For one Sunday night in 1999, the company behind The Little Mermaid put a children’s movie on ABC about a hockey player who signs away his soul for the Stanley Cup. “H-E Double Hockey Sticks” premiered October 3, 1999, as a Wonderful World of Disney movie, ran 96 minutes, and then more or less vanished.
The plot is exactly as strange as it sounds. Matthew Lawrence plays Dave Heinrich, a hockey player who wants to be the youngest man ever to win the Cup and signs a very specifically worded contract: his soul, in exchange for a championship for his team, the Delaware Demons. Will Friedle plays Griffelkin, a slacker apprentice devil sent up to collect it. Rhea Perlman, fresh off Cheers, plays Ms. Beelzebub, the boss downstairs. Gabrielle Union plays the angel.
The loophole is the movie. Griffelkin gets Dave traded to the last-place Annapolis Angels, so the Demons can still win the Cup without him and the contract would hold. Instead Dave turns into a real teammate, the Angels make a miracle run and beat the Demons in the finals, and the deal is void. Perlman storms back to hell, and Griffelkin quits being a demon.
The opera part is true. The film was adapted from Lukas Foss’s children’s opera “Griffelkin,” with a libretto by Alastair Reid, first performed on November 6, 1955, in a nationwide NBC telecast. In the opera, Griffelkin is a child devil given one day on earth for his 10th birthday, does a kindness, and is punished by being turned human. The hockey was Disney’s idea.
Neither star auditioned. On the Magical Rewind podcast in February 2025, Lawrence said he told them, “If Will’s not doing it, I’m not doing it.” Friedle, 6 seasons into Boy Meets World, said “they were writing the script every day we were shooting,” and that a rewritten third act put his demon on the ice: “I guess I get on the ice now in a mask for some reason.” Lawrence had just turned 18 and learned to play hockey for the part in Vancouver. His review of his own skating: “I couldn’t stand on the ice, that’s about it.”
Friedle has since said one scene holds something only he can see. “I’m in the middle of a take and I have my first panic attack,” he told People in June 2026. “They used the take, so I can actually watch my first panic attack ever. But I’m the only one who knows it.”
The movie earned exactly one industry notice, a Golden Reel nomination for its sound editing, and no critic reviewed it. Even its title never settled: Disney’s own encyclopedia spells it “H-E-Double Hockey Sticks,” and the sound editors’ ballot printed “H.E. Double Hockey Sticks.”
Today there is nowhere to stream, rent or buy it. It never showed up on Disney+, and no DVD or Blu-ray was ever listed. One viewer summed up the search in 2012: “i saw it when i was young and been trying to get this movie since then, and now i cant seem to find it anywhere!”
