One of the jollier musical moments in the Howard Ashman-Alan Menken score for ”The Little Mermaid” comes when a friendly crab named Sebastian reminds Ariel, the movie`s mermaid heroine, of the advantages of marine existence over landbound human life in the song ”Under the Sea.”
To the happy-go-lucky strains of calypso, the Jamaican-accented voice of Samuel E. Wright insists that ”it`s better down where it`s wetter.”
The film`s score, which includes five songs and two song fragments that Ashman calls ”songettes,” has the same freshness and bounce that marked the songwriting team`s score for the 1981 Off-Broadway hit ”Little Shop of Horrors,” though the style for ”The Little Mermaid” is more 1940s pop than `50s rock `n` roll.
For Ashman, who wrote the lyrics, and Menken, who composed the music, the leap from musical comedy to movie songwriting was not so intimidating as one might suppose.
”I don`t think we did anything differently than if it had been a theater project,” Ashman said. ”Writing about crabs singing to mermaids involves the same craft as writing about man-eating plants from outer space. In both cases, the songs have to mesh with the story and push it forward.”
Before starting work on the music for ”The Little Mermaid” nearly three years ago, both songwriters made intensive studies of older Disney animated films.
”Though they had many values in common, they were actually quite different from one another in musical style,” Ashman said. ”`Snow White,`
for instance, was written only a few years after `The Vagabond King` opened on Broadway, and you can feel a lot of Rudolf Friml floating around in that score.”
Menken said his first impulse before sitting down to write had been to talk to the composers of the scores for some earlier Disney films.
”Unfortunately, they didn`t seem to be around, and no books were written,” he said. ”I looked at `Pinocchio,` `Peter Pan,` `Dumbo` and
`Cinderella` to get an impression of the pacing and emotional feel. In Disney films, a feeling of sweetness, innocence and warmth is more of a priority than in other animated films, which tend to favor action-adventure.” Although the collaborators wanted to maintain the musical feel of Disney classics of the `40s, they were determined to give the score some contemporary inflections. To add a calypso-reggae flavor, the nationality of Sebastian the crab was changed from English to Jamaican.
On the drawing board, the movie`s wicked sea witch, Ursula, resembled the late transvestite actor Divine, with a Mohawk haircut, Ashman said. Eventually she evolved into an obese vamp with squidlike tentacles.
Since her big song, ”Poor Unfortunate Souls,” required a husky, seductive voice, veteran cabaret and musical-comedy divas were invited to audition for the role. Pat Carroll won; among the many others who tried out were Elaine Stritch, Julie Wilson and Eileen Brennan.
”The Little Mermaid” has been a success in record stores as well as at the box office. Its soundtrack album has sold more than 800,000 copies, and Ashman and Menken already have been signed to write the score for another Disney animated film, ”Beauty and the Beast,” which the studio plans to release two years from now.
– The pop-novelty tradition of creating new hits out of fragments of older records goes back at least to ”The Flying Saucer” in 1956, and includes such playful concoctions as ”Hooked on Classics” and ”Stars on 45.” Its latest manifestation, ”Swing the Mood,” is a catchy pop pastiche by Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers (Music Factory/Atco).
Combining swing and early rock `n` roll with a steady computerized rock beat, it splices fragments of Glenn Miller hits (”In the Mood,”
”Pennsylvania 6-5000,” and ”Little Brown Jug”) to snippets of `50s and early `60s rock `n` roll hits (”Rock Around the Clock,” ”Tutti Frutti,”
”Hound Dog,” ”Let`s Twist Again” and others).
”In the Mood,” which has sold more than half a million copies in the United States, had reached No. 1 in seven European countries before it was released here. In England, it was No. 1 on the pop charts for five weeks and became Britain`s best-selling single in four years.
Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers are John Pickles, 47, an English producer; his son, Andy, 20, and seven associates. Because of the difficulty in getting permission from record companies to excerpt parts of the original recordings, Pickles said in a telephone interview last week, not all 14 song fragments are from the originals.
An Elvis Presley imitator had to be found to sing the three pieces from Presley hits. And the Glenn Miller medley was played by the John Anderson Big Band.
After the licensing, the hardest part of making the record was synchronizing the modern computerized rhythms with the man-made drum beats of the original recordings.
”In the `50s they had live drummers, and even the best ones didn`t play in strict tempo,” Pickles said. ”That`s why it was so hard to loop an old record across a backbeat. We had to keep varying the speed of the turntable. It often took six hours to get one edit.”
