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After the success of the 1989 movie "The Little Mermaid," The Walt Disney Company planned to produce a children's television series for it's Disney Channel cable outlet called "The Little Mermaid's Island." The proposed series would feature puppets from Jim Henson's Creature Shop interacting with a "live" Ariel.

As the video release of "The Little Mermaid" soared in sales during 1990 and early 1991, Disney quietly dropped plans for "The Little Mermaid's Island" in favor of a more ambitious plan: An animated weekly series for the CBS network. The new show would concern the adventures of Ariel and her friends before the events in the movie.

Jodi Benson, Sam Wright and Kenneth Mars were brought back from the movie to reprise their roles. Jamie Mitchell, an artist and graphic designer whose work has ranged from "Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears" to producing videos for the rock group Queen, was named the producer and director of the new series.

Patsy Cameron and Tedd Anasti were named the story editors and wrote almost all of the episodes for the show's second and third seasons. Their previous joint work included "The Smurfs," the animated "Beetlejuice" and "DuckTales." Cameron, an expert on sign language and a former sign language interpreter for President Jimmy Carter and Pope John Paul II, worked her knowledge of communication with the deaf into a second-season episode, "Wish Upon a Starfish," about Ariel's friendship with a deaf mermaid. A dance sequence in that episode involving a human ballerina used Cameron's friend Kim Ashby, a ballerina with the Joffrey Ballet, as a model. The facial features of the deaf mermaid, Gabriella, were based on a real Gabriella, a young girl and "Little Mermaid" fan who died after a long illness in the hospital where Cameron did volunteer work.

Conscious of the worldwide acclaim for the movie's superior artistry, Walt Disney Television Animation auditioned the best overseas animation studios. In the world of TV animation, farming most of the artwork out to Asian studios is an economic reality due to lower production costs and wages abroad. Studios in Korea, Japan and the Phillippines contributed to the series.

Some of the artists and technicians on the feature film also contributed to the TV series. Mark Dindal, chief of special animated effects for the movie, was a consultant for special effects on the TV show. Robby Merkin, who worked with Alan Menken and Howard Ashman on arranging the songs for the movie, worked as the arranger and music producer for the first season of the TV show.

Ron Dias, a former animator for Disney and Don Bluth who has become a well-known illustrator of children's books (including Disney titles for Little Golden Books), was the art director for the show's first season.

Dan Foliart composed the score for the series, fusing three of the melodies from the movie - "Under the Sea," "Part of Your World" and "Kiss the Girl" - into one tune.

In a press conference of Broadway actresses in 1993, Jodi Benson, asked about her "Mermaid" work, mentioned that after a year of work on the show, she still had not met the director face-to-face. While she was working in New York City in the musical "Crazy For You," she recorded her lines as Ariel and sang the mermaid's songs in a New York recording studio, with California-based director Jamie Mitchell giving directions via a special two-way phone patch.

Ariel's broadcast debut in September 1992 was in the form of a half-hour prime-time special, "The Little Mermaid: A Whale of a Tale." The story concerned Ariel's attempts first to hide, then to let go of, a baby killer whale which she brought home as a stray after he became separated from his pod. Interestingly, "Whale of a Tale" is not officially considered an episode of "Disney's The Little Mermaid" by Disney because it was produced under a separate contract from CBS and was not shown again in the U.S. after its one and only broadcast, though it is available on video and laserdisc.

"Whale of a Tale" was written by well-known fantasy author Peter S. Beagle, probably best known for his book "The Last Unicorn" and his prologue/tribute to J.R.R. Tolkien, which has been published in the first volume of "The Lord of the Rings" ever since shortly after Tolkien's death in 1973.

Ariel's Saturday-morning debut came the very next day. The show's time slot was 8:30 a.m., following another new animated series based on an animated movie: "Fieval's American Tales." The "Mermaid" series drew a fair bit of media attention, including more than one spot on "Entertainment Tonight," because it was the first series based directly on a Disney animated feature and was a rare television cartoon concerning a strong female character.

The series introduced several new characters, including Urchin, a teen-age boy with no family who is unofficially adopted by King Triton and his daughters; the Lobster Mobster, a comic criminal with a fake Jimmy Cagney "Public Enemy" accent and his spineless sidekick, Da Shrimp; Dudley the turtle, King Triton's slow-as-molasses accountant, mathematician, aide and chess partner; Pearl, a gorgeous blonde teen-age mermaid who is also vain and shallow and whose parents won't control her; and The Evil Manta, an avatar of pure evil accidentally released from his imprisonment by an unsuspecting Ariel.

Not everyone in the Disney organization was thrilled that the movie was now going weekly on television. Some of the feature animators who had worked on the movie complained privately and anonymously, says Charles Solomon in his book "Enchanted Drawings: The History of Animation." These artists felt the television division should come up with its own ideas.

The following year, "Mermaid" kept its time slot and gained Pat Carroll, the voice of Ursula from the original movie, as she brought the sea witch back for occasional nasty outings. "I must go now; I have things to do ... to someone else ..."

For the show's third season, "Mermaid" was moved back to the 8 a.m. time period and was the lead-in for a new Disney animated series, "Disney's Aladdin." This was to be the show's last season in original production; CBS elected not to buy another batch of episodes.

Less than a week after "Mermaid"'s last broadcast on CBS, the Disney Channel began rerunning the show's 31 episodes seven days a week. The show is now broadcast once a day on The Disney Channel and on the new Toon Disney cable outlet.