Ursula just needs your signature to make all your dreams come true, e-sign with your finger (or fin). but before you sign, consider this campy, bombastic villain with whom you’re doing business.
Our tentacled sorceress is based on a minor character from the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen novel, “The Little Mermaid”. In the children’s fairy tale she was merely a “sea witch” with no given name but in the 1989 Disney movie (of the same title) she was named “Ursula” and given a greatly expanded role (with a great musical number!) The character design was based on the drag queen Divine (from “Hairspray”) and she was originally written with the actress Bea Arthur in mind. It’s never explicitly stated in the animated film but subsequent Disney comic books reveal that she is the estranged sister of King Triton, the Poseidon-ish merman king from whom she plots to steal the throne of Atlantica (obviously inspired by the legendary Atlantis myth).
The movie features a seaside kingdom where prince Eric hails from which is generally agreed to be Denmark, given the author (it’s not explicitly named in the movie). From this we can extrapolate that Atlantica and Ursula’s lair are probably somewhere in the North Sea, given the speed in which the characters traverse between the locations. The North Sea has a mean depth of 300 ft (90 m) although the Norwegian trench within reaches a depth of 2,379 ft (725 m). Also within the North Sea, 125 miles off the coast of Scotland, is the “Devil’s Hole”, a series of trenches that are as deep as 750 ft (230 m). We can assume that Ursula’s lair is located in the Devil’s Hole, thus Ursula herself is capable of surviving in total darkness, freezing temperatures and under crushing pressures. Such an environment would likely feel familiar to an octopi since it was also home to a similar devilish denizen of the deep:
The giant dark demigod Cthulhu (with his tentacled face) from the sunken city of R’lyeh rose from the darkest depths in the HP Lovecraft story, “The Call of Cthulhu” and created a scene similar to the climatic battle against Ursula in the Little Mermaid. Cthulhu was defeated after a boat rammed him, impaling him with the bowsprit. Many think that this classic Lovecraftian story was a direct inspiration for Ursula growing to giant proportions and meeting the same fate at the hands of the movies protagonists.
