Once Upon a Time Season 2: Less Fairy Tales?

Looks like there will be less and less fairy tale coverage of OUAT. And, yes, reading between the lines is that the focus is really more about Disney characters coming to visit than anything else. Mulan, Captain Hook, all Disney animation. I don't think we will be seeing Jane Eyre. We're more likely to see

 

or Herbie the Love Bug--or wait! Isn't that Emma's car already?

From 'Once Upon a Time' producers pledge intense season 2 by James Hibberd at EW:

Here’s what I find interesting about the characters you’re adding this season. Mulan is a Chinese historical figure. Captain Hook is an early 20th century literary creation and Lancelot is a fifth-century possible historical figure. Those aren’t fairy-tale characters.

KITSIS: Go back and look at the pilot when you see Henry’s book and the book flips [through the pages of illustrations from different stories]. Also the episode with the Mad Hatter when you see all the doors [to other worlds]. If you Tivo-pause those doors there are some that look different than what you might think.

HOROWITZ: Fairy tales are ground zero. They’re the first stories we hear … Will Chewbacca show up in Storybrooke? Probably not, because that’s a Lucasfilm property.

KITSIS: But he’s welcome to!

You play a lot with Disney characters. What’s something you’re not allowed to do?

KITSIS: Cinderella is not going to be doing an 8-ball in a Boogie Nights scene.

But you wouldn’t write that anyway.

HOROWITZ: You get the sense of where the line is and you try to push as far over that as you can without going too far. We want to do cool dark stories, but we don’t want to sully the characters. We had Snow “under a curse” and not behaving as herself, capture and torture a guard with an axe and threaten him. It was very real to what our Snow was doing at the time, but it’s not something traditionally Disney would want to do with that character.

KITSIS: That was our Quentin Tarantino moment.

HOROWITZ: And we had things like the Red Riding Hood episode where she kills her boyfriend and eats him. We’re getting families to watch this, but we were able to get the dark things we wanted to do.

KITSIS: For us it’s about character. Everybody has darkness in them.