The Little Mermaid Trivia
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108 free The Little Mermaid trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
54 free The Little Mermaid trivia questions with answers. Andersen's little mermaid gives up her tongue and walks on knives; Disney's Ariel gets a talking crab and a happy ending. This quiz covers both, plus everything in between: the 1989 animated film's voice cast, songs and Oscars, the direct-to-video sequels, the CBS cartoon, the Broadway show, the 2023 live-action remake with Halle Bailey, and the much-vandalised statue on the Copenhagen waterfront. It is built for families and Disney fans alike. Roughly a third of the questions are easy enough for kids who know the film by heart, and the rest climb steadily to real stumpers about production trivia, animation decisions and Andersen's original text. Every answer has been checked against a primary source, mainly the relevant Wikipedia articles and official pages, so the fun facts hold up when someone in the room insists you are wrong.
30 of 108 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In The Little Mermaid, who is Ariel's best friend, a nervous yellow-and-blue fish?
Flounder
Flounder, Ariel's timid best friend, was voiced by Jason Marin in the 1989 film; despite the name he is drawn as a yellow-and-blue tropical fish, not a flatfish.
Q 02What are the names of Ursula's two green moray eel henchmen?
Flotsam and Jetsam
Flotsam and Jetsam spy on Ariel for Ursula, who kills them by accident with a blast meant for Eric; her fury at losing them is what makes her swell to giant size.
Q 03What breed of dog is Max, Prince Eric's loyal pet in the animated film?
Old English Sheepdog
Old English Sheepdog Max sniffs out Ariel before any human does: he tracks her scent and licks her face, the first to know she is the girl who saved Eric.
Q 04Who plays Ariel in Disney's 2023 live-action remake?
Halle Bailey
Halle Bailey was the first to audition, after the director saw her sing at the 2019 Grammys in the sister duo Chloe x Halle; he said nobody who followed surpassed her.
Q 05Which comedy star plays the sea witch Ursula in the 2023 live-action remake?
Melissa McCarthy
Melissa McCarthy's Ursula comes with a new backstory: the remake makes the sea witch King Triton's estranged sister, so the villain is now Ariel's aunt.
Q 06In Disney's The Little Mermaid, sixteen-year-old Ariel is which of King Triton's seven daughters?
The youngest
The youngest of seven, Ariel still snaps at her father that she is 'sixteen years old' and no child; Andersen's mermaid was the youngest too, with five older sisters.
Q 07Hans Christian Andersen, author of the original fairy tale, was from which country?
Denmark
Denmark's Andersen borrowed from the German novella 'Undine' but changed its ending, writing that a mermaid's soul should not hang on whether a human happens to love her.
Q 08In the direct-to-video sequel Return to the Sea, what is the name of Ariel and Eric's child?
Melody
Melody is her mother's story in reverse: raised on land behind a wall built to keep her from the sea, she longs for the ocean that Ariel was so desperate to leave.
Q 09The famous bronze Little Mermaid statue sits on the Langelinie promenade in which city?
Copenhagen
Copenhagen keeps having to repair her: the mermaid has been doused in paint again and again, and in 2003 vandals blasted her off her rock into the harbour.
Q 10What name does Ursula use when she disguises herself as a human to seduce Prince Eric?
Vanessa
Vanessa hypnotises Eric with Ariel's stolen voice, worn in a nautilus shell at her throat; fittingly, Ariel's own voice actress, Jodi Benson, spoke the impostor's lines.
Q 11What is the title of Ursula's big villain song in the animated film?
Poor Unfortunate Souls
'Poor Unfortunate Souls' cost Elaine Stritch the part of Ursula: she reworked its tempo against the lyricist's wishes and was dropped, and the sea witch went to Pat Carroll instead.
Q 12Which duo wrote and directed Disney's animated The Little Mermaid?
Ron Clements and John Musker
Ron Clements and John Musker's film began with a bookshop browse: Clements came across Andersen's tale on a shelf and pitched it to the studio in a two-page treatment.
Q 13Who wrote the lyrics for Disney's 1989 The Little Mermaid, working with composer Alan Menken?
Howard Ashman
Q 21Disney's 1990s Little Mermaid TV series is set at which point in Ariel's story?
Before the film's events
Before the film's events: the CBS Saturday-morning series is a prequel with Ariel still a mermaid, yet Pat Carroll's Ursula is there to trouble her all the same.
Q 22A ballerina refused to pose nude, so whose body did the Little Mermaid's sculptor use?
His wife's
His wife's: Eline posed for sculptor Edvard Eriksen after Ellen Price, the dancer whose performance as the mermaid had prompted the statue, would not model unclothed.
Q 23The man who commissioned the Little Mermaid statue was the son of which company's founder?
Carlsberg
Howard Ashman wrote the lyrics with composer Alan Menken, co-produced the film, and pushed for the songs to drive the story as they would in a Broadway show.
Q 14Before its lyricist made him Jamaican, The Little Mermaid's Sebastian was first written as a crab of which nationality?
British
British was the first idea, a stuffy crab named Clarence; the lyricist proposed a Jamaican instead, and the change pulled the film's music toward calypso.
Q 15Ursula's look was famously modelled on which real-life figure?
Drag queen Divine
Drag queen Divine, star of John Waters' Pink Flamingos, never saw the villain he inspired: he died in March 1988, twenty months before the film opened.
Q 16Animators studied footage of which person to work out how Ariel's hair should move underwater?
Astronaut Sally Ride in space
The team studied Astronaut Sally Ride in space, since weightless hair in orbit closely matched hair drifting in water; they also filmed a live-action model in a pool.
Q 17The Little Mermaid's Broadway director, Francesca Zambello, had made her name in which field?
Opera
Opera was Francesca Zambello's trade; on Broadway she conjured the sea with no real water, only translucent sets that light could turn from the ocean depths to the sun above.
Q 18In the sequel Return to the Sea, how is the villain Morgana related to Ursula?
She is her sister
She is her sister, out to avenge Ursula's death; fittingly, Pat Carroll, who had voiced Ursula, came back to voice Morgana too.
Q 19Jodi Benson, the voice of Ariel, appears on screen as a secretary in which Disney film?
Enchanted
Enchanted put the voice of a cartoon princess into real life: Benson plays Sam, a lawyer's secretary in the Manhattan office its animated heroine stumbles into.
Q 20In the prequel Ariel's Beginning, what does a grieving King Triton ban from Atlantica after losing Queen Athena?
Singing and playing songs
Singing and playing songs were banned after Triton lost Queen Athena to a pirate ship; Ariel breaks the ban when a new fish friend leads her to the secret Catfish Club, where Sebastian performs.
Carlsberg's Carl Jacobsen ordered the statue after a ballet of the tale captivated him in 1909; his own art collection became a museum, the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek.
Q 24In Andersen's original tale, which relative tells the little mermaid that humans have an immortal soul?
Her grandmother
Her grandmother explains that mermaids live three hundred years but have no soul that outlasts them; wanting one, not just the prince, is what sends the heroine to the sea witch.
Q 25In Andersen's tale, what happens to a mermaid when she dies?
She turns into sea foam
She turns into sea foam: in Andersen's tale mermaids live 300 years but have no immortal soul, and that soul is what the heroine truly wants.
Q 26Who directed the 2023 live-action remake of The Little Mermaid?
Rob Marshall
Rob Marshall, the director of Chicago and Mary Poppins Returns, said his Ariel's audition moved him to tears, and that no later hopeful matched it.
Q 27Alan Menken wrote the new songs for the 2023 Little Mermaid remake with which lyricist?
Lin-Manuel Miranda
Lin-Manuel Miranda, raised on the original, said he loved Sebastian's songs too much to write the crab new ones; his additions include 'Wild Uncharted Waters' for Eric.
Q 28Jodi Benson, the original animated voice of Ariel, has a cameo in the 2023 remake as what?
A market vendor
Benson appears as A market vendor who hands Ariel a fork during the tour of Eric's kingdom, a wink to Scuttle's most famously mislabelled piece of 'human stuff'.
Q 29Besides Ariel, Jodi Benson is best known for voicing which character in the Toy Story films?
Barbie
Barbie, Benson's role in Toy Story 2 and 3, falls for Ken in the third film; her decades of Disney voice work made Benson a Disney Legend in 2011.
Q 30Which song from Disney's 1989 The Little Mermaid won the Academy Award for Best Original Song?
Under the Sea
'Under the Sea' is Sebastian's calypso-flavoured plea for Ariel to stay at home and forget the surface, sung in the film by Samuel E. Wright.