Wednesday, October 1, 2014

OUAT Loses some Originality

I was thankful to see on Tumblr that I'm not the only viewer who was saddened to see "Once Upon a Time" lose some of their originality in costuming on Sunday's episode, "A Tale of Two Sisters." Now it's not that the quality suffered at all, but the "Frozen" costumes were pretty much stitch for stitch replicas of the film costumes, not interesting interpretations of the original Disney designs.

Why is this a problem? Well, partially because what works in animated form isn't always great when rendered in real life materials. Elsa's dress is an example of this. I was tremendously excited by the interpretation we got in her cameo at the end of the Season 3 Finale. It was gorgeous and interesting and historical.

Don't misunderstand me. Elsa's blue dress in this week's episode was exquisitely made. It just wasn't anything new.

From OUATFashion.tumblr.com

Anna's dress was more original, thankfully, even if the colors seem a tad too subdued for such a spunky heroine. The details on it are lovely, though, and her wedding dress is also scrumptous.

From OUATFashion.tumblr.com

The design fits perfectly with everything we've seen from Arendelle fashion so far, and the details are gorgeous. 

From Hypable.com

However we're back to the movie template with Anna's final costume showing only slight changes.

OUAT has had a long track record of creating absolutely gorgeous original creations, with the closest nods to original dresses being Belle's blue and gold gowns, and even those were pretty creatively different. So why the sudden change of pace here for Anna and Elsa? 

It's simple. Anna and Elsa are the most popular princesses among little girls since "The Little Mermaid." Their dresses sell out among record time wherever they are stocked, and Disney World has struggled to keep any "Frozen" merchandise on hand. OUAT may be introducing the "Frozen" storyline because they love the movie, but they would be foolish not to capitalize on the huge fanbase the movie has and draw in new viewers. To do this, they have to keep the characters recognizable to the little five-year-old girls who are all about looking exactly like their favorite princesses and don't understand the concept of re-imagining dresses yet.

And of course they are right, because "A Tale of Two Sisters" had the biggest audience OUAT has seen in quite some time, despite being one of the weaker season openings. We can pretty much chalk that up entirely to the appearance of the beloved residents of Arendelle. 

But thankfully that northern realm didn't quite consume the episodes, because we still got a lovely honeymoon subplot with Belle and Mr. Gold that included new costumes for each.

From OUATFashion.com

I don't know about you, but until we got the sneak peek of this dress a few weeks ago, I certainly wasn't expecting the pleasure of a second reincarnation of Belle's gold dress. And I must say, I like this one even better! (Although the boob coverage shape is a little... odd.)

Now, on another costume front, how long do you think it is going to be before Hook decides he's tired of the heavy leather coat and wants to try modern clothes?

1 comment:

Casey said...

I was also disappointed by Elsa's dress in the Premier episode. It looked like a dumbed down version of the fabulous dress in the previous season's finale. Was there a difference between her Arendelle dress and her Storybrook dress?