Disney Channel Renews Elena of Avalor For Third Season Ahead of Its Season Two Premiere
After a successful first season and with its second yet to start, the Disney Channel has announced that Elena of Avalor will be getting a third season!
According to Deadline Hollywood the show, which centers on a Latinx-inspired country and its crown princess, Elena, is “television’s No.1 series for Girls age 2-11 in the U.S. It also ranks No. 1 in its time slot among kids in the UK, Spain and Portugal.”
While there was, and continues to be, some concern over whether it’s a good idea 1) to have a Latinx princess be on television, rather than in her own feature film, or 2) feature a monarchy as representative of cultures that historically fought against a monarchy, the high ratings for this particular age group mean that this princess is getting a lot of attention, both here and in other countries, and she’s not waiting for people to come to her. Elena comes into people’s homes and onto their devices. As promised, she also appears at Disney parks, and has “a line of dolls from Disney Store and Hasbro which recently reached the mark of one million dolls sold.”
In this piece on the show over at Mic, the writer highlights the thing that is truly great about Elena of Avalor:
“[T]here is no discernible Latino community out in the world: There are Puerto Rican enclaves and Mexican barrios; Dominican neighborhoods and Cuban districts, but, as Santa Ana puts it, there’s no one Latino “zip code” in the U.S.
That’s precisely what Avalor becomes: a kingdom where Mayan glyphs, merengue dances, Spanish guitars, pre-Columbian folklore and Caribbean architecture exist in tandem with one another. Rather than dilute each other, they instead nourish the vibrant cultures they embody for audiences at home. It’s in that spirit that one finds it encouraging that a character voiced by a Dominican-American actress got its Incan and Peruvian-inspired ball gown cooked up by a Brazilian-born and New York City-based designer.
This is what’s most exciting about Elena of Avalor: She epitomizes the very diversity found in Latin American cultures — emphasis on the plural.”
That, and just as Frozen did before it, Elena of Avalor highlights the importance of a sister relationship over any others in Elena’s life. Feminism plus centering people of color in a fantasy story? Here’s to Elena having a long and successful rule!
Season Two of Elena of Avalor comes to Disney Channel in the fall of this year.
(featured image via screencap)
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