Makes Us Appreciate the Live Action Film

Everyone can agree that The Little Mermaid, Disney’s 1989 animated film, is a beloved classic. Whether it strikes your specific fancy or not, it was a Box Office success that has stood the test of time, finding new fans every year. Even with two direct-to-video sequels of varying quality that muddy the waters of its legacy, the original rises above, remaining one of greats of the Disney Renaissance, with Ariel continuing to be a beloved character among Disney PrincessesReleased in 1937, Disney's Snow White was a gamble for the company: the first fully-animated, feature-length film ever created. It's success lead to the eventual creation of the Disney Princess franchise, which has spawned 13 main-line films and multiple spin-off movies and shows. fans, young and old.

A property like that can’t be left alone, not when it’s Disney. And with the push for live action adaptations it was inevitable that we’d see a kind of revisit of The Little Mermaid. I just don’t think anyone could have anticipated how awful that revisit would be. I’m talking, of course, of the 2019 The Little Mermaid Live!, which aired on ABC during the time when live theatrical adaptations on TV were all the rage (there were also adaptations of Grease, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and many more). And, to be clear, Disney did this version of The Little Mermaid very dirty.

Honestly, calling it an adaptation of The Little Mermaid really oversells the piece. Functionally it’s a mixed media presentation, with the songs of the film playing out on a live action set, with dancers, singers, and performers, while an audience watches on. But all the story beats, talking, and everything else that moves the plot along is shown from the original movie, on a screen. Functionally, then, it’s the original The Little Mermaid, just with some people coming out to do a bit of Broadway to break up the space, almost like the worst of both worlds for both sides of the equation.

I can’t help but wonder why the producers thought this was a good idea. This weird, mixed presentation does neither side any favors. The presentation of the original film is done from a less than ideal transfer, making the film look old and grainy. There were better transfers of the film on Blu-Ray in 2019, so why Disney’s people thought, “hey, let’s grab this old VHS copy and use that for this showing,” made sense is beyond me. That’s what it feels like, though, and it looks terrible.

But then when it comes to the musical numbers, things get even worse. Most of the musical numbers are staged poorly. Well, more specifically, they’re staged poorly for television. Perhaps, in the kindest reading of the material, the musical numbers looked good for the audience members forced to stand around for two hours and watch this thing up close. But for those of us out in TV Land (watching now from the comfort of Disney+Disney's answer in the streaming service game, Disney+ features the studio's (nearly) full back catalog, plus new movies and shows from the likes of the MCU and Star Wars.), this thing looks abysmal. The people staging and recording the show had no clue how to put something like this together for television.

Problem number one was that the musical numbers have no life to them. Take a song like “Under the Sea” or “Kiss the Girl”. There’s a lot that went into the original production on screen, with a kind of Disney Magic that came into effect. Creatures swirling, light flowing, everything working on concert, that people on stage in goofy costumes couldn’t match. They’re constrained by the costumes, but also by how the stage looks, how the camera moves, and how everything that should work in concert fails to do so when watched from the angles we’re given.

Is it fair to compare Broadway-style staging against an animated movie where anything was possible? Maybe not, but then Disney drew the comparison themselves by showing us the movie and then staging the songs live. If this were solely a Broadway production without any parts of the film involved, that would change the equation some. I’m not saying it would make the versions of the musical numbers we see in this live production any better, but at least the show wouldn’t invite the comparison itself, which certainly does it absolutely no favors.

Also hurting the musical numbers is the fact that many of the performers aren’t up to the task. Some are good singers, with Auliʻi Cravalho as Ariel and Graham Phillips as Prince Eric performing their songs very well, even if there’s absolutely no chemistry between their characters in the few moments they spend together on stage (the fact that they don’t get to perform the story means they likely didn’t get much time to work on their characters together). Others are good performers, with the stand out being Queen Latifah, clearly loving getting to play Ursula in all her glory. But there are others that just suck.

The worst of the lot of Shaggy, cast here as Sebastian the crab (and, it should be noted, was at the height of his career in the late 1990s and early 2000s, making his inclusion here at least a little curious). Shaggy seems absolutely lost on stage, barely moving more than the occasional wave of his arms back and forth. There’s no life in his performance, no soul, sucking all the fun out of Sebastian. Similarly, John Stamos is here as the Chef for the performance of “Les Poissons", and I once again thought, “why is this actor here for this role?” He at least has more life than Shaggy in his number (although that’s a really low bar) but he still barely manages to make his song interesting. There’s easily thirty or so people on stage for this song, desperately trying to make it interesting, but it falls so flat.

All of this leads me to wonder, again, why Disney thought this mixed-media performance was the best way to do a television live musical of The Little Mermaid. To be clear, there’s an actual Broadway production of the princess’s story, which was done by Disney in 2007 and 2008. Sure, it wasn’t as successful as other Broadway shows by the Mouse House (like The Lion King or Beauty and the Beast), but the television show was willing to steal a couple of songs from the Broadway production (“Fathoms Below” and “If Only”). Why not just commit and do the whole thing? Why do this awful film-plus-badly staged music numbers version that fails on both fronts? Who thought this was a good idea?

The Little Mermaid Live! fails on all fronts, providing neither a good presentation of the original animated classic nor a good version of live musical numbers. Airing, as it did, as part of the Wonderful World of Disney, it would have been better if ABC had simply shown the original 1989 movie instead of this travesty. If there is anything good that came out of it, at least we have to think the 2023 live action adaptation of The Little Mermaid can’t be any worse than this sad affair.

If, for some reason, you’re going through and watching all the versions of The Little Mermaid out there, do yourself a favor and skip this one. It’s just a worse version of the 1989 animated film. Watch that instead, maybe a second time, and pretend this live version doesn’t exist at all.