It’s time to play Cartoon Catch-up today, as we re-cap on some recent additions to the site that you might have missed (and would make idea weekend reading, wink)!

• Jeremie kicked us off this week with his latest exclusive series of Little Mermaid interviews, timed to coincide with the release of the Ariel’s Beginning prequel but also touching on the original 1989 classic and about to offer a sneak peek at the new Broadway musical version! So far the series has introduced us to Ariel herself, Jodi Benson, and Beginning‘s co-screenwriter Robert Reece, with more to come next week!

• Reviews have been plentiful over the past few days, though I admittedly struggled to come up with much enthusiasm for The Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Beginning myself. Words of praise were in abundance for late July and August releases for Tiny Toon Adventures: Season One, Freakazoid Volume One, South Park: Season Eleven and the Blu-ray debut of Justice League: Season One.

• We’ve a couple of updates for you on those new disc announcements: Paramount isn’t letting anything out on that Shrek The Halls release at the moment, but we’ll be sure to let you know what we can when we can, and Warners have now confirmed November 4 as the street date for Popeye The Sailor: Volume 3, 1941-1943. By the way, for those with all the previous incarnations of The Pink Panther films and cartoons on DVD, the new Pink Panther Ultimate Collection adds very little new disc content (just a suspect 60 minutes of “all new” footage): it’s basically a repackaging (with Jerry Beck’s Panther Guide) to promote the new Steve Martin film out early next year, and we’re hearing that the ninth cartoon disc is probably the Christmas compilation from last year. So, apart from a nice box, two hundred bucks isn’t even going to buy you Blu editions (yet).

• Full circle and back to our interviews: don’t forget that Christian added a fun chat with Disney animator Eric Goldberg on his new Character Animation Crash Course book and that we have a copy to give away to one lucky reader. But hurry – you have only two days left! This weekend is your last chance to enter as the contest closes on Sunday night at 11:59pm ET. Good luck!

Phew, I think that’s it for this week. Have a good weekend and we’ll be rolling out more stuff next week! Stay tooned! – Ben.