Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-24589671-20141201023147/@comment-24674051-20141209150808

IN the case of the Frozen arc, I am going to choose to diagree. It was not coincidental, Adam and Eddy clearly took advantage to bring in Elsa and Anna to help with the story of the Snow Queen.

However, with Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, both of these have been directly referenced since season 1, before either of the 2 live action movies were released. Again, part of the problem is that the roles for Mal and Ella were not main cast roles, but supporting or recurring roles. The actresses that have those roles have been working on other jobs, which prevents them from being available to film any episodes. (The same is true for the Actors that play Prince Philip, Mulan, Aurora, Ruby, Tink, and Whale). I like that the show has taken the viewpoint that they cast person X for a specific role, and only in 1 case did they change that casting (Robin Hood). But it does make it more challenging for the writers to know whether a specific role can be used in a story, since those roles are now dependant on the actors being available. This has even been true of Mal's role, which was cast in Season 1, and is now able to be expanded because OUAT was able to schedule a larger chunk of an arc to have the actress avaialble. The same with Cinderella. She appeared in 3 episodes of season 1, but was unavailable due to other obligations until this season.