Meet Shelley Marie – Disney’s New “Anti-Princess”
MickeyBlog.com keeps an eye on all the upcoming holiday flair at the Disney parks; especially Halloween. And this year, a new character will join the celebration at Disneyland Resort – Shelley Marie.
Meet Shelley Marie
The Los Angeles Times’ Todd Martens reported:
Princesses versus villains. It’s a classic conflict in Disney animated movies.
And while there are plenty of variations within those groups, be it “Frozen’s” comfortably independent Elsa or “The Little Mermaid’s” entitled power broker Ursula, they usually fall into two camps: good and evil.
Perhaps there’s room for some middle ground? Meet Shelley Marie.
Shelley who?
Who exactly is Shelley Marie? And how does she fit into the “middle ground.”
Martens helped us with that, too.
She’s something of an anti-princess. That is, she’s a regular kid, a preteen whose idols aren’t the privileged class but the outsize personalities that make up some of Disney’s most warped characters. Give her the shape-shifting abilities of Maleficent, the spellbinding prowess of the Evil Queen from “Snow White” or the charisma of Dr. Facilier (the Shadow Man) from “The Princess and the Frog.”
Shelley Marie is also that rare original character created not for a movie but for a starring role at a Disney theme park.
Shelley Meet Mary
The fact that “Shelley Marie” is simply “Mary Shelley” — a.k.a. the brilliant writer who penned Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus — backwards, is not lost on me.
Nor is the fact that villian or spooky characters have an increasingly large hold on many modern Disney fans.
This will be a huge hit. My only question is: How do we get Shelley Marie into Walt Disney World?