La Ron S. Readus
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The Little Mermaid is ALMOST Significant! (VIDEO SCRIPT)
🕑 Added 2023-09-20 20:00:02 +0000 UTCReaders, I wanna start this by saying I don’t think the 2023 live-action remake of Disney’s “The Little Mermaid” was terrible
Am I upset that they got rid of the lyrics to the Vanessa reprise of Poor Unfortunate Souls? Yes. I’m actually REALLY upset about that!
Listen, sometimes you’re just in the mood to hear Halle Bailey sing “Soon I’ll have that Little Mermaid and the ocean will be mine” and I’m just never going to have that, so just let me mourn.
/However that doesn’t mean I wasn’t down with a lot of the changes they made. Even the main one that they did to appease the Christian Moms against Movies crowd./
No, that’s not a real group. At least, I HOPE it’s not. But nowadays, I wouldn’t be surprised if it is.
However, It would do me a great disservice to not share with you all, that the major change in question that they made to the movie, opened the door to right a VERY messed up Wrong Disney made almost 30 years ago.
And they would've gotten away with it, too. If it weren’t for those meddling humans. Let’s begin.
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Hey, Readers. La’Ron here. Offering you analysis and perspective on your favorite bits of geek and pop culture media
If it wasn’t obvious from the intro, this video will in fact contain spoilers for Disney’s 2023 live-action remake of “The Little Mermaid.” It’s currently available to stream on Disney Plus, so give it a watch if you haven’t seen it yet, and don’t want me to spoil pivotal points of it for you in this video.
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That’s the syllabus. Now onto the lesson.
Are Disney’s changes noticeable?
That’s the question you SHOULD be asking instead of “what did Disney change?”
Because for fans of the 1989 animated classic, both casual and die-hard alike, the changes made are very noticeable.
/The “Body Language” bit and the entire second verse of Poor Unfortunate Souls was cut from Ursula’s number because I assume its lyrics promoted being silent to keep the attention of a man.../
Even though she’s clearly a villain and common sense tells the watchers that this way of thinking is outdated the way she was singing it but that’s just me
/Lin-Manuel Miranda thought Prince Eric needed his own song for some reason and wrote the most non Alan Menkin/Howard Ashman-sounding song for him/
The Scuttlebutt...(deep sigh)
Nods and references to the actual short story that was written by Hans Christian Andersen were scattered throughout, which I definitely appreciated.
/Like the small reference to when The Little Mermaid had to kill the prince to become a mermaid again before turning into seafoam/ (we have to kill him)
/And even a nod to Andersen’s own queerness playing a factor in the creation of the story/ (can’t you see the longing in his eyes?)
However, one of the most important changes that were made involved the development of, as you would expect, Ariel herself.
This was to be expected, however. As I stated in my previous video about the 1989 animated classic, there were plenty of cishet moms out there who were unaware of the queer cis male perspective that Hans wrote the original story under and even the queer subtext that Howard Ashman sprinkled into Disney’s otherwise heteronormative take on the story, seeing nothing but the idea of a woman giving up her voice to impress a man as problematic.
So what Disney did to make sure that this wouldn’t be an issue to the mostly white feminists making this complaint for years, was take lore they created for Ariel -- their legally distinct copyrightable version of The Little Mermaid -- in previously animated spin-offs and apply it to the live-action retelling of the 1989 classic in a way that helps make this the main drive and motivation for Ariel to become a human, as opposed to simply wanting to be with prince Eric.
/The lore in question comes from the 2008 prequel film “The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Beginning,” which is the first time we see her mother Queen Athena./
Y’know, if you hadn’t read any books or comics beforehand, which I’m absolutely sure exists.
/The plot of the film is that Ariel as a child is trying to restore music to Atlantica after her father King Triton outlawed it. And it’s only outlawed because after gifting Athena a musicbox while the two of them and a few other mermaids were resting on a lagoon, she got killed by pirates trying to retrieve it./
This aspect about Queen Athena perishing by the hand of humans is what made it into the live-action adaptation.
/And alongside the other things that different species of life would rightfully hate humans for such as pollution, overfishing, and the extinction of different sea life and whatnot, nearly every mermaid hates humans because they were the ones who killed Queen Athena.
/Every mermaid but Ariel./
This is the difference between the 2023 film and the animated 1989 one. In her fascination with humanity and the surface world, Ariel developed the emotional maturity to be one of the only merfolk to realize that just because ONE human killed her mother doesn’t mean EVERY human wants to kill all merfolk.
/And instead of Ariel shifting from curiosity and wonder to immediate infatuation and yearning as the key to her transition like the loud minority of the film’s cishet fanbase has been projecting since the criticism became popular, we now have Ariel going from this.../ (daddy I love him, he’s a human you’re a mermaid, I don’t care)
/To this/ (he’s a human you’re a mermaid, yes but that doesn’t make us enemies)
Now, before I continue, I want it on record that this is completely a case of cursed coincidence that Halle Bailey -- a black woman -- was cast as THIS version of Ariel.
Rob Marshall, the director of the film, has gone on record time and time again that Halle was cast because she knocked her audition out of the pun-intended water, and nobody else impacted him the way that it did.
What I WILL say is Disney going this route with Ariel as a way of dealing with the Million Moms of Movies’ complaints made me feel like this was just an attempt at them righting a wrong they previously made almost 30 years ago. Because watching this play out the way it did in the movie gave me a strong sense...
Of Deja Vu.
Disney’s Pocahontas was released in 1995. (pause) Oh yeah, we’re doing this.
/What initially was planned to be one of the biggest box office hits in their repertoire near the end of the Disney Renaissance era, 1995’s Pocahontas was nothing but white revisionist garbage that was beaten by The Lion King, the ACTUAL biggest box office hit in their repertoire near the end of the Disney Renaissance era with a smaller budget./
What do I mean by white revisionist garbage? Well, the story of Pocohantas that Disney told was GROSSLY inaccurate to how the actual story went.
And normally that would be fine; creative liberties and all that. But so much was added and changed to both the conflict between the colonists and the Powhatan tribe and even Matoaka herself -- that’s Pocahontas’ real name, by the way -- that the story they were trying to tell might as well have been a completely original one.
/Lindsay Ellis does a far better job at explaining the differences between the film and the real-life tragedy that it drew inspiration from, so I highly suggest you give it a watch after you’re done with this video./
But for the sake of the point I’m making, the character Pocohantas in the theatrically released Disney film and its straight-to-video sequel...
/Was aged up from 10 years old to a young adult, was given a star-crossed lovers romance with John Smith that never happened in real life, and completely changed her kidnapping, Christianity brainwashing and the various assaults of the sexual nature she endured as a prisoner during the First Anglo-Powhatan War to say that she willingly left for England so that she can help bring peace between the two factions./
And the seed of her being the mediator was planted in the theatrically released movie as well...
/With them utilizing the scene from the movie that was supposed to be the one that got the movie the Academy Award nomination for best Animated Film as the indicator./ (I love him)
Disney’s heavily romanticized version of Matoaka’s life was done primarily as Oscar bait after a white man got the idea to make it during Thanksgiving dinner.
But in order for the bait to work, they had to make sure the plot and its “moral” surrounded that of the nowadays overused trope of the minority providing the mediation between their oppressed people and those that are doing the oppressing.
/All while utilizing the white liberal tactic of saying that if the one bad apple is taken out -- which, in the case of Disney’s Pocohantas, is the seed of racism and bigotry -- then the entire batch can thrive. Using Ratcliffe, the film’s villain, as that one bad apple in both films./
The reason why I had a case of Deja Vu when watching 2023’s The Little Mermaid in regards to 1995’s Pocohantas however, is that the shift they gave Ariel in this regard reminded me a lot of how Disney tried -- and failed -- to accomplish the same thing with 1995’s Pocohontas.
/However, instead of completely rewriting a young girl’s actual history in order to improve race relations between that of indigenous native americans and british colonizers, it’s -- coincidentally -- a dark-skinned mermaid trying to do the same thing between merfolk and the human race./
And thanks to the fact that Ariel is and always was a work of fiction, and that the two factors are between humanity as a whole and the fictional species of mermaids, Disney’s live-action version of The Little Mermaid does a way better job at handling the topics of unity and whatnot that the directors and writers of 1995’s Pocohantas tried to do, without having to completely bastardize the tragic history of a young native american girl who died as a victim of British colonization.
Here’s the thing, though...
While the concept of using the live-action Little Mermaid to subconsciously right the wrongs that they made with 1995’s Pocohantas can be seen as noble, there’s only one real way it can work that the movie only halfway commits to. And because it only halfway commits to it -- specifically on the side of the merfolk -- that being an intended message the film tries to convey falls flat.
While I also witnessed the racism that happened soon after, I remember VIVIDLY when Black Twitter both celebrated and fan-cast the other major players of the kingdom of Atlantica based on Ariel’s newfound blackness.
Up until Javier Hardem was announced as King Triton about a week later, a lot of peeps were hoping to see the likes of Idris Elba in the role. And despite Melissa McCarthy being one of the main names thrown around for Ursula even beforehand, the announcement of Ariel revitalized a lot of peeps’ hope of seeing Lizzo play Ursula like she always wanted to.
/Especially since they were going with the angle of Triton and Ursula being brother and sister in this version of the story./
But, as we’ve seen with the casting of Javier as Triton, Melissa as Ursula...
/And Ariels sisters being portrayed by performers of different ethnicities and skintones despite their characters being related by blood once we were given first looks at their portrayals, it was clear at first that this casting wasn’t taking genetics into consideration and was going for more of a 1997 Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella type of deal. Where a black queen and a white king can produce a Filipino prince and nobody bats an eye./
/And considering how news outlets were quick to write pieces on the film’s new character Queen Selina -- Prince Eric’s black mother -- over a month before the movie’s theatrical release, there was now even MORE evidence supporting this theory./
Because this was the type of casting they were going for -- at least from my initial understanding when I first put together the mediator change to Ariel’s journey -- it put me in the mindset of going:
“Oh, okay. So I should just interpret this as these are just mermaids and these are just humans. If there’s no debate over the different types of ethnicities that mermaids represent, then there shouldn’t be one regarding humans either. This can make the narrative of humans and mermaids being able to exist together a lot more plausible if we don’t have to deal with any real-life nuances on the human end.”
But guess what they did on the human end?
/Now I will admit, the reveal of Prince Eric being adopted was fine and didn’t necessarily break the immersion they were trying to set up with humans and mermaids singing kumbaya at the end./ (the king and queen took you in as their own)
Then they referenced real life trade routes that date the time period of this movie and its location to somewhere in the Caribbean during the 17th century...
/Possibly the 19th century because of where they were located and how behind in the times they were.../(I don’t want us to be left behind)
/And what Eric was carrying on the ship that sank/ (we traded cane for quinine. They use it in Europe to treat malaria)
This is even further backed up when Ariel becomes human...
/And is found and taken care of by the kingdom’s black servants before reuniting with Eric, implying they were brought over by the British during the monarchy’s occupation of the Caribbean./
This makes the position of Queen Selina questionable.
/Now that we’re operating off of real world situations, there’s never been any type of black leadership within the Caribbean while under British rule during that time frame, and the closest were a couple of isolated settlements that wouldn’t have been recognized enough for Eric to be able to successfully trade sugar cane for quinine, despite his whiteness./
The closest way of explaining her role was that King Maximillius, her late husband, was white and was placed in charge of the island before breaking off from the monarchy and marrying her, leaving her the matriarch of the island nation after his death.
/Which -- once again -- wouldn’t have allowed Eric to do what he ended up doing during the first act of the movie./
Because of this looseleaf and confusing connection to real life human history the movie tries to make with its human characters, it falls incredibly short in trying to truly achieve the “mediation and unity between two races” narrative that the film is trying to achieve, in a way that makes us forgive how they tried to do it with Pocohantas...
Because the real-life history they’re trying to infuse within the plot of the humans is already filled with atrocities of humans fighting and doing terrible things to each other because of ethnic differences and infighting; something that is completely ignored and overlooked on the mermaid side of the conflict because no such ethnic differences or infighting exist.
Once again; if the human society on the island nation were treated like that of the kingdom in the 1997 version of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella, where anyone could be related to anyone by blood regardless of ethnicity...
/In order to truly represent humanity as a whole the same way it's implied within the kingdom of Atlantica -- whose infrastructure is now free of golden dildos -- this could’ve been easily achieved. But it turns out that, just like real life, humans have to ruin everything./
Conclusion
So I know this isn’t gonna stop people from doing so in the comments, but please don’t interpret what I have to say about the movie to mean that I think it’s terrible.
Halle Bailey killed it as Ariel and I really dug the fact that it was her that offed Ursula in this one instead of Eric
And while the animated one is still my preferred one, there’s a lot about this live action version that I appreciate.
/I just personally feel that it's fair to point out that in their attempt to address one of the loudest critiques of the original, the live-action remake was THIS CLOSE to being Rodgers & Hammerstein’s The Little Mermaid. And if nobody was gonna do it, I was./
But I digress, Readers. Your homework assignment for the day:
Write in the comment section below what you thought of 2023’s live action remake of Disney's The Little Mermaid if you’ve seen it.
Or, if you feel like sharing with the rest of the class, a movie you’ve seen -- remake or otherwise -- that was THIS CLOSE to achieving something that another one dropped the ball on, only to realize that its chances were hurt in the new one, too.
Whichever question you decide to answer, I’d love to know your thoughts.
/A HUGE shoutout to my Patrons both big and small for helping make this channel possible.
Make sure you check out the card at the end of the video to join, or click the link to it or any of my affiliates in the description box below.
But until then, this is Readus 101. Class dismissed./
Comments
L B
Thank you for saying it! They did imaginary seas and a kingdom on land, then referenced the real world. IN COLONIAL TIMES. Smh
