On a recent trip to the library, I discovered a line of books entitled The Little Mermaid’s Treasure Chest. As a fan of The Little Mermaid,
I found these little books intriguing, and I checked out several, only
to be a bit puzzled about the timeline and characters I’d never
encountered before. A search led me to discover that this book series
was born after the television series Little Mermaid’s Island, a
proposed collaboration between Jim Henson and Disney that would have had
a human Ariel and puppets playing the side characters, fell through.
The stories planned for that series were turned into the books for this
series, which seem to have only been available to those who ordered them
through the mail as part of a special club.
In The Magic Melody,
the only characters present are those we already know from the movie.
Flounder’s twin sister, who is pink and named Sandy, and a dragon named
Scales appear in several of the other books, but here it’s just Ariel,
Sebastian, Triton, Ursula and her faithful eels. Flounder also makes a
very brief appearance. The story takes place at some point before the
movie but after the television series that followed. Ariel looks about
the same age as in the movie, so I would guess that all of the stories
take place within that same year.
Ursula is plotting to take
over the ocean. Her latest plot involves tricking Ariel into delivering
King Triton’s magical trident to her. She’ll accomplish this by leaving
Ariel a mysterious gift: an enchanted music box that will hypnotize the
listener after three repetitions of its song. Ariel takes the bait, but
can something be done to stop her from falling under Ursula’s spell?
The trouble with prequels is that it’s very hard to maintain perfect continuity. It was always my impression from The Little Mermaid
that Ariel had only ever heard of Ursula, but in this book, they speak
to each other. Ariel is perfectly aware of who she is, and she knows
that Ursula has every intention of taking over her father’s command.
This is not her only attempt in the series. This seems to me to change
the relationship between Ariel and Ursula; the savvy mermaid we see in
this series shouldn’t have been taken in by the sea witch months later.
Still,
this is a fun story about friends looking out for each other and
outwitting a nefarious villain. The coloring is vibrant, and the
characters all look very much the same as they do in the movie. Most of
the pages have one or two paragraphs of text set on top of the picture,
and I’d put the reading level somewhere in the 7-to-10-year-old range.
For fans of The Little Mermaid, The Magic Melody is a charming read. Continuity issues aside, this is a series that Ariel lovers can treasure.
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