ABC is airing a modern Disney classic on Monday night, with Rapunzel and Flynn Rider swinging onto small screens in Tangled. The 2010 film, which many believe is better than Frozen, will air at 8 p.m. ET as a lead-in for the latest episode of The Good Doctor. It is part of ABC‘s The Wonderful World of Disney film series, which started earlier this month.
Tangled is a twist on the classic Rapunzel fairy tale, featuring the voices of Mandy Moore as Rapunzel and Zachary Levi as Flynn Rider. The film had a long production stretching back to the late 1990s, but the version that finally hit theaters in November 2010 was still critically acclaimed and a box office hit. The film was followed by the sequel short Tangled Ever After, which played in theaters before the live-action Beauty and the Beast in 2012. Disney expanded the franchise with the underrated animated series Rapunzel’s Tangled Adventure, which is set between the events of the film and Ever After. Tangled, Ever After, and the series are all available to stream on Disney+.
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Although Disney has been more open to enlisting the feature animation unit to make sequels like Frozen 2 and Ralph Breaks the Internet, the studio has never started production on a feature-length Tangled sequel. Back in 2015, Tangled producer Roy Conli told Den of Geek there was “a desire” at the studio to make a traditional Tangled sequel. However, directors Nathan Greno and Byron Howard were not interested. (That’s likely because Howard was busy working on Zootopia and Greno was working on the eventually-canceled Gigantic at the time.)
Conli also pointed out that Rapunzel did lose her hair at the end of Tangled. However, the creative team behind Rapunzel’s Tangled Adventure did find an organic way to bring back Rapunzel’s hair. Since the series leaned heavily into magic and fantasy, even more so than Tangled, they created magical black rocks that restored Rapunzel’s golden hair.
The next film up on The Wonderful World of Disney is The Princess and the Frog (2009), which airs on Monday, May 31 at 8 p.m. ET. The Princess and the Frog was intended to revive interest in traditional hand-drawn animation. It was a hit with critics and audiences who saw it, but it wasn’t quite the big hit Disney hoped for. In recent years though, the film has attracted a wider audience through home video. Disney plans to change the Splash Mountain attraction to reference The Princess and the Frog characters. A follow-up series, Tiana, is also in development for Disney+.
