Stop Putting Lin-Manuel Miranda in Everything

 Last weekend I finally started watching Arcane on Netflix, and it’s pretty good thus far! I really dig the animation style, too. I’ve also discovered that Alphas is on Roku and have started rewatching that. Fun fact: You know Mahershala Ali is in that series?

Currently, I am reading Skulduggery Pleasant: Mortal Coil, so if you’re on Facebook or Goodreads, expect that update to come soon.

Also! I kind of want to go see Blue Beetle; we’ll see if that happens this weekend.

Stop Putting Lin-Manuel Miranda in Everything

I recently saw the live-action remake of The Little Mermaid. There is a scene with a rap, written by Lin-Manuel Miranda: “The Scuttlebutt”. It’s… not good. It’s gotten a bit of a reputation as a bad part of the movie, and that’s kind of deserved. It’s jarring and even though I knew it was coming, it was still a bizarre part of the film. Making it worse is that it feels entirely pointless: the scene has Scuttle come in to say she’s heard that Prince Eric is going to propose to someone, and they jump to the conclusion that it’s Ariel, only for Ariel to stumble out to see Prince Eric and find out that he’s proposed to in-disguise Ursula. The song is rendered meaningless seconds after it ends.

But I don’t think the hate is all justified because this bit wouldn’t feel too out of place in a different kind of musical. In a musical story like Hamilton, which is told almost entirely in musical numbers, this would fit–this is information to deliver to the audience, and you wouldn’t get it across any other way, because this is how all of the information is delivered to the audience. Even if it doesn’t fit with the rest of the music in the show–after all, in Hamilton, King George III has three musical numbers that don’t match at all with the musical tone of the other songs (and don’t really add anything to the story), but they still work.

But The Little Mermaid is not the same kind of musical as Hamilton. There are a lot of scenes that aren’t musical numbers, so if you inject one into the narrative, you should have a good reason for doing so. Most of the musical numbers in The Little Mermaid are big character moments: characters are revealing their inner thoughts and feelings or trying to convince others to do so. They tell us something about the characters.

“Scuttlebutt” does not do that. It tells us something about what the characters think they know, only to get rid of it immediately afterward.

Now I suspect what happened is that they hired Lin-Manuel Miranda to work on the music of the movie, and he had to produce something, and everyone expected that he would do his signature rapping, so he came up with this. He can write non-rap, and quite well–but that’s kind of what they all think he’ll do. Supposedly when he wrote for Moana, the song he wrote for Maui, “You’re Welcome,” didn’t originally include rap, but Dwayne Johnson was insistent about getting to rap in his song.

But this is different, because it doesn’t introduce a character, it’s just there. Which makes me think that Disney needs to stop putting Lin-Manuel Miranda in all of their projects. He’s not bad, not at all–he’s quite good. But it seems like Disney realized that Miranda is good at what he does (or, more realistically, that he makes money), and decided to involve him with as many projects as they possibly can. 

For instance! He’s been cast in the upcoming Percy Jackson & the Olympians Disney+ series as Hermes. Rick Riordan put on his blog that when he was writing the series scripts, he couldn’t get Miranda’s voice out of his head when he wrote Hermes’s lines. Which is odd, because Hermes as written in his novels isn’t much like Miranda’s usual, fast-talking, slightly nervous presence that he gives in a lot of performances. He’s also bigger name than most of the cast, so he’ll stick out like a sore thumb among the other cast members. But Miranda makes money, so he’s in the series.

Disney has this thing (and to be fair, they’re far from the only company to do this): they see something successful, and their plan is to replicate as much of it as they can. When The Mandalorian proved successful, Disney’s Lucasfilm announced four other live-action streaming serieses, and a massive crossover (without admitting that they hadn’t actually started real production on any of them).

They have no restraint.

Stop putting Lin-Manuel Miranda in things. Let him be in things if he wants to, and if you have something that would be good for his unique talents, then hire him. But stop deciding that he needs to be in everything. You can’t just drop a Lin-Manuel Miranda rap in The Little Mermaid and expect it not to feel like the most jarring thing you’ve heard in a Disney movie.

Also, you don’t need to remake animated classics.

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