I seem to remember - but bear in mind that my memory may be misleading me - Disney going after, very aggressively, anybody that produced a film (or even talked about producing a film) based upon the same source material as one of their films. To be fair, it's possible that said productions had references to the Disney-specific source material.

I'm also less than impressed at the "happy ending" to (for example) "The Little Mermaid" - even as a relatively young teenager, when it came out, I was thinking, "Hang on, isn't the mermaid supposed to die at the end?!"