Read This: How Divine inspired Ursula The Sea Witch
If you’ve ever re-watched Disney’s The Little Mermaid as an adult, you’ve probably had that feeling that the movie’s villain, Ursula The Sea Witch, reminds you of someone. As it turns out, that’s not a coincidence. Ursula is inspired, in both appearance and demeanor, by drag legend and John Waters muse Divine.
This revelation begs the question, how does a character based on a poo-eating, ultra-profane cult movie star wind up in a Disney movie? The missing link, according to a new article in Hazlitt, was Howard Ashman. Ashman was the playwright and lyricist responsible for Little Shop Of Horrors. He also came up in the same Baltimore-D.C. gay scene as Divine. After the failure of Smile, his post-Little Shop broadway debut, Ashman and his writing partner decided to take a job with Disney.
Depressed and dejected, he and Menken accepted an offer from Disney executives Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner to move across the country and write the lyrics for an animated feature. The studio was reeling from its own expensive bomb. With a budget of $45 million in 1985, The Black Cauldron was one of the most ambitious animated films that had ever been made. It earned only $23 million at the box office. Bringing Ashman and Menken to work on an adaptation of The Little Mermaid felt like the studio’s last chance at a blockbuster.
Ashman saw that animated films could be like musicals—with songs furthering the plot rather than just adding color. In working on the film he drew on his Children’s Theater training and his West Village attitude.