ABC is planning an ambitious live television event for The Little Mermaid, mixing animation and live musical performances.
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The Little Mermaid is set to become an experimental ABC live television event. The network’s planned revival of the classic television branding of The Wonderful World of Disney will first manifest with a hybrid special called The Wonderful World of Disney: The Little Mermaid Live!, mixing the iconic under the sea animation of the 1989 Disney movie and a live-airing musical component.
While ABC is short on specifics regarding how the animation of 1989’s The Little Mermaid will integrate (or, as they put it, “intertwine,”) with live music for The Wonderful World of Disney: The Little Mermaid Live!, the network is already touting a yet-to-be-revealed lineup of “celebrity artists” who will occupy the Disney dais for the television event, planned to air this fall. Undoubtedly, the dual-Oscar-winning signature song of the 1989 movie in Alan Menken and Howard Ashman’s “Under the Sea” will be played prominently, as will their Oscar-nominated song “Kiss the Girl.” The special will be produced by Done + Dusted, with attached executive producers Hamish Hamilton, Ian Stewart, David Jammy, Katy Mullan and Richard Kraft.
Of course, anyone who follows film news knows that Disney has been planning a cavalcade of live-action adaptations of its animated hits – exemplified by the recent box-office-smashing success of Beauty and the Beast– and The Little Mermaid is definitely amongst that growing group. For now, the extent of Disney’s live-action Little Mermaid plans pin Lin-Manuel Miranda, the visionary and star of the Broadway smash Hamilton, to score the live-action manifestation of Disney’s take on Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 fairy tale about mermaid princess Ariel and her romance-motivated Faustian bargain with sea witch Ursula to become a bipedal surface dweller.
In a tangential angle to this story, the idea of ABC and its Disney corporate parent reviving anthology series The Wonderful World of Disney should hit some nice nostalgia spots for a wide range of generations, since the ABC program dates all the way back to 1954, subsequently undergoing evolutions as a Sunday primetime showcase for Disney TV movies, series pilots and as a small screen showcase for the Mouse’s theatrically-released films; a platform on which many first experienced the classics. The series ended its run in 1990.
The Wonderful World of Disney: The Little Mermaid Live! should be quite the mixed-media small screen spectacle when it airs on ABC on Tuesday October 3.