After a several decade-long career, famous director and animator John Musker is slowly preparing to retire. The 70-year-old director is responsible for revitalizing Disney in the late 80s and 90s, so he is definitely one of the most important animators in history. Not that long ago, Musker attended the Animayo International Summit in Gran Canaria, where he promoted his new short film, I’m Hip!.

There, he also talked to El País about his beginnings at Disney, as well as about his opinions on the current state of things at the House of the Mouse, which is something we have already reported on earlier. But he also told us about a very interesting anecdote involving one of Disney’s biggest classics.

Namely, at the time, the production of such movies was not a rule but rather an exception, and the iron fist president at the time, Jeffrey Katzenberg, was not for making such movies, although this turned out to be one of his biggest blunders, as the movie has – in the meantime, become a proper classic.

The movie in question is The Little Mermaid, the animated version, of course, which was initially met with a lot of resistance, only to become one of Disney’s biggest animated hits. The movie earned a staggering $235 million on a mere $40 million budget, and you can only imagine how much money that was back in 1989. And while the live-action remake became a controversial one, the animated classic is beloved by all.

But, as Musker revealed in the interview, Jeffry Katzenberg was not amazed at the idea at the time, and he was initially reluctant to greenlight the film, as Musker recounted:

“Movies about girls don’t work. (…) The Little Mermaid will never best Oliver & Company. (…) The big eye-opener was when we had a preview. It played so well to a public audience, all ages, including adults. They decided they were doing two different ad campaigns. One was a silhouette of a mermaid, looking wistfully out. I think they saw there was a way to treat it a little more adult, classier. It has a lot of fun as a comedy. But there’s an emotional story, not just silliness. I mean, the Hans Christian Andersen’s story was that. (…) Die Hard had been a box-office hit. So he came into the office saying, ‘We need The Little Mermaid to be more Die Hard. That’s how we got the second action sequence, with an Ursula who is as big as the building in Nakatomi Plaza.”

Source: El País

As far as executive blunders go, this was definitely a major one and we’re just glad that Katzenberg had enough reason to greenlight the project, as it remained one of Disney’s most popular ones.