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Monday, December 1, 2014

Once Upon A Time… Meets Frozen? Why!?

Anyone who knows me well enough knows that I love classic fairy tales, and not just their Disney counterparts but the original stories too. I also have a small collection of fairy tale re-writes that I enjoyed and that is why the TV series, Once Upon A Time, initially appealed to me.

But last season I found the series took a nose dive. I couldn’t put my finger on why, but it just didn’t feel the same and I lost interest. But, after so many seasons, I kept watching to see what would happen only not with the same enthusiasm I once had. But in the last episode of that season… I lost all interest.

And you know why? Because I think they got desperate…

You see, while everyone else was based from original folk tales like Snow White and Rumplestiltskin (Brothers Grimm), Red Riding Hood and Cinderella (Charles Perreault), Pinocchio (Carlo Collodi), Peter Pan (J.M. Barrie) and Beauty and the Beast (Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve), they teased the arrival of a new character… Elsa, you know, that blonde hair and blue-eyed DISNEY princess from Frozen?

I PVR’d this season, in hopes of liking it again, and have just caught up. But, now that I have, I am only more disappointed. You see, Elsa is from the original Disney movie Frozen. Frozen was inspired by The Snow Queen (Hans Christian Andersen). And while Once Upon A Time also included The Snow Queen herself this season, which made me very happy because she is less popular but a wonderful villain, was it really necessary to bring in Elsa and the rest of the Frozen crew too?

It’s like that old commercial, and I forget what it was for, that had a bunch of adults around the table playing with character driven toys they were going to market and then one guy shouts out “we have the toys, now all we need to do is make the movie” and everyone cheers. I agree that it was a clever marketing scheme on their part, to introduce this new character, but personally I found it kind of cheap and I didn’t buy it. There are so many well written characters out there to choose from in the classics that they didn’t need to run out and find the newest, coolest, money-making princess. If they wanted someone cold and icy with a cool power, they could have just included The Snow Queen herself.

Not a critic, just my 2 cents…