Over the Hedge by T Lewis and Michael Fry for March 29, 2003

Actually, in the original version of The Little Mermaid by Hans Christian Andersen, the mermaid’s goal is to obtain an immortal human soul (her grandmother tells her that merpeople don’t have souls; when they die, they become sea foam). The sea witch warns the mermaid that if the Prince marries someone else—which he ends up doing—the mermaid won’t get a human soul, and she’ll turn into sea foam like other merpeople. However, her sisters trade their hair to the witch in exchange for a knife, and they tell her that she has to kill the Prince to turn back into a mermaid. Since she can’t bring herself to do that, she obtains a human soul (in the Disney version, her sisters made no attempt to help her). I agree that his version is somewhat darker than the Disney version, but at least nobody gets stabbed through the heart or blasted by the Sea King’s trident. Also, the witch doesn’t turn the mermaid into a human deep underwater the way Ursula does. When Ursula said, “I will make you a potion that will turn you into a human for three days…”, I thought, after she took Ariel’s voice, that she was going to give Ariel the potion in a flask and make her swim to land and drink it, the way the witch did in the original version. Instead, Ursula turns Ariel into a human deep underwater and would have drowned her if it hadn’t been for Flounder and Sebastian. She doesn’t even warn Ariel that it will hurt when she walks. I think that the moral of Andersen’s version is that you shouldn’t believe everything you hear.