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TV Notes; Happy Ending For 'Cinderella'
The huge success of ''Cinderella'' will mean more musicals for television, probably as early as next year.
Charles Hirschhorn, the president of Walt Disney Television, said yesterday that the company was ''overjoyed'' by the huge audience attracted by ''Cinderella'' on ABC's ''Wonderful World of Disney'' on Sunday night.
''We always expect great things,'' he said, adding that the number of viewers per household attracted by the special was especially gratifying. ABC estimated that about 60 million viewers saw at least some of the show. In one especially striking statistic, the show attracted 70 percent of the girls under the age of 18 watching television on Sunday night.
''This success told us a number of things,'' Mr. Hirschhorn said. ''It told us that there is a huge family audience out there for quality programming. It also confirmed that there is a special value attached to quality event programming.''
It also told Mr. Hirschhorn, the man in charge of programming the new two-hour Disney program on Sunday nights, that musicals can excel as television events. ''We'd like to fill in the ground between feature animated musicals and Broadway,'' Mr. Hirschhorn said.
He said that Stephen Schwartz, who wrote the lyrics for Disney's ''Hunchback of Notre Dame'' and the music and lyrics for the forthcoming Dreamworks animated musical ''Prince of Egypt,'' was working on an original musical for the Disney program called ''Geppetto,'' based, he said, on the father's point of view in the Pinocchio story.
The producers who mounted ''Cinderella'' are also working on finding another family-style musical to remake for the Disney program, Mr. Hirschhorn said.
''It's our ambition to try to do a number of events a year and have one or two musicals in that mix,'' he said.
As for ''Cinderella,'' Mr. Hirschhorn said there has been a ''big demand to release it quickly on video and we're looking into that.''
But that does not mean Disney won't bring the show back. ''Oh, we definitely plan to run it again next year,'' he said. BILL CARTER
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