Did an illustrator sneak a penis on ‘The Little Mermaid’ poster?
On one fateful day in 1990, an Arizonan mother saw, to her horror, a vertical phallic shaft on display on her offspring’s latest Disney VHS.
Sure enough, one glance at the original home video release of the previous year’s The Little Mermaid indeed seemed to sport a slyly inserted throbber amid the golden underwater castle between the King Triton character and the movie’s villain, Ursula. As reported by Entertainment Weekly at the time, the distraught Machelle Couch complained to both the Disney corporation and the supermarket chain stocking the VHS tapes before the offending items’ quiet removal from shelves.
Rumours have abounded for years about how such a hidden tool could have ever found its way onto one of the House of Mouse’s biggest properties, forming an essential slice of Disney urban legend. Just how did an erect cock pass the checks and balances in Uncle Walt’s arts and marketing department?
It’s long been thought that the stiff knob hiding in the castle was the work of a disgruntled employee narked at his dismissal notice or an old animation veteran nearing retirement and running out of fucks to give. The truth is more banal.
According to a Snopes exploration, the artist in question was never directly employed by Disney, but was a freelancer hired to create much of the visual promotion and advertising ahead of the November 1989 theatrical release… However, the schedule for the home video cover art was a tight squeeze, the artist staying up til four in the morning finishing off those golden, glowing spires. Tired and lacking otherwise diligent oversight, he allegedly had simply failed to notice that he’d illustrated one of the castle’s spires like a vertical gutstick.
Time was of the essence. A rushed submission down to the wire left next to no time to make any revisions, whizzing through the various stages from the artsdesk to being slapped on the video release, as well as theatrical posters. Cinemagoers never raised an eyebrow, only for the controversy to rear its head once sat on shelves months after the fact.
The unidentified artist was long thought to be Disney background artist regular Ron Dias, who tackled The Little Mermaid’s various storybooks and promotional materials and found himself in a slice of Disney lore where his early hours rush tempted the fatigued illustrator to glibly whack in a golden pecker for his own amusement. Waking up the next day, the jokey junk was less conspicuous than he realised, but he had no time to amend.
The truth came out in the end. Bongo Comics co-creator and occasional writer for The Simpsons, Bill Morrison, confessed to his error in a 2025 blog post, “I finished the art by dawn, and it went to Disney and then to the printer. Nobody noticed that one tower in the coral castle closely resembled male genitalia. Not, that is, until a man in Arizona brought a copy of the tape home from the video department of an Albertson’s supermarket, noticed the phallic image, and pointed it out to his wife.”
Plausible deniability an’ all that. The Little Mermaid VHS and LaserDiscs weren’t entirely recalled, but later issues were quietly revised to tone down the beef bayonet unwittingly slapped on a kids’ video box. It wouldn’t be the last time Mickey Mouse was accused of impure subversion. One illustrator’s bright idea to slip “SFX” among the blown dust in a scene from 1994’s The Lion King triggered another moral panic after knicker-twisted parents thought the letters spelt out “SEX”.
