(futuristic music)

(typing)

(comic music)

(train whistle)

Once upon a time,

good boys and girls could turn on their TV sets

and see fresh, original characters and storylines.

Nowadays, it seems like any old story

that has a trace of the macabre or the supernatural to it

is being turned into a TV drama.

The formula is simple,

find a classic yarn, public domain, of course,

so you don't have to pay anyone for the rights,

then transpose it to the present day

and film it in some city that offers huge tax breaks.

Just look at this new show, Sleepy Hollow,

which takes Washington Irving's gullible cowardly beanpole,

Ichabod Crane,

and turns him into a hunky time traveling crime fighter

in present day North Carolina.

Brought to you by the same writers

who thought they could improve Star Trek

by adding temporal paradoxes.

The most nefarious fantasy drama is undoubtedly

ABC Disney's Once Upon a Time.

This series populates a modern day city

with characters and plot devices

swiped from Beauty and the Beast,

Peter Pan, Pinocchio, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty,

and now there's a whole spin-off series

set in a Louis Carroll Wonderlandverse.

What's particularly insidious about Once Upon a Time,

is that the source material

is not the gory, creepy, classic stories

collected by Hans Christian Andersen or the Brothers Grimm,

it's the pop culture versions of these stories

that we know from the films made by the House of Mouse.

The Once Upon a Timeverse isn't the land of fairy tales,

it's Disneyland.

The show makes coy references

to Tron and 101 Dalmatians, in case you missed this.

Building vast crossover universes

out of pre-existing intellectual properties

is a classic Disney move.

Oh, it would take a hero as powerful as Hercules

to bring down this many headed media hydra.

Oh, I forgot, they've got him too.

(typing)

(train whistle)

(sweeping music)

What do you think about fairy tales in popular culture?

Let me know in the comments,

and subscribe to the Wired Channel.