‘Ralph Breaks the Internet’ Writer Reveals How Disney Princess Scene Was Created

As we all know by now, Disney’s Ralph Breaks the Internet, the upcoming sequel to Wreck-It Ralph, is going to pull off one of the beloved studio’s most daring scenes: A party featuring every single Disney Princess.

This scene has been one of the focal points of Ralph‘s marketing strategy, and fans are certainly ready to see it happen. But the scene didn’t just happen out of the blue, it was actually an idea that has been floating around with the film’s writer for years.

During a visit to Disney Animation Studios, ComicBook.com had the chance to hear from Ralph Breaks the Internet writer Pamela Ribon, who first thought of the princess scene back in 2014. It all started with the notion that princesses shouldn’t always have to wear uncomfortable dresses, an idea that becomes a big part of Vanellope’s scene with the Disney Princesses in the movie.

“I was still working on Moana in 2014 when they started working on the treatments and the ideas for this sequel,” Ribon said. “I was also thinking at the time, ‘Why isn’t Vanellope canon? She is a princess. She’s also a president, as she has clearly stated.’ I believe a woman can have more than one title. And I felt like this is, of all the princesses, I’m the one in the hoodie. I love my comfy clothes. And I just had this idea in the back of my head. So when we were working on this movie, and we all got back together after Zootopia in early 2016, we knew that we’d like to do a scene that was meta. As we were talking about all these different parts of the Internet you gotta be meta. It’d be fun to have a scene of Disney poking a little fun at itself.”

It’s this idea of having a “meta” scene that pushed Ribon towards the idea of including the Disney Princesses.

“​And so I thought, what if, we talked about what if Vanellope met all of the princesses,” she continued. “We thought that might be … In this version and one of the early versions we thought maybe Vanellope was gonna go viral, and I thought well, yeah, if she met all the princesses, that might break the Internet. And that’s when I started thinking, if she met all the princesses, I assume the first question would be, ‘What kind of princess are you?’”

Ribon texted with one of her friends about it and ran through her ideas, While there was a good chance that the scene could get immediately shot down, she wanted to see if other people actually thought it was worth giving a shot. When her friend replied with even more ideas, Ribon knew she had to go for it.

“So I wrote the scene, and I read it. And then I had a panic attack, and I laid down on the floor. And I was like, ‘Well I’m either going to be fired or this might be a big deal.’ And these are the first-draft pages, which you can’t read. Nobody wants to read the script. But I just wanted to show that it is a lot of still the same run of the first draft, from breaking into Oh My Disney into comfy clothes.”

Once the scene was given structure, Ribon needed a place on the Internet for this interaction to actually take place, and what better place could there be than the happiest fan site on Earth, OhMyDisney.com.

“I had found Oh My Disney. It’s a real website,” Ribon laughed. “And it was, as opposed to using something like Disney.com goes into all these sections of parks and tickets and stuff, this was just pure fandom. My Television Without Pity roots, I know the importance of being in a place where you can just love what you love unabashedly and earnestly, and everybody around you loves it too. So we were talking about Comic-Con and D23, thinking about that’s a pretty safe place for Vanellope to meet her new family or her tribe of princesses and find out that she belongs in something she may not have known she was truly a part of.”

Ribon even joined the adventure herself, as she voices Snow White in the scene. While every other princess is voiced by the actresses who portrayed them in the original films, Snow White’s Adriana Caselotti passed away more than a decade ago, leaving the position vacant.

Are you excited to see all of the Disney Princesses come together on screen? Let us know in the comments!

Ralph Breaks the Internet is set to arrive in theaters on November 21st.