Jim Henson Presents Little Mermaid's Island - Episode 1: Sebastian's Birthday (1990)

Little Mermaid's Island is a proposed TV series for The Disney Channel that was produced by Jim Henson during the time his company was going into a merger with The Walt Disney Company. At the time, places to plug in Jim Henson's talents into different areas of the Walt Disney Company were being explored. The Little Mermaid was already generating buzz for being a very unique film before its release, so other venues to use these characters on a scale never seen before were in development. Little Mermaid's Island was hoped to be a Disney Channel series in the vein of Fraggle Rock or Sesame Street using The Little Mermaid characters.

Like all Jim Henson productions, the puppets were built by Jim Henson's Creature Shop and he put his core group of talent on the project. Four songs were planned for each episode with songwriters assigned to the project (when the series wasn't picked up, some of these written songs were later repurposed for Sesame Street episodes.)

Samuel E. Wright and Buddy Hackett reprised the voices of their characters from the original film while Jim Cummings voiced the new character Scales the musical Sea Dragon. Scales later appeared in some Little Mermaid storybooks from the time. Flounder was also given a twin sister, Sandy (whom also appeared in storybooks from the time.) It's unclear who voiced Flotsam, Jetsam, Flounder, or Sandy.

Marietta DePrima was cast as Ariel. She had appeared on a few sitcoms and other TV programs and continued to after the pilots were shot.

Clive Revill was cast as Sir Grimsby. In this reimagining, Grimsby is a retired admiral who mentors Ariel on the human world and Max is his dog. Revill had a Walt Disney career providing voice work in various productions as well as co-starring in One Of Our Dinosaurs Is Missing. He most famous role, however, is as the original Emperor Palpatine in the Empire Strikes Back before George Lucas replaced him with Ian McDiarmid.

In this episode Sebastian thinks everyone forgot about his birthday.

Some of the Little Mermaid Muppets appeared in the Walt Disney World Very Merry and Happy Easter Parades because they could present the characters in scale.

In the end, Jim Henson died and no further development with this series continued. When Disney did produce a TV series inspired by The Little Mermaid, it would be animated and a Saturday morning series on CBS. The format of Little Mermaid's Island was used for the Beauty & the Beast spinoff series Sing Me A Story with Belle. In that series, Belle ran the local bookshop populated with puppet characters and she "read" stories from her books illustrated by vintage Walt Disney cartoons. Some of the knowledge gained from this testing of the waters was also applied to the Disney Channel series Adventures in Wonderland.

The two Little Mermaid's Island pilots were never released, not even as a home video or TV specials and have only ever been seen by Jim Henson buffs and Walt Disney historians. We present them here as part of the Walt Disney history story.

Posted for historical purposes. This channel is not affiliated with the Walt Disney Company.