The Little Mermaid (1989 film) "Oliver & Company". He proposed changing the minor character Clarence, the English-butler crab, to a Jamaican crab and shifting the music style throughout the film to reflect this. At the same time, Katzenberg, Clements, Musker, and Ashman revised the story format to make "Mermaid" a musical with a Broadway-style story structure, with the song sequences serving as the tentpoles of the film. Ashman and composer Alan Menken, both noted for their work as the writers of the successful Off-Broadway stage musical "Little Shop of Horrors", teamed up to compose the entire song score. In 1988, with "Oliver" out of the
The Little Shop of Horrors with us, and the three of us worked out the rest of the story together. The first screenplay Griffith wrote was "Cardula", a Dracula-themed story involving a vampire music critic. After Corman rejected the idea, Griffith says he wrote a screenplay titled "Gluttony", in which the protagonist was "a salad chef in a restaurant who would wind up cooking customers and stuff like that, you know? We couldn't do that though because of the code at the time. So I said, "How about a man-eating plant?", and Roger said, "Okay." By that time, we were both drunk." Jackie Joseph later