Blu-Ray Review: Once Upon A Time

Once Upon A Time, there was a Blu-Ray release of the first season of a series that captured the heart and soul of a Disney Generation.  Once Upon A Time, Season One, on Blu-Ray, is a collection that you are going to want to own!  There are so many incredible details to this, I scarcely know where to begin.  For starters, the first season is 22 episodes long, which encompasses five Blu-Ray disks worth of incredible storylines, plot twists, and character development!  What is great is that you can sit down, put in disk one, and watch each and every episode without commercial interruptions, pause it when you need to, and you don’t need to wait each week for the next episode!

One interesting thing that they have on the Blu-Rays is a feature called SmartPlay.  If you utilize this, you create a profile, start watching, and when you stop, the system remembers where you were, and starts back at that spot when you pick it back up again.

Here are all the incredible episode titles for the first season:

1. “Pilot”
2. “The Thing You Love Most”
3. “Snow Falls”
4. “The Price of Gold”
5. “That Still Small Voice”
6. “The Shepherd”
7. “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter”
8. “Desperate Souls”
9. “True North”
10. “7:15 A.M.”
11. “Fruit of the Poisonous Tree”
12. “Skin Deep”
13. “What Happened to Frederick”
14. “Dreamy”
15. “Red-Handed”
16. “Heart of Darkness”
17. “Hat Trick”
18. “The Stable Boy”
19. “The Return”
20. “The Stranger”
21. “An Apple Red as Blood”
22. “A Land Without Magic”

What I find absolutely astonishing is the way that Adam Horowitz, Edward Kitsis, and the rest of the crew have woven an incredible backstory to each of the fairytale characters, showing some information about each of them that didn’t know about.  It is so believable that you can quite easily forget that they made this stuff up!  I can picture them as Imagineers, it is that believable.

For me, my favorite of the episodes would have to be “Skin Deep.”  This episode is the story of Rumpelstiltskin and Belle, and how Belle tried to save Rumpelstiltskin, and almost succeeded, but in the end he did not allow True Love’s Kiss to break the hold of his magic on him.  It is an extremely well written episode, and does an incredible job of pulling at the heart-strings.  I found myself hoping that Belle would break the spell and return Rumpelstiltskin back to himself, but it wasn’t to be.

As incredible as the episodes are, and being able to watch them one after another, the Bonus Features are just as good.  There are several things to explore on the disks (each disk has bonus features!) including the following:

• Fairy Tales in the Modern World
• Tell Me a Story
• Building Character
• Noble Creatures
• Deleted Scenes
• Easter Eggs

The beauty of Blu-Ray technology, in addition to the stunning imagery, is that the disks hold so much more data so you are able to get so much more information on each of the disks.  I really enjoyed both Tell Me a Story and Building Character for the bonus features.  In Tell Me a Story, the origins of the fairy tales were explained in greater detail, and details were also provided that showed the link between the original stories and the Disney versions of the stories.  In Building Character, interviews were had with Horowitz, Kitsis, and some of the cast to explain how the actors grabbed a hold of their character and made it their own.

In the end, if you are a fan of Disney and a fan of the series, you are going to want to own this collection.  It is incredibly well done, and something that you will treasure for years to come.  With the second season starting on September 30, go out and get it now and re-watch the first season just in time to get caught back up in the second season!

Related articles

• Bluray Review: ‘Pocahontas’ and ‘Pocahontas II’ on Blu-Ray (chipandco.com)
• ‘Ghosts of the Abyss’ Comes to Blu-ray September 11, 2012 (chipandco.com)

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