The Princess Blog

If you're a Swan Princess  fan, you might be familiar with the Chamberg Daily News , the YouTube webseries for official announcements about the never-ending onslaught of tie-in movies  to the original 1994 adaptation of "Swan Lake."  Instead of exploring the new settings and characters that were introduced in  The Swan Princess 10: A Royal Wedding , it looks like the series is going back to its roots for its 11th installment. According to the latest video newsletter from the Chamberg Daily News, the next Swan Princess  movie will be a prequel entitled A Fairy Tale Is Born  that will explore the events before and leading up to the original film. I've been pretty vocal about my thoughts on the pointless CGI sequels that spat all over the beautiful hand-drawn animation of the original trilogy. As such, I'm not too thrilled about adding a prequel to the mix that would further soil the imagery of the original film. To be fair, it has not been officially co...

After completing over 400 fairy tales in Andrew Lang's Fairy Books , it's easy to get burnt out by all the alternate versions of stories we're already familiar with. The biggest draw of these books is the potential to discover new fairy tales that are as compelling and imaginative as the ones we tell our children. Though these stories are few and far between, I compiled a list of the top ten hidden gems after reading all twelve books. Since this list only contains stories I have never heard of outside the Fairy Books, The Blue Fairy Book is automatically disqualified since it mainly contains popular stories. I also didn't care for any of the stories from The Pink or Lilac Fairy Book s even though these are named after the two most feminine colors in the set. The stories listed below are ahead of their time in one way or another with brave princesses who rescue princes, spiteful fairies, and unique visual or story elements that stand out from anything Disney or any ot...

National Tell a Fairy Tale Day  is here again, and that means lots of fun freebies and games from Brittany Fichter  and her posse of authors. The first online event I attended for this was the Entwined Tales Launch Party  in 2018. While most of these fairy tale celebrations have been done on Facebook in the past, this year's took place entirely on Brittany's blog, making it less interactive than the previous ones due a lack of live post and comment notifications. Participating authors  included Brittany Fichter (of course), Laura Greenwood , Melanie Cellier , Rachel Rossano , Abigail Manning , Mary Mecham , S.R. Nulton , and Celeste Baxendell . Additional authors who did not contribute to the blog events offered free or deeply discounted editions of their books . I managed to complete all twelve of Andrew Lang's Fairy Books  just in time for this auspicious occasion, but I'll be writing more about that on Sunday. My favorite activity from this year's posts were ...

The Ocean Between Us  by Cate Rowan  is a book I saw advertised on Facebook. It sounded more adult than the books I normally read, so I was going to pass it up. Then I saw that it had quite a few positive reviews. The concept of a Greek mythology mermaid romance intrigued me, so I decided to check it out. The book was short enough for something I was on the fence about and didn't take up much of my time. While it was pretty mature, it was a decent story for someone who is interested in paranormal romance. Of course, it goes without saying that I would not recommend this book to anyone below the age of 18. The Ocean Between Us  is about a mermaid named Mareisa who is cursed to live on a desert island as a siren to sink any passing ships with her uncontrollable song. To her surprise and delight, one of those ship's passengers survives and makes his way to the island, where he is no longer held by the grasp of her song and has the opportunity to get to know her as a person....

After a disappointing Super Bowl Sunday  that did not reveal the promised trailer for the live-action remake of The Little Mermaid , Disney quietly dropped the 30-second TV spot online a couple of days ago. This is a teaser rather than a trailer with even less content than I was hoping for. Half the video shows footage that has already been released at the D23 Expo , while the other half reveals two-second flashes of additional scenes from various points in the movie. They are so quick that you might miss them if you blink. The only way to get a good look at what's going on is through screenshots. One clip features our new Ariel bouncing off a phosphorescent pink cloud of translucent jellyfish. This is a fun little image that gives us a first look at the movie's visual effects in creating the fantasy underwater kingdom of Atlantica from the original film. Her playful movements are reminiscent of the showstopper "Under the Sea" number, which might be where this clip c...

I wanted to review the new trailer for Disney's remake of The Little Mermaid today , but sadly,  the trailer was canceled at the last minute . I'm upset about this because Aladdin  had many more official promos at this point in its release. Instead of dwelling on present frustrations, let's take a deep dive into the past and see how fairy tale princesses were treated in film before the  Disney Princess brand existed. There are a number of old movies from the '30s and '40s that feature a fantasy sequence with one of the main characters living the life of a fairy tale princess. These scenes were typically separate from the main plot of the film, separating the idealized dream of royalty a concept from  historical fact . The first princess fantasy sequence comes from the 1939 film The Little Princess  starring Shirley Temple , which is based on the book A Little Princess  by Frances Hodgson Burnett . Though the story does not actually feature any princesse...

The latest ARC I received from Celeste Baxendell  is Of Chivalry and Revenge , a perspective swap on the classic King Arthur tales in which Morgana, who is typically portrayed as a villain, gets her happy ending. This book is different from anything else I've read by Celeste Baxendell. Usually, her stories are long and complex, introducing characters and worlds that take a lot of time and effort to keep track of. That formula worked well in Cinders of Glass , which is currently my favorite "Cinderella" retelling. Here, everything is stripped down to brass tacks, using only the original Arthurian lore with no new magic systems or settings to keep track of. With its shorter length and simpler plot, this book would have fit perfectly with the multi-author Villain's Ever After series  to the point where I wouldn't be surprised if it was initially intended for that. Most of my Arthurian knowledge comes from vague high school memories, the BBC's Merlin series , and...

I was inspired to write this story after reading the version of "The Twelve Dancing Princesses"  in  The Red Fairy Book . It was one of my favorite stories as a child. In this version, the princes that the princesses dance with in their underground world were other candidates who tried to learn their secret and were brainwashed by a magic potion to forget everything but the love of dancing. As soon as I saw that, I knew there was another story in there. This is that story. "The Dancing Prince" Prince Justin loved Princess Calliope with all his heart, but no matter how he tried to convince his parents to break off his alliance to Princess Jessamine, they simply would not listen to reason. Even after Calliope's father issued a contest to learn the secret that she shared with her eleven sisters with the prize of marrying one of the princesses, Justin's parents still would not relent. "You may enter the contest if you wish," they told him, "but yo...

We have to wait a bit longer than initially anticipated for the new trailer of  Disney's live-action remake of  The Little Mermaid . To ease the wait, fans were treated to a surprise yesterday in the form of an excerpt from the upcoming prequel novel , Against the Tide  by J. Elle . Typically, books like these are considered side stories that don't need to fit perfectly with the main canon of the films, but that would be difficult in this case. It would be impossible for the little that has been revealed of this book not to have any effect on the upcoming May 26th film release. So much of it is different from what Disney has already established about Ariel's backstory in both the prequel series and the 2006 direct-to-DVD movie, Ariel's Beginning , which already contradict each other to an extent. According to this upcoming novel, Ariel and her sisters are granted responsibilities as Protectors of various territories in the sea as teenagers, which would make her later...

Princess Power  is a new animated Netflix series for preschoolers based on the celebrity-endorsed picture book Princesses Wear Pants . I would like to state up front that I am definitely not the target audience for this series, but there has not been a new American animated princess series in at least three years, so we're doing this one. To be fair, one of my favorite shows of all time, Sofia the First  has the same target age group, but I would argue that series was written with a wider breadth of audience in mind because it spent so much more time than it needed to on worldbuilding, music, and character development. Princess Power is a lot more obvious about its demographic, and that's fine, but as a result, it has little to offer for adults, parents, or older kids. Princess Power focuses on four girls from the "fruitdoms," whose names all start with the same letter as their kingdom's fruit. Penny comes from the Pineapple Kingdom, Rita from the Raspberry Kingdo...