Beauty and the Beast (1991 film)
The video game series "Kingdom Hearts" features a world based on the film, named "Beast's Castle", along with several of the film's characters. In the first game, the world has been destroyed and Belle kidnapped by the Heartless, led by Maleficent, but the Beast travels to Maleficent's stronghold and works with Sora to defeat Maleficent and rescue Belle and the other captured princesses. In "Kingdom Hearts II", the world has since been restored following Ansem's defeat, but Beast and Belle are having difficulties due to the enigmatic Xaldin of Organization XIII attempting to bring out the Beast's darker side in order to turn him into a Heartless and a Nobody, but the Beast eventually comes to his senses and works with Sora once again to defeat Xaldin once and for all. In the game's ending credits, the Beast turns back into the Prince. In "", the world is featured as a playable level but the story is not essential to the main plot. In "Kingdom Hearts χ", the world is featured again, this time as a hallucination that follows the plot of the movie more closely. The characters featured in the series are Beast, Belle, Lumiere, Gaston, Cogsworth, Mrs. Potts, Chip, Maurice, and the Wardrobe. After Gaston is defeated, the Beast transforms back into the Prince. Gaston does not appear in "Kingdom Hearts II", the world's primary antagonist being Xaldin, an original character created for the series, but who shares several traits with Forte, the main antagonist of "Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas".
Beauty and the Beast (1991 soundtrack)
Menken recruited musician Robbie Buchanan to arrange "Beauty and the Beast" into the form of a pop duet while Walter Afanasieff was responsible for producing the track. Afanasieff also assisted Buchanan in the arranging of the song. Menken was ultimately pleased with Afanasieff's production, explaining, "Walter Afanasieff ... took it and really molded it into something very different than I ever intended and I grew to love it. In a way, Walter made it his own, and I love that." Because Disney could not afford to hire a "big singer", they drafted Canadian singer Celine Dion, who was relatively new to the music industry at the time, to record "Beauty and the Beast". However, the studio feared that she would not draw much media attention because of her relative obscurity in the United States, so they hired American singer Peabo Bryson, who was a more well-known recording artist at the time, to perform alongside her. The newly arranged song was released as the album's lead single on November 25, 1991.