Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-29195016-20160724204832/@comment-4453062-20161214014811

Eskaver wrote: ItachiIshtar wrote: Edward Zachary Sunrose wrote: Actually, I know plenty of people who hated The Tower specifically because of Rapunzel not having any mention of Tangled. They thought she was bland and uninspired. They did like that she was racebent into an African-American princess, but that's pretty much it. Oh, "The Tower" got a ton of critics after it aired, and many of the criticisms didn't even have to do with Tangled. I thought it was a very underwhelming take on the Rapunzel story that just didn't work. Though, I wouldn't be surprised if the backlash from the episode was what inspired the later more direct Disney insertions starting with Frozen. It could have been better but if they stuck Tangled in to that slot it would have been just as underwhelming. But then again, a lot of David flashbacks are dull. I think one reason why people were disappointed that they didn't go the Tangled route is because up to this point while the fairy tale characters weren't copy and pasted from the Disney versions as much as they are now, they still borrowed enough elements from those films. For the most part they kept their Disney names, with Prince Thomas being one exception (likely to avoid confusion with Snow White's Prince Charming). Along with other little nods to the films. Perhaps the nods were more subtle back then, but they were certainly there. The same can't be said for their version of Rapunzel in "The Tower". For those reasons, their take on Rapunzel was doomed to get compared to Tangled from the get go. It doesn't help that Tangled as a film had a pretty solid script, while "The Tower"s script was very lackluster. Adam and Eddy explained that they didn't want to adapt Tangled because of how "perfect" they thought the movie already was. I'm certainly not saying that they should have gone full on Disney insertion, but actually incorporating some elements like they had done prior wouldn't have hurt. There were actually more nods to Tangled when they turned Emma into a Rapunzel stand-in in "Operation Mongoose", perhaps as a way to make it up to the fans disappointed with "The Tower."