Disney's The Little Mermaid (Live-Action)

[Ben]

Even worse is the terrible scanning syntax of that new lyric!

[Bill1978]

Squeezing 9 'syllables' into 7 is ridiculous. Should have dropped either 'from' or 'off' when rewriting cause 8 is manageable if you mangle the pronunciation of scale. But what would I know, I'm not an award-winning lyricist.

[Ben]

I didn’t think you need to be to see this just doesn’t flow. "From off" is just bad English whoever you are, and the mix of words in just those two lines is too "spiky" to run smoothly, however they’re performed. It’s muddled.

[Ben]

Er…it ain’t exactly pretty…a damp squib as many expected:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movie ... 1235484161

(Yep, as I surmised, Triton's been sailing those seven seas alright…)

[Randall]

Sounds par for the course.

[Ben]

The weird thing, like this review suggests, is that they kind of expect you to have seen the original film going into these things. Like "here’s the same but different" version of what you know and love and have seen before. Inevitably, they don’t live up to comparisons, because the originals were worked on for four years at a time and were literally handcrafted and honed over and over during production, becoming minor works of commercial art and extremely successful at that. These are copies whose only job strangely seems to be to remind you of how great the originals were, which is maybe the point…

[Randall]

Variety liked it somewhat better. They add some further insight, too:
https://variety.com/2023/film/reviews/t ... 235620560/

[Ben]

More positive, but also the same reaction to lots of it: sounds from both that more is less, in this case. Marshall "taking a page out of Condon's B&TB playbook" doesn’t sound great, and only three added songs to fill an extra hour of screentime? Hoo, boy, this one’s gonna be talky…!

[Bill1978]

Or 'action packed'. That shark scene will need to be stretched out to build anticipation for Ariel's first song. And I'm imagining the final battle will be at least 20 minutes long, possibly 30.

[Ben]

Joy.

[Daniel]

McDonald's Happy Meal toys start today:



Kinda cute considering what they have to work with. Not one I'll be collecting.

[Farerb]

I remember I used to have Happy Meal toys of The Little Mermaid II - Ariel, Melody and Morgana.

[Daniel]

Surprisingly they didn't a toy promotion over here! I probably would've collected the whole set as I was pretty hyped for it.

[Ben]

Ha! False advertising! None of them look that cute (or have red-red hair)!

[Daniel]

Artistic liberties, like changing a bra to tank top: