likely longer) I expect that laws to prevent this would likely be as effective as the laws forbidding production and sale of alcohol were and for much the same reasons (although I doubt there would be the same level of violence). People will continue following long-held and enjoyable cultural practices particularly if they can't be proven to do positive harm to any individual.
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