Love this. And this one of my favorite movies, too. It's funny, as much as I adore the first movie, I love this one just a little bit more.
I don't know if you noticed this, but there's an interesting thing about the beginning of this. I never noticed it before, until you made a comparison between Prince Charming in this film and Prince Charming in Once Upon A Time. If you watch the start of this movie, when Prince Charming is riding toward the castle, you can see that the opening scene of Once starts exactly the same way. It isn't just that in both scenes they're riding fast across a landscape to get their perspective princesses. In both scenes, the men are riding at a breakneck speed with a cape flying behind them. The angle of the forest around them in both is very similar. There's even a brief appearance of a snowy mountain peak in each, and both mountains are shaped the same, at the same to the side angle on the screen. Even the horses are the same. The two sequences are so close that there's no way Once did that by accident. It's a callback to this film. I've seen both the opening to Once and this movie so many times, I can't believe I never noticed it before now.
The announcer in the red carpet scene at the ball who you thought you knew is supposed to be Joan Rivers. And the opening title card for the show the ball is being featured on (with the letters EF) is a play off of Entertainment Tonight, I believe.