There’s a stretch of Disney’s catalog that exists in a strange middle space — beloved by the kids who grew up renting them, dismissed by everyone else, and conspicuously missing the name of the composer whose work made the originals possible. Alan Menken, the eight-time Oscar winner who wrote the scores for The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Pocahontas, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and Hercules, did not write a note for the direct-to-video sequels that Disney released between 1994 and 2008. Not Aladdin: The Return of Jafar. Not Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World. Not The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride. Not even The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea or The Hunchback of Notre Dame II, both of which extended the worlds of the films that made his name.
The omission isn’t an accident, and Menken hasn’t been shy about why it bothers him. “As part of being associated with Disney is that they are going to do these cheaper knockoffs, and I don’t love them, I don’t watch them,” he told The Theatre Times in 2024, marking the 35th anniversary of The Little Mermaid. “I would much rather they come to me if they wanted to do an actual sequel but it happened to all of them — The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, there were also a couple of Aladdins along the way, even The Hunchback — I do not consider any of those to be an actual continuation of our initial musicals — I wouldn’t recommend anybody to watch them.”
That’s the eight-time Oscar winner. On the record. Telling people not to watch the Disney films his name technically appears on.
So why didn’t Disney just call him?
The Cheapquel Era, Briefly Explained
The system Menken is describing has a name. Disney fans call them “cheapquels.” The studio that produced them — first as Disney MovieToons, then Disney Video Premieres, then Disneytoon Studios — was a separate animation pipeline from Walt Disney Feature Animation, run partly out of a satellite facility in Sydney that had originally been built to do television. It existed for one reason: to monetize the brand equity of Disney’s Renaissance hits without spending Renaissance money.
The strategy worked. The Return of Jafar, released straight to VHS in 1994 on a production budget of roughly $5 million, sold 1.5 million copies in its first two days, 4.6 million in its first week, and ultimately moved 15 million units worldwide for a gross of approximately $300 million. It effectively created the direct-to-video sequel as a Hollywood business model. Disneytoon followed by operating on per-film production budgets typically under $15 million, the kind of margin Disney’s theatrical features could not touch. From a balance-sheet perspective, it was the highest-margin operation on the Disney lot.
The downside was that every choice in the production pipeline — animation, voice talent, story development, music — was made under a cost ceiling that the original films never had. That ceiling is the reason Menken wasn’t in the room. And it’s the reason the people Disney did hire have such an interesting set of resumes.
Who Actually Wrote These Movies
Each of the major cheapquels has its own constellation of songwriters and composers, and once you start pulling on the credits, the names get more interesting than the films deserve.
The Return of Jafar (1994) got a score from Mark Watters, a working television and film composer who had contributed music to Steven Spielberg’s Tiny Toon Adventures. The songs were divided among Randy Petersen and Kevin Quinn (who’d go on to write songs across the Disneytoon roster), Michael and Patty Silversher (a husband-and-wife songwriting team who’d done Disney TV work for years), and Dale Gonyea. Robin Williams refused to return as the Genie after a public falling-out with Disney over the studio’s use of his voice in Aladdin marketing — Williams had agreed to do the film on the condition that his name and voice not be used to sell it, a deal Disney effectively broke — and Dan Castellaneta, yes, Homer Simpson, took the role. Menken’s only fingerprint on the film is a reprise of “Arabian Nights,” sung by Brian Hannan, which was also repurposed as the theme song for the Aladdin animated series.
Aladdin and the King of Thieves (1996) brought back Williams, after Joe Roth (Jeffrey Katzenberg’s successor as Disney studio chairman) organized a formal apology. But it did not bring back Menken. Watters returned to score, with additional music by Carl Johnson — another television animation veteran. The songs were primarily written by David Friedman, the Broadway music director and Beaches soundtrack contributor. “Arabian Nights” got another reprise, performed by Bruce Adler, the original peddler from the 1992 film.
Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas (1997) is the one with the deepest non-Disney pedigree, and the one where Disney’s hiring choice looks most like a deliberate flex. The score and original songs were composed by Rachel Portman — the first woman ever to win the Academy Award for Best Original Score, for her work on Emma in 1996. The lyrics were by Don Black, who at the time was already one of Britain’s most decorated lyricists. His credits included the Oscar-winning “Born Free” and the lyrics to five James Bond themes: Thunderball, Diamonds Are Forever, The Man with the Golden Gun, Tomorrow Never Dies (“Surrender”), and The World Is Not Enough. He’d also collaborated extensively with Andrew Lloyd Webber on Sunset Boulevard and Aspects of Love.
Disney went out and hired a Best Original Score Oscar winner and the lyricist behind half the Bond song canon for a direct-to-video Christmas movie. They just didn’t call Alan Menken.
Pocahontas II: Journey to a New World (1998) put the songwriting in the hands of Marty Panzer and composer Larry Grossman. Panzer’s name might not ring a bell, but his songs will: he’s Barry Manilow’s lifelong friend and collaborator, the co-writer of “It’s a Miracle,” “Even Now,” “This One’s for You,” and “I Am Your Child,” plus the Kenny Rogers wedding-reception standard “Through the Years.” Grossman was a Broadway composer best known for Goodtime Charley and Snoopy!!! The Musical.
The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride (1998) is the funhouse mirror of the bunch. The score went to Nick Glennie-Smith, who had conducted the orchestra and co-composed additional music on the original Lion King — a Hans Zimmer collaborator who would later contribute to the Pirates of the Caribbean films. The signature song, “He Lives In You,” came from Mark Mancina, Jay Rifkin, and Lebo M, all veterans of the original film’s musical world via the Rhythm of the Pride Lands album. “Upendi” was written by Petersen and Quinn. Tom Snow (who wrote “Let’s Hear It for the Boy” from Footloose) and Jack Feldman contributed the rest of the songs — and Feldman is a name worth flagging twice, because he co-wrote “Copacabana” with Barry Manilow and would later win a Tony Award sharing the stage with Alan Menken himself, for the Broadway adaptation of Newsies. And then there’s “My Lullaby,” the villain song sung by Zira, which was co-written by Joss Whedon. Yes, that Joss Whedon, in his pre-Buffy songwriting hyphenate era.
The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea (2000) is the cruelest cut of all. The score was composed by Danny Troob. Troob is Menken’s longtime orchestrator. He’s the man who arranged “Be Our Guest,” “Friend Like Me,” “Colors of the Wind,” and “Go the Distance.” He worked on Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Pocahontas, Hercules, Newsies, Enchanted, and Tangled — basically every major Menken project at Disney. For Little Mermaid II, Disney effectively went to Menken’s own orchestrator and asked him to fill the seat while leaving Menken outside the room. Troob received an Annie Award nomination for his trouble.
The Hunchback of Notre Dame II (2002) brought back Carl Johnson — from his Return of Jafar additional-music gig — to score, alongside songs that included Jennifer Love Hewitt’s “I’m Gonna Love You,” which she co-wrote and performed herself.
And then there’s The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Beginning (2008) — working-titled The Little Mermaid III through most of its production and bundled into the “Little Mermaid Trilogy” boxed set that Disney released later that year. The original songs were written by Jeanine Tesori, who at that point was already a Broadway force (Thoroughly Modern Millie, Caroline, or Change, Shrek The Musical) and has since become a two-time Tony winner for Best Original Score (Fun Home in 2015, Kimberly Akimbo in 2023), a two-time Pulitzer Prize for Drama finalist, and the first woman ever to open a season at the Metropolitan Opera. The orchestral score was handled separately by film composer James Dooley(TV’s Pushing Daisies, trailer music for Spider-Man 3 and The Da Vinci Code). Ariel’s Beginning was the last cheapquel of the original Disneytoon mandate — completed and shipped in August 2008, after John Lasseter had already shut the rest of the program down. Disney’s parting Broadway hire on the era turned out to be one of the most decorated theatrical composers of her generation. They still didn’t call Menken.
What This Cost, Musically Speaking
There is a defensible version of the choice Disney made. Menken’s rates were not in the cheapquel budget. He had a Broadway adaptation of Beauty and the Beast running on stage from 1994 onward, eventually closing as the eighth-longest-running Broadway show in history. He was working on Hercules, then Home on the Range, then Enchanted. He wasn’t sitting by the phone.
But it’s not as if Disney quietly hired second-tier replacements and hoped no one would notice the difference. They hired an Oscar-winning Best Score composer in Portman, a five-time Bond lyricist in Black, a Barry Manilow co-writer in Panzer, a Hans Zimmer collaborator in Glennie-Smith, Menken’s own orchestrator in Troob, and a future two-time Tony-winning Broadway songwriter in Tesori. Some of these credits are, on paper, more decorated than the songwriters Menken himself partnered with on the originals. The decision wasn’t about expertise. It was about leverage. Direct-to-video sequels paid considerably less than theatrical features, and the studio could fill those slots with talent whose names didn’t carry the same negotiating weight as the architect of the Disney Renaissance.
What it cost, in aggregate, was tonal continuity. The original films are characterized by what musical theatre people call “the Menken-Ashman DNA” — the Broadway-style “I Want” songs, the comic patter numbers, the act-one finales hidden inside G-rated children’s animation. None of the sequel scores attempt that vocabulary. They mostly settle for pop-radio-style love themes, end-credits ballads, and “African choir” gestures borrowed from the originals. The films don’t sound like sequels to musicals. They sound like sequels with songs in them. There’s a difference, and Menken hears it.
The Pattern Disney Repeats When It Wants the Sequel to Count
The clearest evidence that Menken’s absence from the cheapquels was a budget decision rather than an artistic one is how Disney behaves when they actually want a sequel to count.
For Disenchanted (2022), the Disney+ sequel to Enchanted, the studio brought Menken in alongside Stephen Schwartz from the very first development meetings. For the 2023 live-action Little Mermaid remake, Menken co-wrote new songs with Lin-Manuel Miranda. For the live-action Aladdin, he partnered with Pasek and Paul. For the still-in-development live-action Hunchback of Notre Dame, he and Schwartz are again attached. When the project is meant to play in theaters and stand alongside the originals, Menken is the first call. When it’s destined for a clamshell VHS case at $14.99, he isn’t.
There’s one tell that makes the divide explicit. The D23 Disney Legends biography for Menken — Disney’s own official document recognizing his contributions to the studio — lists “The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea” among his “small screen contributions.” That phrasing is a stretch. The actual composer of record is Danny Troob, and Menken himself told The Theatre Times he hasn’t seen the film. The hedge is the point: Disney wants the credit to redound to Menken when it’s convenient, but didn’t want to pay him when it counted.
The End, Brought to You By Pixar
The cheapquel era didn’t end because Menken complained. It ended because in 2006, Disney bought Pixar, and John Lasseter — installed as chief creative officer of Walt Disney Animation Studios — made it known almost immediately that he hated what Disneytoon was doing. Lasseter believed the sequels were degrading the value of the original films. By 2008, his solution was simple: cancel everything in development. Sequels to Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Dumbo, Pinocchio, The Aristocats, Chicken Little, and Meet the Robinsons were killed in pre-production. Ariel’s Beginning, already nearly finished when the order came down, was the last gasp of the original cheapquel mandate when it limped out to home video in August 2008.
Disneytoon survived for another decade by pivoting to spinoffs — the Tinker Bell films, the Planes movies — before finally shutting down in 2018 amid Lasseter’s own ouster from the company. The era of straight-to-VHS Disney sequels was, by then, a closed chapter, remembered mostly by millennials who got them as Christmas presents and by Letterboxd users with a taste for pain.
The Verdict
The cheapquel pipeline made Disney an enormous amount of money. It also gave several legitimate working composers — Watters, Johnson, Portman, Glennie-Smith, Troob — steady paychecks during a period when traditional animated musicals were on the wane elsewhere. There were jobs in those scores, and to Menken’s credit, his own framing of the issue isn’t punitive. He told The Theatre Times it’s “great to give young writers work and opportunity.” His objection isn’t to the existence of the work. It’s to Disney’s failure to ask whether the people who built the original cathedrals might want first refusal on the wing additions.
The reason Alan Menken didn’t write the music for Disney’s direct-to-video sequels, in the end, is the simplest reason imaginable: the studio was running a parallel pipeline designed to maximize margin on his name without paying him for it. The Renaissance was a prestige operation. The cheapquels were a business unit. He was the architect of the first one. He was never invited to the second.
