06/18/2026
A forgotten Disney classic! 🏒🥅😈
For a brief window in 1999, the same company behind The Little Mermaid greenlit a children's movie built on a Faustian deal for the Stanley Cup.
"H-E Double Hockey Sticks" premiered October 3, 1999, on ABC's anthology series The Wonderful World of Disney. It later aired on Disney Channel, which is why people often remember it as a Disney Channel Original Movie, but it started as a Disney TV movie.
The plot is exactly as strange as it sounds. Matthew Lawrence plays Dave Heinrich, a hockey player who signs a contract forfeiting his soul in exchange for his team, the Delaware Demons (a very thinly veiled New Jersey Devils), winning the Cup. Will Friedle plays Griffelkin, an underachieving young demon sent up from hell to collect. Rhea Perlman plays Ms. Beelzebub, aka Ms. B, a sassy, wigged-out, female take on Satan running the operation downstairs. Gabrielle Union plays Gabrielle, the angel guiding Dave and, eventually, Griffelkin too. Shawn Pyfrom plays the kid brother who helps humanize the demon.
The loophole is sharper than it sounds. Dave gets traded to the last-place Annapolis Angels, which means the Demons could still theoretically win the Cup without him and the contract would stand. Instead, Dave turns into a real team player, the Angels make a miracle run, beat the Demons in the finals, and the deal voids. Griffelkin gives up being a demon and joins Gabrielle as an angel.
The opera part is true. The film is based on Lukas Foss's 1955 children's opera "Griffelkin," with a libretto by Alastair Reid, about a young demon sent to Earth. That's where the demon's name comes from.
It's G-rated but surprisingly edgy for Disney kids' fare: soul-selling, hell, demons, angels, redemption, all wrapped around a hockey movie. There's even a musical bit built on a "Hockey Thing" parody of "You Sexy Thing."
Disney never gave it an official home-video release. No DVD, no Blu-ray, no Disney+. It isn't banned or scrubbed from existence, it just never got the re-release treatment most of its era did, so it slipped out of the culture. It survives through fan VHS rips uploaded to YouTube, which is the only way most people stumble onto it now.
In a 2025 interview, Matthew Lawrence said he and a young Gabrielle Union had very different work styles on set, and she went to the director about him not wanting to rehearse as much. He framed it as classic young-actor awkwardness that's now just a funny anecdote.
The movie resurfaced this month thanks to Jeff's Watchlist, a movie-recap creator who walked through the premise for an audience that had no idea it existed.
