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 (musical)
Still recovering from Walt Disney's demise, Disney's animated films continued to experience a noticeable decline in quality while struggling to attain critical and commercial success during the 1970s and 1980s. The Walt Disney Company CEO Michael Eisner was hired to ensure the performance of the studio's next animated projects, despite having virtually no animation experience. Eisner himself had been a theatre major in college. Eisner's first hire as Disney's CEO was theatrical producer Peter Schneider, who subsequently became responsible for hiring more artists who shared similar theatrical backgrounds to contribute to the studio's next animated releases, among them lyricist Howard Ashman and his long-time collaborator, composer Alan Menken. Ashman and Menken had previously amassed great live musical success with their Off-Broadway production "Little Shop of Horrors", but the performance of Ashman's first Broadway venture "Smile" had been disappointing. Eager to redeem himself, Ashman agreed to work on Disney's animated film "The Little Mermaid" (1989), which he and Menken would famously decide to approach as though they were scoring a Broadway musical. Upon release, "The Little Mermaid" was a massive critical and commercial success, garnering two Academy Awards, both of them for Ashman and Menken's original music. Disney established a successful renaissance period, during which Ashman and Menken became responsible for teaching the art of transforming traditional animated films into animated musicals.Inspired by "Mermaid"s success, production on an animated musical adaptation of the "Beauty and the Beast" fairy tale began shortly afterward, during which Ashman finally confessed to Menken that he was dying of AIDS, a secret he had been keeping from the studio in fear of being discriminated against or fired. Before the film had even been completed, executive vice president Ron Logan suggested to Eisner that he consider adapting "Beauty and the Beast" for Broadway, an idea Eisner quickly deflected. While the film, written by screenwriter Linda Woolverton, was premiering at the New York Film Festival, an ailing Ashman was being cared for at St. Vincent's Hospital; the lyricist succumbed to his disease four days later on March 14, 1991, dying eight months before the film's November release. "Beauty and the Beast" became the last project on which Menken worked with Ashman. The film was released to immediate critical acclaim and commercial success, outperforming "The Little Mermaid" by becoming the highest-grossing animated film in history, as well as the first animated film to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture. Once again, Academy Awards were won for Ashman and Menken's music. Several critics noticed the film's live musical potential, among them prolific "New York Times" theatre critic Frank Rich. Lamenting the Broadway selection at the time, Rich famously praised the songwriting duo for having written "[t]he best Broadway musical score of 1991", while hailing the film as a "better [musical] ... than anything he had seen on Broadway" in 1991. Rich's review would ultimately provide Eisner and Katzenberg with the confidence needed to seriously consider the film as a potential Broadway project. Disney was also inspired by the successes of Broadway musicals such as "Cats", "Les Misérables" and "The Phantom of the Opera" strongly believing their production could be just as profitable.