Let's Discuss: Tangled the Series

This was a weird one to come across, does anyone remember Tangled? Okay, to jog your memory because it's been a decade. Tangled is Disney's take on the story of Rapunzel, but with a twist.

There are a few ways this story has been told to me. The one that stuck out the most was the story of The Two Neighbors. Two neighbors, both farmers of different crops, have a garden, each with magic vegetables and other things of that nature. One neighbor's wife becomes obsessed with a certain kind of vegetable: insert-magic-vegetable-here. That the neighbor has a plot of this magic vegetable growing in their garden.

So it starts off simple, the neighbor politely asks for a trade, seeds for the already ripe vegetable growing in the garden. But as the neighbor's wife's cravings become more persistent the neighbor's request for more of insert-magic-vegetable-here, became more frequent and the trades less valuable. Because the demand outweighed the product, the generosity of the neighbor became more and more scarce. Until finally the neighbor with the magic vegetable denied the request of their neighbor.

But the need for this magic vegetable that this woman was craving drove her husband to steal the last few of this magic vegetable. This angered the generous neighbor and when the wife had her baby the cries from the child at night irritated the generous neighbor. Night after night the baby would cry and keep the neighbor awake.

One night the neighbor, in an exhausted state, decided to take the crying child and place her in the highest tower in the farthest part of the Forest. The neighbor had done this for peace and quiet, finding no other way to get it. The way it was told to me is that this person was only out for that. One night to just sleep. The neighbor had every plan to return the child come morning light. But by the time she had returned from placing the child in the tower, the neighbor's wife had noticed that her child was missing.

Knowing that they couldn't just return the child like the neighbor had originally thought, the lie grew as the child became an adult locked away in the tower.

This version is a little sad but in the publication of the story of Rapunzel, the person who takes Rapunzel is the villain. I mean, of course! Nobody in their right and stable mind would think that taking a child is a good idea. But this particular version really takes into account and places emphasis on the feeling of being used and exhausted.

It's a very telling version of the same story.

And I know we have all been Quarantined together for like, 10 months and this Virus doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon. So I can definitely see people thinking that in passing. But certainly not in practice. Right? We're still all kind of sane here? Good.

Much like in similar versions of Rapunzel that were told to me throughout my childhood and have become a key-point in the story it is now. In the story of Tangled, Rapunzel is a princess that was locked away in a tower. Before this gets repetitive, what Tangled did differently than past versions of this very old tale, is they gave her a gift.

Believe it or not, before Tangled all Rapunzel had was long hair. There was nothing magical about the hair, just that it was further proof that the person who locked her in that tower didn't take care of this child.

Different stories picked up in this story and different adaptations of the character 'Rapunzel' were created. But before Tangled, there was nothing really magical about Rapunzel but the fact that she had extremely long and thick hair. One that her captor and eventually savior would use to climb up into the tower window. It's a pretty morbid story. But I love it.

In Tangled, Rapunzel's parents the King and Queen of Corona, (yeah I found that kind of ironic too) are expecting a baby but the queen becomes ill and the only way to heal the ailing queen was to search for a magic flower. One that acts as a Manus Dei of sorts for this movie and it's series stem-off. The flower heals the Queen and the magic used from the flower's petals gave the baby a Congenital defect: Magic hair and the power to Heal.

The flower, before it had been plucked from it's little cliffside outside of fair Corona, also had another user. One we are quickly introduced to briefly before she becomes a staple in Rapunzel's life.

Fearing that this woman would lose this ability to age backwards, when baby Rapunzel was born, the woman broke into her bedroom and after a short but brief realization that cutting the baby's golden hair severs the connection to the flower that gave Rapunzel life (right?), she decides to take the child for herself and hides her away in a tower until the day thief Flynn Rider stumbles upon her tower.

It's a great movie and I highly recommend watching it and the 58-minute made-for-TV movie that was more like an extended Pilot for the series, before diving deep into this little Golden gem. Why? Because the story-telling between the-end-of-this-2010-film, into the beginning of this-2017-made-for-TV-limited-series, is just absolutely phenomenal.

And if you're into adequate storytelling, this transition was incredible to watch unfold in front of me.

At the end of Tangled, we are told by the voice over Narration from Eugene Fitzherbert, The man behind the persona: Flynn Rider.

"The Kingdom rejoiced! The lost princess had returned .. "But I know what the big question is; Did Rapunzel and I get married? Well I'm pleased to announce after years and years of asking..." and then tells us that he and Rapunzel did eventually get married.

In that ending monologue is where the series takes place.

And my God is it a weird story of Destiny, Betrayal, and growth after PTSD.

Rapunzel goes through a stage in the first season where she exhibits symptoms of PTSD. Within the first few episodes we are shown a Rapunzel with confidence and curiosity of her new role as a princess of Corona, yeah that sounds a little funny given where we are right now. But we're also shown a side of her that wasn't in the movie or the made-for-TV-movie. This Rapunzel sees hallucinations, experiences visual and audible flashbacks, anxiety, and drastic changes in her mood and how she governs her people are expressed within the episodes of the series. But season one was heavily heavily focused on what happened to Rapunzel as she transitioned from Tower to Castle.

I don't know if it's because I have some trauma of my own and I grew up on Timon and Pumbaa, The Little Mermaid, and Lilo and Stitch; but giving little girls a princess on television that they look up to and fell in love with so much so that she became an officially licensed Disney Princess less than a year after the release of Tangled. Something that up until October 2011, never happened. Giving them a princess with human consequences and human emotions at the televised level was a really big step forward for Children TV.

Even Disney went meta about it in the 2018 movie Ralph breaks the Internet!

Tangled was a lot of record breaking changes for Disney at the beginning of the 2010's. You can tell that the writers really cared about the characters in this series. It is definitely a change of pace from their earlier Movie-based Cartoon Series, such like Lilo and Stitch and it's spin-off series Stitch!, which aired between 2003 and 2015 collectively.

More and more of these cartoons set for Children are getting more and more linear plots and storylines that exceed the 23 minute cartoon limit and doesn't always end with a Deus ex Machina ending that resets the story and the characters for the next episode.

I highly recommend checking out Tangled: the Series as your next Disney+ binge during this second lockdown. It's quirky, it's fun, and the storytelling is on par with that of a full-length Tangled Sequel.