The Little Mermaid (TV series) Little Mermaid" soared in sales during 1990 and early 1991, Disney quietly dropped plans for "The Little Mermaid's Island" in favor of a more ambitious plan: an animated weekly series for the CBS network. The new show would concern the adventures of Ariel and her friends before the events in the movie. Jamie Mitchell, an artist and graphic designer who worked on "Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears", was named the producer and director of the new series. Patsy Cameron and Tedd Anasti were the story editors and wrote almost all of the episodes for the show's second and third
The Little Mermaid (1989 film) shots failed because the machine was reputedly in dilapidated condition. The multiplane shots were instead photographed at an outside animation camera facility. "The Little Mermaid" was the last Disney feature film to use the traditional hand-painted cel method of animation. Disney's next film, "The Rescuers Down Under", used a digital method of coloring and combining scanned drawings developed for Disney by Pixar called CAPS/ink & paint (Computer Animation Production System), which would eliminate the need for cels, the multiplane camera, and many of the optical effects used for the last time in "Mermaid". A CAPS/ink & paint prototype was used