Disney remade The Little Mermaid, and the internet caught fire before a single frame played in a theater. NBC News has the rundown, and I'll tell you what I make of it, since nobody over there in Burbank is going to.

Two arguments are happening at once here, and only one of them interests me. The first is about casting, and it got ugly and racial and stupid, as these things always do. The second, the one worth having, is about why Disney keeps strip-mining its own vault and handing us back a worse version of the thing we already loved. I care about the second one. The first is just the smoke from the fire.

My confession for the day: I don't much care who plays Ariel. I care whether she's written like a person or like a seminar. The 1989 Ariel had wants, flaws, a stubborn streak you could hang a hat on, and a father she loved enough to defy. She made a bad deal with a worse lady and spent the movie paying for it. That's drama. If the remake gives me that girl, I'll sit through anything. If it gives me a girl who stops the story every twenty minutes to explain the moral to me like I'm slow, then I want my money back, and I'll want it loudly.

The word everyone keeps throwing around is "woke," and I'll use it because it's the word we have, but it's a symptom. The disease is contempt. Somewhere along the line, the people making these movies stopped trusting the audience to feel things without instructions. Every line becomes a lesson, every character a delivery system, every song a footnote correcting the original. Eric can't be a prince who falls for a voice; he has to be gently managed into it so nobody gets the wrong idea. Scuttle can't just be a funny seagull. Everything has to be improved, and improved, in this town, always means sanded down until it can't offend a focus group or a sensitivity reader.

Howard Ashman and Alan Menken wrote that score like their lives depended on it, because as it happens, Ashman's did. He was dying while he wrote it, and you can hear it, that desperate joyful grasp at life in "Part of Your World." Disney has been dining out on that urgency for 37 years. And their idea of honoring it is a remake where the lyrics get rewritten so a grown woman in 2026 won't be scandalized by a fictional mermaid. Call that progress if you like. I call it vandalism with a permit.

And the executives refuse to learn this, every single time: audiences are not bigots for noticing when they're being managed. People paid to see Ariel the way they remember her, the way I remember her, sitting in the Rex Theater in Muskogee with a popcorn in my lap and my heart in my throat. When you hand them something else and call them names for noticing, they stay home, and then some executive goes on a podcast to explain it was "unusual circumstances." The movie is never the culprit; it's the weather, the fans, the algorithm, the moon.

Maybe the remake is fine. Maybe it's lovely. I'll see it, because I see everything, and I'll grade it against the original the way I always do, no curve, no mercy. But Disney has spent the last several years teaching us to brace for the lecture, and you don't get to complain about the flinch you trained into people.

Now if you'll excuse me, TCM is running the 1989 one tonight, and unlike the remake, it doesn't need a committee's permission to be beautiful.