Background
Originally, Beauty and the Beast, under the direction of Richard Purdam, was not intended to be a musical. Then-studio chief Jeffrey Katzenberg made the decision to turn the film into a Broadway-style musical similar to The Little Mermaid (1989), Disney's previous animated film, after he, displeased with the film's initial story reel, ordered the film scrapped and restarted from scratch. As a result, Purdam resigned, and first-time feature film directors Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale replaced him.
In lieu of the Academy Award-winning success of The Little Mermaid, Katzenberg asked the The Little Mermaid songwriting duo of Howard Ashman and Alan Menken to write the songs for and score Beauty and the Beast. At first Ashman, who was at the time writing songs with Menken for a recently pitched film idea called Aladdin, was reluctant to join the struggling film project, but eventually agreed.
The original version of "Be Our Guest" was written by Ashman and Menken to be sung by the enchanted objects to Maurice instead of Belle. However, story artist Bruce Woodside felt that the song would make more sense if it was sung to Belle, the main character, as opposed secondary character Maurice, and directors Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale agreed. Despite the fact that the scene was already near completion, a costly and timely effort was made to re-script and animate the scene and re-write the song to incorporate Belle.
Read more about this topic: Be Our Guest
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