Let the dancing begin! On June 29th, 2012, the Make Your Mark: Shake It Up Dance Off will begin accepting online video auditions for its 2012 competition.
Promotional image for Disney Channel's Make Your Mark: Shake It Up Dance Off, image copyright Disney
Last year’s Make Your Mark inspired thousands of aspiring dancers to upload more than 28,000 audition videos. Disney Channel fans invited to watch the videos online and vote for their favorite dancers. Six semi-finalists were selected to compete in a televised event where the competitors were watched – and voted for – by millions. The four talented dancers of AKsquared were declared the winners and were featured as spotlight dancers on an episode of Disney Channel’s Shake It Up.
Read More: http://www.disney-blog.com/?p=2811
I have always been a fan of fairy tales, from Disney’s animated classics to retellings by authors Gregory Maguire (Wicked, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister), Robin McKinley (Beauty, Spindle’s End), and Shannon Hale (The Goose Girl). Drew Barrymore’s Ever After: A Cinderella Story is one of my all-time favorite films, and who doesn’t swoon over Westley, Buttercup’s dashing true love in The Princess Bride?
Logo for ABC's Once Upon a Time, image copyright Disney
When ABC’s ambitious fairy tale series Once Upon a Time premiered in primetime last fall, I was excited to see Disney’s latest take on fairy tale characters trapped in the modern world, a concept which worked wonderfully in 2007’s Enchanted starring Amy Adams and Patrick Dempsey. The pilot episode showed promise, despite some sup-par special effects and conspicuously rendered backgrounds, but as season one’s disjointed plot unfolded across two worlds (one magical, one mundane), I was often less than enchanted – and left wanting.
Read More: http://www.disney-blog.com/?p=2714
This summer, I watched a Make It Or Break It marathon on Netflix where all 40 episodes of the ABC Family drama about elite gymnasts-in-training are available to Watch Instantly. When I was a tweenager, I was obsessed with the “Magnificent Seven” 1996 Olympic Gymnastics Team and their quest for real-life Olympic gold, and 15 years later, Make It Or Break It is my perfect guilty pleasure.
Promotional image for Make It Or Break It, image copyrighted ABC Family
The series centers on four gymnasts: newcomer Emily Kmetko, uber-focused Payson Keeler, diva Kaylie Cruz, and manipulative backstabber Lauren Tanner, who are frenemies at the Rocky Mountain Gymnastics Training Center (The Rock) where they compete to make the National, Worlds, and (eventual) 2012 Olympic gymnastics teams. I first gushed about the series this past June, with my take on the series’ PROS (solid acting, excellent gymnastics, melodrama) and CONS (preachiness, predictable storylines, melodrama).
Read More: http://www.disney-blog.com/?p=2576
ABC’s Once Upon a Time debuted last week as one of two new primetime series with a fairy tale twist (the other being NBC’s Grimm).
Pinocchio and Geppetto from ABC's Once Upon a Time, photograph by Jack Rowand and copyrighted ABC
In Once Upon a Time, fairy tale characters, including Snow White, Geppetto, Rumplestiltskin, and Little Red Riding Hood, have been cursed by the Evil Queen and are now trapped in the real world in a town called Storybrooke, Maine, with no memories of their past lives. Only Snow White’s daughter Emma escaped the curse, and she has returned to the town 28 years later to break the curse and restore the characters to their happy endings.
Read More: http://www.disney-blog.com/?p=2503
74 years ago, Walt Disney released Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), the first full-color animated feature ever produced and the first film in the Walt Disney Animated Classics cannon which has grown to 51 animated features, including 2011’s Winnie the Pooh.
Still from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), image copyright Disney
Despite the years that have passed, Snow White remains a very popular Disney character. She is one of the ten official Disney Princesses and appears frequently at the Disney parks as a meet and greet character and in the Snow White’s Scary Adventures dark ride. The seven dwarfs in the original Brothers Grimm fairy tale may not have had names or personalities, but Walt Disney imbued them with both, and Sleepy, Happy, Grumpy, Dopey, Sneezy, Bashful, and Doc remain beloved classic characters.
Read More: http://www.disney-blog.com/?p=2495
