Actually, Bill Willingham ripped off Hallmark
This post is purely to explain why, if it weren't for the Network rejecting the Fables pilot, it would never cross my mind to compare Once Upon A Time to Fables, aside from the obvious "fairy tale mashup" aspect. Back in the late 90s/early 2000s, there was a serious trend of fantasy/adventure TV miniseries based on mythology and fairy tales, most of them created in conjunction with Hallmark and a network station. I think most aired on ABC. I watched most of them at the time and own serveral. The Merlin miniseries with Sam Neill kicked this off (The first, fun one. Not the horrible sequel.) but there were severl based on Greek mythology (Hercules, Jason, Odysseus) a leprechaun one, one based on 1001 Nights, and several based on fairy tales. We had Snow White, Jack and the Beanstalk and The Snow Queen all getting their individial treatment, but probably the best known of these series is The 10th Kingdom.
10K starts in an alternate reality which the Grimm brothers stumbled into centuries ago (their stories are, essentially, a record of what was going on in that reality at that time). We start with Snow White's grandson, Wendell, being attacked by his evil stepmother and turned into a dog. He escapes into our world, and one of the people the Queen sends after him is a convict known as Wolf, who is the grandson of Red Riding Hood's Big Bad Wolf. At this point, Wolf is the Huntsman and Wendell is Snow White. In our world, Wendell gets "Taken in" by a waitress named Virginia and her father, Tony. Wolf meets and falls in love with Virginia and after various attempts at villainy, he basically accidentally becomes a good guy (he tends to fall off that wagon a lot though) and the 4 eventually end up back in fairy tale land. At this point, Virginia has already been Little Red Riding Hood to establish the connection to Wolf, and she now assumes the role of Snow White foir numerous and spoilery plot reasons, and the queen's own Huntsman appears and spend the rest of the series chasing them. The series incorporates as much Grimm as it can but Snow White's characters and themes remain central, and the final leg of the adventure is 100% Snow White. There's also secret mothers, mirror curses, evil mirrors and surprise-pregnancy-wait-how-did-that-happen? Virginia transitions though representing numerous heroines throughout the series, bu Snow White remains her and her story's central them. Though, as ambergold pointed out, Virginia/Wolf can also be seen as representing "Beauty & the Beast." I've always focused on the Snow White aspect, but I can see that pretty strongly too now that it's been brought to my attention.
Here's a Virginia/Wolf MV, chosen largely for better picture quality and a bit more scene variety than the other 10K videos a quick youtube search found.
A bit later (riding the wave) there was another miniseries called Jack and the Beanstalk: The Real Story. This was fun, though it lacked the level of meta and deconstruction of 10K. Here, we start with the traditional tale of "Jack and the Beanstalk" and the hero, also Jack, is descended from the legendary Jack, but all the men in his family, no matter how healthy, die before they're 40. Later, we learn that the traditional story is a load of lies and the real Jack was a lying, cheating, thieving, murdering, seduce-and-abandon creep who didn't care about silly things like dooming the entire fairy tale kingdom world, and the reason his descendants die young is because of his actions. in the end, the modern Jack has to right his ancestor's wrongs and break the curse. Since time passes differently in the two worlds, he also ends up falling in love with the girl his ancestor used and abandoned. I've never quite decided how I feel about that.
This low-res version of the trailer is all I found on youtube except for a couple clips:
So, basically, when I started Fables, I was comparing it to those series, and those are also what I compare Once Upon A Time to.
10K starts in an alternate reality which the Grimm brothers stumbled into centuries ago (their stories are, essentially, a record of what was going on in that reality at that time). We start with Snow White's grandson, Wendell, being attacked by his evil stepmother and turned into a dog. He escapes into our world, and one of the people the Queen sends after him is a convict known as Wolf, who is the grandson of Red Riding Hood's Big Bad Wolf. At this point, Wolf is the Huntsman and Wendell is Snow White. In our world, Wendell gets "Taken in" by a waitress named Virginia and her father, Tony. Wolf meets and falls in love with Virginia and after various attempts at villainy, he basically accidentally becomes a good guy (he tends to fall off that wagon a lot though) and the 4 eventually end up back in fairy tale land. At this point, Virginia has already been Little Red Riding Hood to establish the connection to Wolf, and she now assumes the role of Snow White foir numerous and spoilery plot reasons, and the queen's own Huntsman appears and spend the rest of the series chasing them. The series incorporates as much Grimm as it can but Snow White's characters and themes remain central, and the final leg of the adventure is 100% Snow White. There's also secret mothers, mirror curses, evil mirrors and surprise-pregnancy-wait-how-did-that-happen? Virginia transitions though representing numerous heroines throughout the series, bu Snow White remains her and her story's central them. Though, as ambergold pointed out, Virginia/Wolf can also be seen as representing "Beauty & the Beast." I've always focused on the Snow White aspect, but I can see that pretty strongly too now that it's been brought to my attention.
Here's a Virginia/Wolf MV, chosen largely for better picture quality and a bit more scene variety than the other 10K videos a quick youtube search found.
Click to viewA bit later (riding the wave) there was another miniseries called Jack and the Beanstalk: The Real Story. This was fun, though it lacked the level of meta and deconstruction of 10K. Here, we start with the traditional tale of "Jack and the Beanstalk" and the hero, also Jack, is descended from the legendary Jack, but all the men in his family, no matter how healthy, die before they're 40. Later, we learn that the traditional story is a load of lies and the real Jack was a lying, cheating, thieving, murdering, seduce-and-abandon creep who didn't care about silly things like dooming the entire fairy tale kingdom world, and the reason his descendants die young is because of his actions. in the end, the modern Jack has to right his ancestor's wrongs and break the curse. Since time passes differently in the two worlds, he also ends up falling in love with the girl his ancestor used and abandoned. I've never quite decided how I feel about that.
This low-res version of the trailer is all I found on youtube except for a couple clips:
So, basically, when I started Fables, I was comparing it to those series, and those are also what I compare Once Upon A Time to.