Great Promo for Wicked Return of OUAT! If Only They Had Followed Through..

I'm way behind on my TV viewing (shocker, I know) so I haven't been up to date on what's been going on with OUAT or when exactly it was coming back. I only knew that the Wicked Witch of the West would be featured, although I didn't realize she was the main hook for the second half of the season. I should have been tipped off by the 75th MGM anniversary though. How could they not take advantage of such a tie-in?

And I only just saw this promo (below) which is quite possibly THE best teaser/promo Once Upon A Time has ever had. It's brief, clearly fairy tale in Storybrooke, uses iconic motifs and images, is subtle in presentation and doesn't suffer from a whole lot of bad CG or weirdly lit make-up and costumes. Take a look:

See what I mean? It's a good promo. It's piqued my curiosity.

Then I saw the full trailer for the return of the show and... "wah waaah..." Yeah.

The WWs look is just hideous and wouldn't even pass the audition phase of FaceOff. I feel awful for the actress. It's just a bad, bad combo. I know she's not supposed to be beautiful (at least in the traditional sense) but she's not supposed to look like her kids colored her face with green markers while she was asleep, either.  And all the extra sparkle makes her look like some sort of failed lizard-lady. :/ Even so, this could still be fixed with some changes to the lighting, lens and smart use of a filter. (It's driving me crazy!) I can only hope the actress is good enough to transcend her look.

The image at left was the official 'teaser image' to see what fans thought of the next cast member's look. Here it isn't too bad, but then this has been through the power of Photoshop. If only they'd done the something similar with the actress' scenes instead of that make-up. (I would even prefer her just in black and white for a good long stretch...)

I do, however, like the flying monkeys - at least, seen in a split-second from a distance... Here's the longer promo I'm talking about:

As a side note: Seeing what fans do with the images gives me good cause to believe that if the show just used a filter on most of the camera work, it would be make the show lot easier to watch (especially in the CG scenes) and a lot more magical! But I digress...

UPDATE 6:52pm:
I forgot to add an excerpt from an interview on the OZ-factor coming to OUAT with the creators. here:

Where is Glinda, the Good Witch? We will meet Sunny Mabrey in the iconic role in latter half of this new crop of episodes.“I think she’s still Glinda the Good Witch in that she’s positive and has a lot of spirit to her,” said Kitsis of their spin on the character. 'But the kind of mythology of the four witches and that thing, we kind of created our own.” Horowitz also revealed that our Glinda is pure goodness but she’s a character “who has gone through a lot more."

You can read more of that interview HERE.

So, we shall see what OUAT has done to the WW of the West story and to Glinda as well. The Wicked Witch will not be named Elphaba or Theodora but will have her own identity and a story we haven't yet heard.  Her name instead, will be Zelena. Although there's usually a reason for the name choices on OUAT I can't immediately think of a reason for this choice. Can you?

Fan-made promo image

Since seeing the second promo and the extensive use of awful green make-up, and use of purple screen (that's right - they had to switch to 'purple screen' for the CG sets instead of using the usual green), I'm just not really hooked in. It doesn't help that the Snow-Charming storyline is so very, very tired and that we just don't care anymore. They essentially had a reboot though, which, although being (essentially) a writerly-cheat, it may just be enough to inject some much-needed life back into the series. The wandering-in-circles-around-the-island with lots of made-up drama got old very quickly and I think everyone cheered when we got back into Storybrook this time. It's the magical juxtaposed against the every day that seems to be most fascinating to people, including big-time fans, so here's hoping Horowitz & Kitsis are listening and have steered this aimless storyline back on course.

OUAT is returning Sunday, March 9th, with a promise of no-repeat episodes until the season finale this time.

I'm going to do my best to be optimistic about it. I'd love to enjoy watching this again and not have it dissolve into a 'likely-to-be-canceled' series.