Now is a good time to divulge what I know about a certain co-worker of mine. By the looks of it, I have a little bit of time left, but I’m unable to call the police without him hearing me. My phone will be useless before I know it, though, so I figured I’d type out my story while he’s not looking, and pray it posts. I have doubts this post will help anyone rescue me, but I feel my family and friends should know what happened to me regardless.
Back in the 90s, when I was but a plucky lad of 24, I worked at Disney Television Animation. I’m sure you’re all familiar with the sort of content they produce: TV shows for the Disney Channel, naturally, and, back then, cheap uninspired sequels to Disney classics. These sequels were released straight to home media and were churned out solely to turn a profit. What kid wouldn’t want to see more material starring their favorite familiar characters? If you’ve seen any of the Disney straight-to-video sequels, you know almost none of them are good, but I was hoping The Little Mermaid 2: Return to the Sea would be an exception.
I was a writer on Mermaid 2, but you won’t see me credited as such at the end of the film. Oh, make no mistake, my name is on the thing, but I didn’t get a writing credit. The reason why is because Disney hired outside writers for the film, which they did with most all of the straight-to-video releases. These outside writers, per their contracts, were the “official” writers of the film, and would get all the credit. Now, these people were technically “professionals,” I guess, but they were one-off TV writers: the sort of people who’d work quickly and cheaply since they didn’t exactly get hired on any major projects. What would happen was they’d turn in a 60-odd-page draft that was, to put it nicely, hot garbage. Then, the director would look over it and assign some of his most trusted animators and artists to cool that garbage down before Disney wanted production to begin (in addition to their regular duties and without extra pay, of course).
There were only two ghostwriters on Mermaid 2: me and my aforementioned co-worker, Larry. Larry and I were passionate about The Little Mermaid and Disney animation in general. Hell, there were a lot of passionate people on those crappy straight-to-video projects, to tell you the truth. Dan Scanlon, for example, went on to direct Monsters University and Onward, for Christ’s sake! I mention that only to illustrate that we were serious artists, and we gave a shit about making the final product as good as it could possibly be, given what we had to work with.
The script we were given was abysmal. Unfortunately, the higher ups, citing the tight production schedule for straight-to-video projects, wouldn’t allow us to completely overhaul whatever the outside writers did. We were only allowed to make tweaks, and in this case, we had only one measly week to do so.
The final version of the film is fairly close to what the outside writers gave us. It was a retread of the first film, with Ariel’s daughter longing for the sea the same way her mother longed for the land. There were a few big differences we quickly dealt with. Melody was originally named Erica, after her father. We felt that was lazy and came up with “Melody” instead because we had Ariel’s beautiful singing voice on our minds. Melody also was originally sixteen, not twelve, and she was meant to fall in love with a merboy. We ditched that because we couldn’t live with ourselves if we let this be an absolute, shameless rehash of the first one. Morgana was always there, and she was always “Urusla’s crazy sister” who would turn Ariel’s daughter into a mermaid. We tried to make her as distinct from Ursula as possible, but everyone on the production knew she was basically Ursula. Hence, they got Pat Carroll to voice her. We aged down Melody to twelve so the romance could be nixed. We then added the prologue to try and explain why Ariel would forbid Melody from going to the sea. The original writers didn’t give any clear reason other than general danger. I think Ariel mentioned the shark that chased her and Flounder in the first film as a reason why the sea was dangerous. That shark does turn up as Morgana’s sidekick, actually, though in the final version, we decided we wouldn’t state that he’s the shark from the first movie. Anyway, those were our big edits. Most everything else we found we couldn’t change without the film coming apart and needing a complete rewrite. What we had the most trouble with, though, was the ending.
Our first problem figuring out the climax was the fact that the setting the writers proposed simply seemed unfeasible with our budget. The writers naturally had no experience in animation, so they didn’t know that certain scenes they proposed would be very complicated and expensive to pull off. For the climax, Melody (as a mermaid) was supposed to pilot a ship on open water while battling Morgana, who’d have a ship of her own (yes, really). The shark (who was full-size for the entire film in this version, as opposed to the final version where we shrunk him down for most of the runtime to save a bit of money) would circle Melody’s ship, butting up against it and trying to sink it. He actually succeeds, and we go on this elaborate chase scene where Morgana is riding the shark, chasing Melody through underwater caverns and an elaborate coral reef, and it just got way overcomplicated.
We decided to scrap the writers’ complicated set pieces with a simple, easy-to-draw-and-color setting for the climax: the arctic. Remember the walrus and the penguin in the film? Yeah, they were originally a sea turtle and a seahorse. Our justification for the new arctic setting was our presumption that the first film took place in Denmark, given the nationality of Hans Christian Andersen, the original fairy tale’s author. We figured, hey, there was ice up there, right? We discussed how Morgana should die (the writers had her killed in a shipwreck but that seemed too similar to Ursula’s death in the first film). Larry came up with an idea I thought was too dark. Namely, Morgana would be frozen in a block of ice and then tossed into the depths of the ocean. Of course, this happens in the final film, which kind of surprised me. But the artists and animators working on the direct-to-video sequels at the time often liked to try and push the envelope, probably to give their projects some semblance of artistry or depth that they were otherwise severely lacking. This was especially true with The Lion King 2, which was also in production at the time. There’s an onscreen death in that and (originally) an onscreen suicide. Crazy shit. Why were such un-Disneylike elements allowed to slip in, you might ask? I’m not entirely sure. It didn’t happen often. I feel like Disney eventually put a stop to it. But perhaps they let it slip by a few times…well…because they don’t consider the projects at Television Animation to be terribly “canon.” That, or, they weren’t paying very much attention to what we were doing, given how “unimportant” the content of the film was so long as it made a profit.
Larry had other ideas that were rather…strange. We decided that Melody should have her human legs back for the climax. The reason why is because we had Morgana standing atop a towering iceberg, and we needed our heroine to be able to scale her way up there to confront the villainess and destroy her once and for all. Larry reasoned that because we were ending the film with Morgana “drowning” in a sense, there should be a parallel scene where Melody should nearly drown. I was iffy on the idea, though it did make it into the final cut. The animators put a lot of care into the scene because of how desperate it was. There were so focused on showing Melody struggling, in fact, they accidentally drew Flounder as young in the scene when he was supposed to be older at this point in the film. This is funny in hindsight, but there was something else about the scene that wasn’t so funny.
The scene was originally much longer. The animators made sure to show the fear in Melody’s eyes. Her face turning blue. Her arms thrashing desperately before her eyes rolled into the back of her head. And then, after a long struggle, she would pass out and sink to the sea floor. One or two people raised on eyebrow at this, but others thought it was bold: something that stood out in an otherwise crap production. And who knew? We might could get away with it. Of course, the scene of the near-drowning in the film was significantly cut down.
But before we arrived at the final, toned down scene of Melody almost drowning, Larry advocated for taking things farther. He wanted Melody to drown for real. He wanted her to die and her parents to avenge her death by defeating Morgana. He excitedly argued that it would make The Little Mermaid 2 the sequel to end all sequels. People would be talking about it non-stop. It would make the national news. Had social media existed back then, it would be trending. Hell, it might even be the film that would define the new millennium that was fast approaching. It would finally allow people to regard Disney direct-to-video sequels seriously. That’s what he told us, and for a short time, we were convinced.
But soon enough, we shot it down. We did consider it, but ultimately we decided that killing off the protagonist would be going too far. We had to keep in mind that young audiences were going to be watching, and we feared the backlash if we ended up upsetting them. Larry was disappointed to say the least. Angry even. At the film’s wrap party, he confided to me that the reason he wanted to include Melody’s death so badly was because his daughter, when she was four years old, had wandered into his backyard pool and drowned, and he’d never quite processed her death or gotten over his guilt and grief. He thought getting a chance to animate Melody’s death would give him the feeling of having “control” over his daughter’s drowning and help him come to peace with it. I didn’t quite know what to say to that, so I just said, “I’m sorry for your loss.” His words back to me: “I’ll come to grips with it. Someday.”
That day came today. The Little Mermaid live-action remake came out recently, as you may know, and to my surprise, I was invited to the premiere. Everyone who’d had a hand in any part of The Little Mermaid franchise over the years was invited. Some of our scrapped ideas even ended up in the remake, like a mermaid piloting a ship. So, maybe an invite to the premiere was Disney’s way of thanking us for our indirect contributions to their new live-action film. And oh, how I wish they hadn’t bothered to invite us…
I saw Larry at the premiere, but we didn’t make it to the screening. He approached me with a sick smile adorning his face, saying with glee that he’d waited for “this moment” for a long time. Then, while everyone was distracted by the festivities, he pulled me away, gagged me, and bound me. He then deposited me in a trunk, and spent days driving me out to who knows where.
And now here I am, my feet nailed to the bottom of a 13-foot-deep empty concrete pool. Larry has been filling it up with water from a garden hose, and the water is now up to my waist. It’s completely covered my feet and seeped into my wounds, causing them to burn. Larry revealed to me his dark secret: he…well, let’s just say seeing people drown was how he got his kicks, which he discovered when he lost his daughter. He said he was there, watching her from the kitchen window as she toddled over to the side of the pool. The idea of her drowning, he found, excited him, and he let it happen. He was burdened with guilt. He went into children’s animation as a form of “repentance,” you might call it, to make other kids happy after failing his daughter simply because he was such a sick fuck.
But Larry had discovered that he’d never be satisfied until he could see at least one more person drown, and this time, be the cause of it. Didn’t matter who or what, he told me: a girl, a boy, a woman, a man, a dog, a horse—anything! It just pleased him to watch a living soul struggle. It made him feel powerful. He’d thought animating a girl drowning would gratify him, but alas, he was denied the opportunity at the last minute.
And now I’m paying for it. Maybe I’ll figure a way out of this now that I’ve finally told the world what has become of me. Maybe someone reading this will be able to track Larry down and find me. If not, well, maybe it’s better down where it’s wetter. The human world, certainly, is a mess. That’s all I know at this point.