![]() Most Disney movies, not to mention fairy tales, are about princesses and their princes. If you want to pay your respects to The Little Mermaid watch any of those films instead. Kids and grown-ups saw Ariel, and like her, they wanted more: Belle, Simba, Mulan, Buzz Lightyear, Wall-E, and, next year, another redhead who wants to stand on her own two - whaddya call ‘em - feet are just some of the results. The Little Mermaid encouraged thousands of creative people to invest in making children’s movies, and those people, being good at their jobs, went out and made The Little Mermaid look really old-fashioned. It didn’t just raise the bar: Coming after thirty years of stasis, it was a reminder that a bar even existed. The Little Mermaid is directly responsible for a pop-culture universe that takes animated movies seriously. Given my deep fondness for this movie, and particularly its soundtrack, I was not at all concerned about fact-checking it. ![]() I loved Aladdin - my class sang “A Whole New World” for sixth-grade graduation (it beat out “Wind Beneath My Wings”) - and I didn’t mind Beauty and the Beast, but The Little Mermaid was my favorite. Needless to say, of the three Disney movies that came out in my tween years, the one nearest and dearest to my heart, the one I listened to endlessly on a white plastic cassette tape, was The Little Mermaid. Every single woman I told of my plans to rewatch The Little Mermaid almost immediately serenaded me with this song, in full command of the lyrics and vocal inflections: Turns out, it’s not that easy to hit the high note on “I waaant mooore.” Obviously, I never should have moved on from Disney films.) Say other words from “Part of Your World” - “gizmos, thingamabobs, ‘no big deal,’” or “what’s that word again” - and it’s 50-50 that the same thing will happen. (The only other words that trigger a song in my mind quite as consistently are “I have shit to do,” which, mortifyingly and unfortunately, causes me to reflexively recall an Ani DiFranco spoken-word poem about abortion. As a result, it is a fairly common occurrence that when I - an adult who, prior to this week, had not watched The Little Mermaid for at least fifteen years - hear someone say “Look at this stuff,” I still instantly get “Part of Your World” stuck in my head. It is also the first line of “Part of Your World,” one of the songs in The Little Mermaid. Nostalgia Fact-Check: “Look at this stuff” is a fairly common phrase in spoken American English. Nostalgia Demo: Anyone 12 and under or not yet born in 1989 the parents of the aforementioned demographics may have fond feelings for these films as well. All three films (unlike 1994’s The Lion King, the high watermark of this period for Disney) are love stories based on previously existing fairy tales that feature future members of the powerful merchandising force known as the Disney Princesses, and they have music and lyrics from Alan Menken and Howard Ashman. ![]() Disney built on Mermaid’s success by using the same creative team and formula for 1991’s Beauty and the Beast, the first animated movie ever to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, and 1992’s Aladdin. Heralded as a return to form, the film, with its catchy soundtrack, adorable sea creatures, and spunky heroine, made over $210 million worldwide and kicked off the Disney renaissance (so real it has a Wikipedia page!), a creative period in children’s entertainment matched only by Disney’s productivity in the late thirties and early forties (when Disney released Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, and Bambi) and Pixar’s still-ongoing run. Since 1961’s One Hundred and One Dalmatians, the company had put out a string of lackluster films that, by the late eighties, almost amounted to an abandonment of the genre. Our latest installment: Disney’s The Little Mermaid.īackground: When The Little Mermaid was released in 1989, Disney’s storied animation department had been on a three-decade skid. Now, years later, we will take a look at these classics in a more objective, unforgiving adult light: Are they really the best ever? How do they hold up now? We’ve already reconsidered Heathers, Ally McBeal, Ace of Base’s The Sign, Ghostbusters, and Dinosaurs. The Nostalgia Fact-Check is a recurring Vulture feature in which we revisit a seminal movie, TV show, or album that reflexively evinces an “Oh my God, that was the best ever!” response by a certain demographic, owing to it having been imprinted on them early.
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