Disney’s 1989 The Little Mermaid was the first legitimate VHS tape I ever owned.

It
was gifted to me as a Christmas present because I had been so abjectly in love with
the film when my grandparents took me to the theater, and I proceeded to watch it
at least once a day, every day, for nigh unto all time. The tape developed a
noticeable squeak by the end of year one. My parents probably still twitch if any
portion of the sound track comes on within ear shot. I knew that film forwards and
backwards, and to this day can still quote the whole thing at you, as I heard it
and learned it when I was five. (That is to say, there are places where the script
turns into nonsense syllables.) I did not have all the Little Mermaid merchandise,
but everything I owned was Little Mermaid. It was my monochromatic color choice
before I found black. My entire social life centered around the fact that I was the
chief authority on the film and its source texts. That made me god-king of the
playground, and I was a fierce and benevolent leader.
My first aesthetic, philosophical crisis as a child was when, at the age of eight,
I realized that Beauty and the Beast was an objectively better film, and had to
decide whether that made me a traitor. I concluded that I could acknowledge the
ways Beauty and the Beast outstripped its predecessor while still faithfully loving
the other one, and thereby achieved, at the age of eight, levels of maturity the
internet would still lack a quarter of a century later. Good job, humans.