Aladdin: Everything You Didn't Know

00:00:00
Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of I Heart Radio. Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret histories and little known fascinating facts and figures behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows and more. We're your two street rats of fast, furious and fun facts. I'm Alex and I'm Jordan front and we have been unprompted talking about a whole New world, not the abstract philosophical concept, but my favorite Disney song spoilers to what this episode is about. That's right, we're talking about one of the high water marks and the so called Disney renaissance of the late eighties, eighties, and the nineties. Film has cemented Robin Williams second act as a children's entertainment icon and set new financial records for animation until The Lion King. That's right, We're talking about a Latin that's turned thirty in November. God, whole New World is so good. Yeah wait, I'm I'm want to talk to you more about that, because I was more of a tell me princess, when was the last time let your heart decide? You have a bit of that the inner theater kid in you? Yeah, and then guys started listening to punk rock and the punk rocker strangled him and garretted him in the crib. Uh. Yeah. One of my mom's favorite things in the world as lame is, so I just lame is the cast recording in the car constantly when I was a kid. Um beer guests might be might be my favorite Disneys. Yeah, it's God, I was trying to top five this earlier. It's definitely be our guest. It's either just Can't Wait to Be King or or the opening from Lion King you know. Uh, that's also an incredible one. Or street Staff Warfare from Bliver and Company and then a bang or yeah yeah, or to the Sea, which also goes unreasonably hard, but yeah, man, whole new world. I'm actually very disappointed because one of the random, like the facts that I read, by by which I mean let me let me backtrack, one of the low fidelity facts that I read, you know, like one of the big p s A to anyone who's podcasting or or doing bar trivia or anything, don't trust i am dB trivia some of it. Some of it is good, but you have to fact check it. One of the facts that I read somewhere that was adjacent to this that I could not confirm was that originally it's Peebo Bryson and someone else who sing a Whole New World on the soundtrack, And originally I had read that that was somewhere that was supposed to be Michael Bolton and Celine Dion. Can you imagine that? Oh my god? Um Well, until the ALFA mentioned Lion King, this was my favorite Disney movie as a boy. I know Beauty and the Beast was your favorite, but Beauty and the Beast always board me because I wanted it to be more beast centered. Scans too much beauty, none of beast hashtag um. I had like Robin Williams dialogue memorized from this movie, do you still know some of it? Because well that that gets into the other part from this, like it Well, yeah, I can't go back and watch it, man, I'll start crying, like it just makes me so sad. Robin stuff, just it just crushes me. Yeah, that's like the worst celebrity death I've lived through. So yeah, I've not gone back and rewatched it, but god, Whole New World bangs and oh and Jasmine is my favorite Disney Princess until Mulan because Mulan had a sword. Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I see you. But in Hercules leg Meg, I didn't like her. I think I was the thing was like Hercules, I was aging out a little bit too much for by the time, like was after really yea, maybe I just regressed for Mulan. Um was sword, Yeah exactly, That's all I could see. I couldn't see fast sword. Um. Yeah, I Hercules. I've come around in retrospect, but at the time I remember it not being great. Uh And then by time like Hunchback rolled around, I kind of just completely tuned out of it. Although Esmerelda, what about you? Well Bell read So that's why I really liked Bell. I thought we could be bookworms together. Yeah. Jasmine definitely takes second place in my personal Disney Princess hierarchy. Um, she's so dynamic. She did all the pole vaulting. It was like running around the city and stuff. Yeah oh yeah. In the opening yeah absolutely, yeah, I don't know. I was a kid. I was very fascinated by just the whole look of a Laddin because it was very exotic. I mean, the only other Disney movies were so steeped in that French or English fairytale aesthetic, and this was, you know, the coin a phrase, a whole new world. I'd never heard of Sultan's before, or really any of those sort of folk tales from the Middle East. I mean, it's bastardized as a Laddin. The plot is in this. Uh so that was all cool for me, although it did lead to me insisting on going to some a Latin themed restaurant when we went to Disney World as a kid. And uh in the middle of dinner, a belly dancer pulled me up and it made me dance with her in front of the entire restaurant, and it was mortifying. Um so was the restaurant. Was it called like the Sultan's Opium Den or something wildly racist like that. I don't remember. Someone's gonna correct me. Maybe it wasn't a Laddin them that, you know what. I think it was at Epcot, at the Morocco Pavilion or whatever. Maybe it wasn't a Latin themes, but I definitely had a Laddin in my head when I insisted to go there, and I quickly regretted it after that experience. Um But back to greater pastors. As you mentioned, the Robin Williams factor was huge, although it was, you know, like you very kind of hard for me to revisit it now, especially after that meme that everyone was sending around after Robin died with Aladdin tearfully hugging him and saying, Genie, You're free. That. Yeah, they stepped in it there, the absolutely I mean talk about not that I expected them to sensitively handle it, but like, good lord, the absolute last thing you want to do is tell people with any kind of depression or suicidal ideation that that death is freedom. Mike, did Disney put that around or to just fans because I was working for I was doing the people snapchat or the e W snapchat at the time, because I vividly remember that being like, well, I definitely liked this movie as a kid, but for some reason I was more prone to watching either Beauty and the Beast or the old school forties and fifties Disney era movies, which I don't know, I guess kind of goes with my personalities, you know, keeping it Sleeping Beauty, Yeah, that was a weird one. I like Sleeping Beauty. I really liked Alice in Wonderland. I really like Pinocchio, dumbbo at, this creepy circus stuff I liked. Yeah yeah, so so yeah, only mildly more racist than this movie though when you think that, yeah, yeah, uh so yeah. I don't know. Maybe it's just a personal preference, but to me, Aladdin kind of got a little lost in the shuffle between Beauty and the Beast and Lion King. So no, I mean it did. It absolutely did. Beauty and the Beast came out and it was like a home run, and then Aladdin came out and it was another home run, and then Lion King came out and immediately your people only people only have so much space for zeitgeists defining things and they I think they just they should have spaced them out better. I mean it was really like, it's like three years in a row, right in the Beast. Ninety two is Aladdin? I think Lion King was before. I think yeah, And I think even though it's not my favorite, I think a lot of people of the Lion King is the high water mark of the Disney Yeah, yeah, yeah, i'd put Yeah. I think that scans well from the chaotic development process the film had at the hands of Enemy of the Pod Jeffrey Katzenberg, to the much better chaos that Robin Williams brought to his revolutionary depiction of the Genie, to the film's trailblazing technical side, to the outcry over its less than progressive depiction of the Middle East. Here's everything you didn't know about Disney's Aladdin. The story of Aladdin begins with Disney a team. Lyricist Howard Ashman. At a virtual event in Beauty and the Beast, animator Kirk Wise said, if you had to point to one person responsible for the Disney renaissance, I would say it was Howard Ashman's early successes were mostly off Broadway shows like God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, which is a Kurt Vonnegut adaptation. Do you know I had no idea about that? Uh? And Little Off of Horse with his chief collaborator, composer Alan Mankin. But he upped sticks for California in the mid eighties, thanks largely to David Geffen, which is hilarious to me. I guess I guess they they they had done something after a Little Shop that flopped, But David Geffen had funded Little Shop and was like, well you know I can hook you guys up with Disney Jeffrey Katzenberg, and so they moved out there, and Ashman's first effort for Disney was Oliver and Company. Regrettably he did not write that banger of a Billy Joel song, why Should I Worry? The only the only song I remember from that movie. And then he moved on to The Little Mermaid, which obviously smash hit bolstered his confidence to the point that he was moved to pitch a project that had a deep personal meaning to him, Aladdin, which he had started in a an adaptation of production of When He Was Just When He Was a Kid. The plot outline that he submitted hued largely to the original tail Uh. He sent them a forty page treatment with character breakdowns um seven original songs that had three reprises later in the film demos of those songs design suggestions. But it was more irreverent and satirical and overtly influenced by the Bob Hope Bing Crosby road movies of the nineteen forties. Jordan's what do you know about the Bing Crosby Bob Hope road movies? They all kind of run together. It's almost like those avant costella movies. There's like it's like what road to Casa Blanca, road to Road to Morocco, Yeah, road to There were seven of them, whether that Man, Road to Singapore, Road des Anzibar, Road to Utopia, Road to Rio, road to Bali, road to Hong Kong. I mostly remember the family Guy they did that was like a whole on the Road to Rhode Island. Yeah. Yeah. And the primary musical influence that they were working in was like early swing and kind of twenties thirties jazz Jason stuff like Cab Calloway and Fats Waller barber Shop Quartet's Aladdin and His like cronies sang in Barbershop Quartet and like Andrew's Sister's close Harmony singing quicksidebar About the actual story of Aladdin and the lamp sh plural or no genies plural one lamp to genies. Uh. Many people think that comes from the collection of Middle Eastern folk tales A thousand and one Nights, and it does. But Aladdin is not one of the original tales and never existed in Arabic in written form, nor was it set in Baghdad. This is from a Washington Post article in Hussein f Hadawi, who is the translator of the authoritative collection of the Arabian Nights, according to the Washington Post, said that it is actually a Chinese story, often set in China, that circulated in the Arab world, presumably along the trading roots, spice road, silk road. Yeah, and was adopted into the Arabic oral tradition uh, and that is where it got its Arabic name. Allah a deen means one who examples eyes the sublimity of religion. Uh. In the original tale, Aladdin is a ne'er do well whose character arc is that he matures, accepts his adult responsibilities and uh submits to the guiding hand of Allah. So Jeffrey Katzenberg didn't like that. Yeah, this is really interesting. Me. Let's talk a little bit about the differences between the original Aladdin story from antiquity and the Disney movie. There was no magic carpet in the original story. I don't know why I lead with that, but I did. Boom. Uh. In the original story, Aladdin has parents, or at least a mother, and early versions of Aladdin the Disney movie had a whole other character of Aladdin's mom, and the whole message of the movie was basically him trying to make his mother proud and do the right thing, you know, much as you just said about how in the original story, Aladdin is this kind of ne'er do well figure who matures and accepts adult responsibilities. That was supposed to be in the original Aladdin script. Uh uh. Jaffar, the bad guy, wants the princess to marry someone else in the original story rather than himself out of self interest. But I forget why. Um. In the original version of Aladdin, there are in fact that two genies, one inhabits a magical lamp and another magical ring, and they grant Aladdin infinite wishes rather than just three. And also in the original there's no desire on the part of either of the genies to be free. That's supposedly an American value that was projected onto this character when Disney took over. But Disney's main villain is Jaffar. But in the original text there are three villains. The first as an evil magician from Africa who poses as a Laddin's long lost uncle in order to trick him into retrieving the lamp. The second enemy is the magician's more evil brother, a more evil brother, and the third villain is the visor's son who is the rival to Aladdin's affections for the princess. So Ashman submitted his treatment to Disney in January of nineteen eight, but they ultimately passed, and Ashman thought that he could produce a Laddin on his own. But big mistake, because once you signed with Disney, they own you. Um. Per his contract, Disney retained the rights to the treatment songs that he had submitted. Um. This is super common with them. There's a when I was researching this, I came across this guy named Bill Plimpton, who's this Indian animator who's very famous for one short that he did called I Think Your Face. And he was originally contracted to do our approach to do Genie because a lot of his animation was dealt with like this morphing kind of animation. Uh. And when he took a look at what they wanted him to sign, where they basically own everything that you do the second you start into perpetuity the second you sign with them, he said no anyway. Uh. Meanwhile, Disney had acquired the remake rights to Alexander Korda's nineteen forty fantasy film The Thief of Baghdad, and commissioned screenwriter Linda Wolverton, who also wrote the screenplay to Beauty and the Beast, to develop an Aladdin script using elements of that film. Uh And at this point in development they would not have been a musical, which again was the same route that they were going to take with Beauty and the Beast, which is for both of those movies almost impossible to imagine. Right. But when Little Mermaid writers directors John Musker and Ron Clements came aboard the project, they backtracked to Ashman's treatment and combined to the approaches reinstating the songs that he had written. And these directors had the choice of several projects other than what would become a Laddin. One was a project that was then called King of the Jungle, which became The Lion King, and another was an adaptation of Swan Lake, which was never made but would have been really interesting and probably like Fantasia Vibes. I imagine, why was the working title for Lion King not Lion Hamlet, King of the Jungle? Come on, you already had you already had Jungle Book according to James B. Stewart's monumental Tomb Disney war Or, Disney CEO Michael Eisner quote didn't feel confident about the mass appeal of a story set in the Middle East, so Katzenberg dropped Clemens and Musker from Aladdin and sent them to work onto Beauty and the Beast. This is the first of many questionable takes on Middle Eastern culture that will encounter in this episode. The problem was, as Disney and t m I fans will remember from our Beauty and the Beast episode, that Howard Ashman was dying. He had contracted HIV aids during the production of Little Mermaid in and while he was able to complete his work on Beauty and the Beast and see an early private screening of the film, he died at just forty years old on March fourteenth, eight months before Beauty and the Beast came out and conquered the world. Alan Mankin in a just a mortifying visual Alan Mankin composed the song Prince Ali sitting at Howard Ashman's hospital bed, which is a rough thing to visualize. Wow, that is now the second extremely depressing thing about this movie that I'll never be able to get out of my mind? Did you watch the documentary? Yeah, the one you sent no Howard Ashman, the no oh god, No, what's what's it called again? Just called Howard oh Man. I remember when we Debauting the Beast. I think I saw clips from it that I didn't I couldn't bring myself to It's. Yeah, it's very sad, but you know what for reframing it to the positive, he gave it untold amount of people a lot of joy. Um, So focus on focus on that, focus on that, make it through, Make it through. Uh lyrist is Tim Rice, who did Lion King with Elton John, was brought onto a Laddin to finish the songs for the film. Supposedly Tim Rice was in the Disney orbit because he was just hanging around the back lot trying to get Evita made with Madonna. I read that somewhere and I don't I don't remember if I was able to verify it, but he was like that was his passion project. So he was just hanging around the Disney back lot all the time, chewing people's ears off about Evita and specifically Madonna. And I'm pretty sure it was Katzenberg who was like, we are not making a movie with Madonna starring as Evita Peron and uh, after Catsenberg was at it got made, and presumably after Lion King gave Tim Rice some juice. But anyway, the first song that Tim Rice and Alan Mankin wrote for the film was a Whole New World. How about that? I sent the Magic Carpet Ride piece to Tim using the working title the World at My Feet, Mancoln told the Recording Academy in it's a bit on the nose for a song about carpet wor all at my feet, it is, yes, uh, and he very wisely changed it to a Whole New World. Um, that that song came off so well is just amazing. Because Brad Kine and LEAs Slongo, who will get to later the singing voices of Aladin Jasmine met for the first time when they were called in to do that the demo for that. Wow. Yeah. Can I have talked about how weird this was? He said. We were standing there singing to each other, and it was a strange situation because when you just meet someone you know nothing about them, and yet the chemistry is undeniable. They're pros. Tim Rice apparently called them back at one point to re record a single line. The original was now from way up here, it's crystal clear that now I'm in a whole new world with you. And he didn't like the double now in there, so it changed too. But when I'm way up here it's crystal clear, and you know what he was right to do. I always thought that bit where a Laddin goes, don't you dare close your eyes was a little creepy because it's a little Ted Bundy ish. I mean, they can all be recast if you just do the slow plus reverb. It's just yeah, look at me with with the low piano note, look at me in the eyes. I really want to hear you do more your your theater kids singing of this. It's very good. Please give us a little it's really just shining, shivering splend there. I'll give us that shining, shimmering splan. It kind of has a little hint of like pop punk mid two thousand's. That's super bright. It's that super bright nasal placement for like the theater kid diction, spiders, spiders, hundred thousand things to see. I used to think I could do that kind of thing pretty well, but I can't hold a candle to yours assle, don't know the words of that song well enough, just there's so it's really tell me, princess, now, when did you last let your heart decide? That's a great line. That is just no, it's not uh anyway. Musker and Clements brought a story real to Katzenberg um which is basically like the animation equivalent of a demo, and Katzenberg disliked it. He uh. In the special features of the film's DVD release, the animators related or Muskar and Clement's talk about it. He told the animation team to rewrite the entire story without moving the film's release date, which is an incident that the animators dubbed Black Friday, and in a telling uh example, that is not the only Black Friday connected to Jeffrey Katzenberg. There is an entirely different one related to the production of Toy Story where I think he fired the whole team or he did like the exact he did. It was like the exact same thing. It was just like Jeffrey Katzenberg wanted the film to have more of a cynical adult tone to it and wanted would he to be like basically more of a jerk, and mandated that they go back and create a new reel for it, in which would he deliberately throws Buzz out of the window. Yeah, and I guess they showed all of this too. The studio executives, Roy Disney and other Disney heads were very angry about it. John Lasseter was very upset about it, and Disney nearly shut down Toy Story entirely. So Jeffrey Katzenberg in Black Friday too. Toy Story, Well, the Aladdin team were really worried that Disney was going to shut down Aladdin too, because, according to producer Amy Pell, no one really cared for Aladdin in this early stage. It was really not well received. Uh. Mercifully, they did not pull the plug, but instead it just gave Katzenberg gave perfect opportunity to go full on. Katzenberg and the team did a page one rewrite in eight days. That is bananas. He also demanded cutting all but three of the songs that Ashman had written, which were later restored when Aladdin was moved to Broadway as a musical Mancoln told CNN two that part of the reason it was shelved at this stage was it was very irreverent, even more irreverent than it became, And there was a lot of concern about how it would affect arab sensibilities, which how racist must it have been? Yeah, I challenged that because, as we'll touch on later, one line that deep make it to the theatrical release, and it was in fact in the opener Arabian Nights was where they cut off your ear if they don't like your face. It's barbaric. But hey, it's home, So no, I don't believe they were worried about offending Middle Eastern people. Katzenberg told the l a times around the time of the movie was made that Aladdin was the least interesting person in the movie at this phase of production. Whenever he was in a scene with Jasmine, she so overwhelmed him with her personality and intelligence. It was like he wasn't even in the scene. He was transparent. You didn't care about him. Now, how do you have a movie called Aladdin where Aladdin isn't worth caring about? I would argue that he's still overshadowed dramatically in the film. I mean, it's all about the genie. It's Gene and then Jasmine. I would say, Iyago, maybe Jaffar Aladdin is the least interesting person in that film. Um. And they also uh in a in a quote preserved for the Ages, Katzenberg called Aladdin's mom a zero and demanded that she'd be removed from the script. I mean, this sounds like a cigar chopping executive bit, but he literally said eighty six the mother the moms of zero. Oh, he's such a caricature of an all studio exactly. Really makes our job easy. Uh. This was said earlier a big change the story because a major part of the plot had been doing right by his mother and making good choices. But predictably, such a message was deemed unimportant by Katzenberg and scrapped. They also cut three of Aladdin's friends, Bab, kak Omar, and Cassim, who were generally just loafers who hung around and sang barbershop quintet songs with them. There was also the Genie of the Ring, who was sort of the beta genie who stayed with a Laddin after he lost the alpha Genie, the Genie of the Lamp to Jaffar, and the loss of these characters also at the loss of their songs, and one of the many songs that was cut from Aladdin at this point was a song that he sang to his mother called Proud of Your Boy, which you know obviously got acts when they lost that character. It was, however, reinstated for the Broadway musical version of Aladdin and the Friends also had three songs that were cut, one that just gave their names basically it's called Babcock Omar Aladdin Cassim, another one called how Quick They Forget, and another one called High Adventure. Uh. They also lost a song called count on Me, which has been described as sort of a low key I want song, which was dropped in favor of one Jump Ahead and its reprise. Uh. And then there was also a deeply unpopular song called call Me a Princess, which was written for an early version of the script in which Jasmine was depicted as spoiled basically justice for Babcock. Um. So the screen writing due of Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, who had one credit to their name at this point, Little Monsters. Have you ever seen that movie Little Monsters? No? Yeah, Oh it's wild Um it is uh. Howie Mandel and he literally plays uh, like under heavy prosthetics, like um Fred Savage is the little kid in there. He plays a it's it's like a whole like there are actually monsters living under your bed. But Howie Mandel is like a whimsical good one. I believe it was a flop but like the makeup and it was all really good if I remember correctly. Yeah, weird, completely forgotten film. But I uh, oh boy, yeah, four and a half to five million budget gross seven thousand. That'll end your career. Not those guys came in to rework the story, uh, and that meant jettison the original carrot designs as well. Veteran Disney animator Glenn Keene originally conceived of Aladdin as a Michael J. Fox kind of teen type, but Katzenberg made him go watch Top Gun and incorporate Tom Cruise's two, the Cruise two into that. That's Katzenberg speak, go and get me some of that Cruise two for that for that Arab picture we're doing. He spits on him, puts a cigar out in his face. Animator Glenn Keane would say, there's a confidence with all of Tom's attitudes and his poses, and they transferred that cruise to. Other visual influences were male Calvin Klein models and mc hammer's pants and dance moves. They literally looked at mc hammer in his parachute pants to get the movements to Aladdin's pants, right, which I love so much. That is a stunning insight into the psyche of one j. Frey Catzenberg. Wow. Uh. The original version of Aladdin, as you mentioned, was a bit younger. I think they had imagined him as like a fifteen year old, and then post the Catzenberg makeover, the animators bumped it up to eighteen. Uh. The initial concept for Aladdin was to make him a more relatable hero and not your stereotypical Disney cardboard prince character that really, if you look back, I don't know, Eric from A Little Mermaid was a little bit more dynamic, but for the most part, all the Disney princes were pretty boring. And it's similar what they wanted to do for Belle and Beauty and the Beast. She was the only Disney princess who wasn't of royal birth or blonde, I believe. So for Aladdin, they wanted to pick him as you know, the underdog. They wanted to make him small and scrappy, but Jeffrey Catsenberg hated it, supposedly telling the animators, come on, guys, you got Julia Roberts and Michael J. Fox. They don't fit together. You need Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts they fit together. You need more Tom Cruise, which I think is an interesting comparison because Tom Cruise is very short, as is Michael J. Fox. But is that the quiet part loud that I say, the quiet part loud? I might have might have? I was just about Oh, Jeffrey Katzenberg reportedly five four that explains everything, making everything. Yeah, let's go for the rest of his DreamWorks crew. How tas Geffen is also David Geffen is also a small man. When I say five seven, Wow, nailed it? Yeah, I see you know that. I I met Jeffrey Catsenberg briefly as a kid. Right part of your studio, part of your your when you're bumming around the studios trying to get your version of made Oh Boy, Sha Guivara the musical Age eight, Michael J. Fox is Fidel, Okay, so hear me out. It's Romeo and Juliet in the Bay of Pigs. Conversational dead end there. Just let that one die. Um. By October of they had a script in place that Catzenberg was okay with. They pitched him and he supposedly said, fine, we'll go with that. Just Barry James Cameron asked of him, I will do that. Let's go again. Uh, Robin, you've done four hours this, can we go again? Uh? And they moved on to casting. But the redesign of A lad had come so late into production that there are some frames of the film, like in A Friend Like Me where you can see like his like scrawny or Michael J. Fox frame, which is funny and I found this amusing. Alan Mancin told Collider in that he doesn't think Genie sings the song A Friend Like Me to everyone who opens the lamp. It's not his standard welcoming song. He just did that for Latin good. I approve of that. As you meditate on that, we'll be right back with more too much information after these messages cast grab bag before we get to the big one. And you know who the big one is, Scott winer Wingert Whanger you would go on to play Steve or was playing Steve? I don't know I don't care about this guy. God bless him, but I don't give you about him. Played Steve D. G. Tayner's boyfriend on Full House. Was the voice of Aladdin. Muscar and Clements had seen him in The Family Man, a CBS sitcom that ran for one season, and he auditioned for it, and they didn't tell him about it until six months later. I think they made him do an other test. He had descended an actual tape of it with his mom doing the other lines for him, which is really funny. He seems like a good dude. No quarrel. Oh, there's a cute nod. There was role in Aladdin. In an episode of Full House, when the Tanners go to Disney World, DJ briefly thinks she sees Steve in an Aladdin the costume, and then the actor turns around and it's a completely different person. But they did shoot an image of him in an Aladdin costume, which is cute. Uh. He was a very enthusiastic voiceover artist. He later said, I really got into it while I was recording. I have to take off my watch in my shirt, I'd get really wild. I'm sure I understand the watch. I don't. Aladdin is not constrained by time North space. Brad Kane provided the character's singing voice. Winer winger Scott Scott told Forbes in twenty nineteen that at the original audition, when I thought it was just some cartoon, they said that went great. Oh, by the way, it's a musical. Can you sing? And I had learned from being a veteran child actor to just lie, to just say sure. I didn't say, oh, can I sing, I'm the greatest singer of all time. I just said I've never been on Broadway or anything, but of course I can sing. They said great, and then they gave me the sheet music and a tape to listen to it with Alan Mankin's demo track, which is on the internet now, and it was a gorgeous song called Proud of Your Boy. I worked really hard. I practiced with a singing coach, and I thought I could really go in there and nail it. And it was not a great experience for anybody. It was laughably bad, and funnily enough, He and Brad Caine are both TV writers now. Yeah, cute for them. Linda Larkin the voice of Jasmine and nothing else that's really shocking to me because she's such a distinctive, like Jennifer Tilly style voice. I'm surprised she didn't go on to do a lot of voice acting. Yeah. She also had been informed that she got the role like months later in her case, uh, nine months I read uh. And she had to lower her voice for the role her As you mentioned, she has a higher registered voice, and they thought it was not a match, so she had to kind of artificially speak down in a slowly lower register for the role. I heard that was a Kazomberg edict, so I choose to hate it. Um I. She gave some interview where she said that she would be out with her family, like a diner, her breakfast or something, and all these kids would kind of whenever she talked, all these kids heads would kind of turn and look towards her because they very distinctive voice, and they would kind of recognize that they knew it from somewhere, but I couldn't quite place it. I mean, God, bless this woman. She has been dining out on Jasmine for thirty years. She has voiced this character in every single possible medium, um, which good for her. More importantly, Jasmine singing voice was Leah Salanga, who is a hugely important singer and actress. She's Filipino. She originated the lead role of Kim and Miss Saigon. It was the first Asian American actress to win a Tony Award. She was the first actress of Asian descent to play the roles of Eponine and Funkin In on Broadway, and the first Filipino artist to sign with an international record label. She sold nineteen million records worldwide. She's singing voice of Milan. So she has a sword. Um, they give them swords right like when they're in the when they sing. I choose to believe them, don't. Well, they gave the guy who did Jaffar a parrot to like both with them, so at least they can do is give her a sword. Jasmine originally did not have a song in the film, since her I'm a Spoiled Brat song was cut when they changed the character, thankfully, and a whole new world was added when Tim Rice came out of the project. So when Larkin was cast, she told Forbes the fact Jasmine didn't have a song at that time really opened up the opportunity for me. To voice this character. And when they added the song and told me about it, my heart fell. I thought, well, that's the end of me doing Jasmine. Now they're going to know I don't sing, and there's never been an actress who didn't sing in a musical version of a Disney animated film. So it's over. Uh. And Disney told her, you know what, We're going to find a singer. Don't worry about it. We are committed to your speaking voice. Yeah. I didn't realize that Aladdin was such a turning point for Disney movies using non singers. Uh. Apparently, when the producers built the movie around Robin Williams, they really wanted to get vocal performers who could hold their own against Robin as an actor, so the singing component was deemed not quite as crucial. And we'll get more into this in a moment, but it's hard to recall a time when doing voiceover work for cartoons, even of like Disney caliber, was seen as like beneath most actors unless they were kind of getting towards the end of their career. Voiceover work, for the most part, up to this point was left to professional voiceover actors. Uh. And Disney had a whole stable of regulars that used throughout the decades, and like just one of many examples, this guy did the voice of Winnie the Pooh, also did the voice of the cheshire Cat and the snake from the Jungle Book, and the Stork and Dumbbo was all voiced by a guy named Sterling Holloway. But yeah, Robert Williams went a long way in changing that when he did a Laddin, which added sort of legitimacy towards animated voice over work, and he did it in Ferngali first. That's true, that is true. Jonathan Freeman as Jaffar, he knew Ashman and Mankin from the off Broadway days. He had unsuccessfully auditioned for a Little Shop of Horrors, but they liked him enough that they kept him in mind and kept mentioning him when they moved west and started working for Disney. He said in two thousand eleven that I took part in the preliminary voice auditions for Jaffar. I read the script, I sang the song, but it wasn't until my second audition that I actually got to see Andreas Dias concept drawings for this character. And once I saw those heavy lidded eyes, that long, narrow face. I knew Jaffar was going to be something really special, a classic Disney villain, so I threw myself into that second audition and eventually won that part. Jafar took design cues from another classic Disney villain, the extremely hard to spell Maleficent Hard. Oh yeah, I never they do look very much alike. That's so funny. Unfortunately, since Jonathan was the first voice actor cast, he worked largely alone, mostly um flying into record dialogue as it was written and rewritten. He spent something almost two years recording Jafar's dialogue. Yeah, I'd read that they initially considered Patrick Stewart for the voice of Jaffar, but I guess his schedule is too crazy with Star Trek Next Generation. Uh. He was really the one who got away as far as like the Disney Renaissance is concerned. Apparently Disney considered him for Cogsworth and Beauty and the Beast and Scar and the Lion King, but just didn't work out schedule wise. And it's a great story about Jonathan Freeman, the guy who ultimately did get the voice of Jafar. Apparently the producers had a parrot in the studio that he could look at as he recorded, and this was probably early in the production when I think Jaffar was also going to do the voice of the parrot on his shoulder too, before they got Gilbert Godfrey as Iago, So they had this parrot in there and he had to tell producers that he was deathly afraid of birds. And for an anniversary special feature att I think probably for the DVD release, this guy Jonathan Freeman actually goes into an exotic bird shop in Manhattan try to confront his fear as as he tells stories of the production of Aladdin, which I appreciated. But yeah, despite this minor trauma, Freeman apparently had a great time voicing Jaffar and continued to do it for many many years. As the Jasmine. He not only voiced Jaffar in the direct to video Aladdin's sequel, which I read was Disney's first direct to video sequel, which is interesting to me, and made a boatload of money and basically cemented that practice for them for the under Perpetuity, also in the Latin TV series which I have no memory of, neither do I actually, and then Patrick Stewart would many years later go on to be the voice of the poop emoji in the Emoji movie Better Like Than Never, and Gilbert Godfried as Iago. According to the DVD commentary, the parrot was originally supposed to have a British accent and his name was Sindbad. But Musker and Clements saw Gilbert Godfried in Beverly Hills Cop Too, and they wanted him for the role Uh, and they wanted a voice specifically that would contrast with Freeman during Jaffar. Originally, there were concerns that Godfried would be to anachronistic in the film, being a contemporary comic, but aftercasting Robin Williams as Genie, they figured that they could keep someone as broad Let's lease say about Gilbert Uh in the movie. They invited Jeffreykatzenberg to a screening room to play him Beverly Hills Cop To to try and sell him on the idea of casting Godfried, and Musker told the ringer that Katzenberg's initial reaction was, I don't know, isn't his voice kind of grading, to which Musker says his initial response was, well, was the pot calling the kettle black? Here? Uh Clement says that Danny DeVito and Joe Pesci were also considered for the part, and Gilbert Godfried echoed as much to People Magazine in he said, the search was on for short, unattractive Jews and Italians, so I went in and auditioned for it. Oh God bless him. Freeman told Forbes in nineteen I was very excited when they brought Gilbert in. It made my job easier to be honest. In the beginning, I was the voice of the parent too. They had an idea that the parrot was going to just be a parrot and mimic other people. When he did that, they just take those other people to record his lines and put their line in his mouth, and the rest of the time he would just squawk and scratch like a parrot. When they hired Gilbert, it allowed him to be the cotic one, gave me permission to smooth things out. I think it really helped my performance not having to do both. And Iago actually also influenced an aspect of the character design as well. Andreas Deja, who is the animation supervisor, told Entertainment Tonight that with the Jaffar's character design, they said we created almost a little stage for Iago with the broad shoulder padge, so that so that the parrot can pace back and forth. Uh. Freeman said Robin and Gilbert both had one thing in common, which is if there's more than three people in a room, that constitutes an audience, and it gives them permission to just go for it. Uh. Gilbert Godfried in Reddit A M A and twenty sixteen said the makers of Aladdin were very open to have me improvise. They gave me a lot of freedom, but often they would have to stop and go Gilbert, this is a family film. So somewhere deep in the Disney vaults, next to Walt's frozen head, never to see the light of day, is all of the R rated material that Godfried and Williams improvised for a ladd which I love. Animator will Finn even made sure that the parts design looked like Godfrey gave him the big thick eyebrows and big teeth, and Clemens told the ringer, of course, parrots don't have teeth, and then Muskar ads to get Gilbert, you needed to have the smile and the toothiness. Yeah. Animator will Finn later said that Iago was the only bird he'd ever drawn with teeth. It's horrifying. They're not supposed to have teeth. Oh, and the Emmy Award winning insanely prolific voice actor Frank Welker as Abu, the monkey for Jasmine's Tiger Raja and the voice of the Cave of Wonders. Welker is another one of those utility voice actors who's been in everything. He's the voice of Fred Jones and Scooby Doo since nineteen sixty nine, has been playing Scooby Doo since two thousand two. Is the voice of Megatron and other Transformers. He's a voice of Curious George, the voice of Garfield on The Garfield Show. According to his Wikipedia he holds over eight hundred and sixty film, television and video game credits as of two, making him one of the most prolific voice actors of all time, with a total worldwide box office grows of seventeen point four billions. That's thus making him the third highest grossing actor of all time. That is bananas. Frank Welker studied spider monkeys at the Zoo and tried to find a way for Abu to have a voice or to react, he said, in seeing what kind of monkey he was, I knew he had to kind of have a little voice. And at first there was no dialogue whatsoever. He didn't speak at all, but they wanted to give the impression that he had his own little language. I find this very funny. Welker did the voice of the monkey from Rangers of the Lost Arc and when they when Clemens and Musker screened Aladdin for Steven Spielberg, his advice to them was, whenever the movie gets to gooey, cut to the monkey. It's a little free Steven Spielberg directing advice there for you. And apparently while they had him, they also apologized to him because they in the scene where Aladdin's gets the lamp, they copied so much of that from the scene and raised the Lost Arc where Indie gets the stone Idol, and it really is like almost frame for frame um and Steven Spielberg said, I don't worry about it. I stole a lot of that from old television serials. Uh. And there's I just one last Steven Spielberg thing tangentially connected to this. Uh. This is a tribeck of film festival. He said during the making of Schindler's List because he had done Hook with Robin Williams. He said, Robin knew what I was going through, and so once a week Robin would call me on schedule and do fifteen minutes of stand up for me over the phone. I would laugh hysterically because I had to release so much. And the way Robin is on the telephone, he'd always hang up on the loudest, best laugh you'd give him. He'd never say goodbye, just hang up on the biggest laugh. Oh. And that leads us into the most bittersweet part of this movie, which is Robin william Hums Muscar and Clements created the role of Genie with Williams in mind, but other alternatives floated for the studio where John Candy, Steve Martin, Eddie Murphy, Martin Short, John Goodman, and Albert Brooks Uh Clemens sold Entertainment Tonight. Right from the start, we saw the Genie as a very special character in this movie, and the concept of him being able to change form constantly was right there from the start. We wrote the script for Robin Williams from the beginning. They told the supervising animator for Jennie, Eric Goldberg to listen to Williams stand up albums and animate a sequence based on one of his bits that they could show to Disney and Williams to convince them. Goldberg went with Williams riffing about schizophrenia, uh, and animated Genie growing a second head rendered as Williams to argue with himself, Oh yeah, tonight, let's talk about the serious subject of schizophrenia. Now, what doesn't shut up? Let him talk like that whole bit. Robin totally got what kind of potential animation had in utilizing his talents. Goldberg told the l a times, we could have just gotten someone who's technically adept at impressions, but the warmth that Robin brought was something we tried very hard to convey. Katzenberg took this real to Williams and introduced him to Goldberg, and Williams signed on for going his usual eight million dollar payday and taking the minimum SAG scale pay, which was seventy five grand. Later on, he said he did it to be part of the animation tradition and do something his kids would like. Um, but there was some other contractual strings, which we will get to in a minute. Uh. This Goldberg Guy, the animation supervisor for Jeannie, always said how special it was that he was the one making Robin Williams laugh with the animation that mocked up that he put together. It was stand up routines. I thought that was cute. Just a month later, Williams was in a recording booth at George Lucas's Skywalker Ranch Recording Studios in Marin County for the initial four hour recording session. According to The l A Times, the first scene alone, Williams tackled twenty five times in twenty five different ways, stretching and bending premises to the point that scenes originally meant to last thirty seconds, suddenly we're ten minutes long. It's like doing this podcast. Uh. Time magazine wrote the Williams spent fifteen months recording Genie in four hour chunks, timed during breaks he had while filming the two other films that he was starting at the time, Hook and Toys. In that first recording session, Williams came up with the concept of Genie calling a Laddin owl, which they made into a recurring bit, which I love so much, Goldberg told Entertainment Tonight. When we finally got Robin into the recording studio. We wanted him to be improvisational. We didn't quite know how improvisational he was going to be until he came out with all of the celebrity impressions. Animators narrowed the performance down to about sixty different characters. I think it's actually it's fifty eight, and Goldberg added, Robin spoiled us for choice. We would go in with three script pages had come out with about four hours of material. I mean that seems maddening, Like that almost gets to the point where it doesn't seem helpful. Well, yeah, but this is this is wild. This is like I just learned this like three hours before we tape this. There's thirty hours supposedly of Robin doing Genie material out there. And this man had the foresight, perhaps because of this Disney drama we'll talk about in a second, to mandate that when he died, he bequeathed the rights to his name, signature, photograph, and likeness to a charitable organization he set up called the Windfall Organization, with the provision that none of that could be used until twenty five years after his death. And given what we have seen Disney do, with Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher in the Star Wars movies. That is an incredibly forethoughtful move because you know, there are discussions happening in the Disney back room being like, how can we crack open the Robin Disney vault and uh do some kind of ghoulish after the fact resurrection of this character. But they can't do it until So stay tuned for Genie coming out. Pretty backstory the R rated material that would actually be kind of funny. Um. They were originally concerns the kids wouldn't get some of Williams's references like William F. Buckley and f O merman um, which definitely flew over my head. And in fact, I we were taping something. I think we were taping Fern going when I couldn't figure out how I had a memory of William F. Buckley's voice before I ever saw William F. Buckley as a person, and it is from Aladdin. Um. But they left them in because they just thought it was funny. Kids find would find it funny, and they did. Uh. They did cut his George Bush impression because they didn't want the film to veer into politics. Um. Presumably because this was taking place during the backdrop of the Iraq One Iraq Iraq I. Goldberg and Clements both recalled having gold Burg in the same room as Williams when he was recording, like trying to get some of his mannerisms down to sketch them, and Uh, they basically said that he had to. Like he said, Robin went for an hour and a half without stopping, and Uh then was like, Okay, I'm gonna take a break, and Goldberg was like, I cannot be in the same room with him. I will ruin one of these takes from laughing. William's imbrowing was not limited to Genie either. He also voices the narrator of the film and those lines were originally scripted and it was just not coming off well. Um So Musk and Clement said on the DVD commentary that on Katzenberg's suggestion, they just brought in a bunch of props into the recording studio in like a covered box and did like a wall off thing and just handed it to Williams and he just started riffing on it, and they ended up with an hour of material just off a bunch of random crap he found in a box Um Goldberg was talking Entertainment Weekly. He said, one of the things Robin flewed out of the box was a bra and he looks at it and goes, look at this, it's a double slingshot of this, it's a double yarmuka. And then he turns and goes, I should have called her just like I thought. He was just so fast, man. I mean, was it inside the actor's studio that they had to hospitalize someone or someone got carted off in an ambulance because they pulled a muscle in their groin from laughing so hard. I haven't heard this. That was an incredible inside the act of studio though, so I wouldn't doubt it. That's the one where he's like acting out what it was like the moment that he received the oscar and he does that whole bit about like everything in slow motion and that you forgot your mother. It was it was inside the actors study and the audience member laughed so hard he got a hernie on left an ambulance after they were done taping. Um, that's amazing. Apparently the longest recording of him improvising was him cheering on a Laddin in the final Battle with Jafar, but most of that ended up on the cutting room floor because they said it's distracted from the action. Another famous improvised bit was when he turns into Pinocchio uh in the middle of the in his first scene with Aladdin, and that is because he wasn't even a line. He Goldberg said that he was watching him improvise and he does the nose growing, he makes the sound, and he made a note about it and was like, we have to do this, like we have to have the character Genie turned into Pinocchio. They're like, what are you talking about? And he was like, that noise that he makes is the Pinocchio nose growing noise. And he gestured what he did was like something like that and uh. But he was like they that wasn't like verbalized. It was just like one of these like split second things that Robin did and they seized onto it, and it did so well and made people laugh so hard in test screenings that they had to go back and add extra frames to that because it was not giving the gag lot time to land. The other Disney cameos that are in the film are they do a musical sting from under the sea when he Uh. He says, uh Alaskan king crap or King's crab k crab soup or something and pulls a crab out of the recipe book and uh, it's Sebastian from Little Murad and they do they do little sting from which have we ever talked about? How isn't it uh only the good Die Young? That sounds exactly like under the Sea. Mm hmmm, only the good Banana Ana? Like that horn sting sounds like under the Sea. I can kind of hear that maybe it was some kind of deal with Disney when Millie Joel wants to do Oliver and Company, I need give me that horn line. Um the And then the other one is when when they cut into the Throne room and the salt is playing with a bunch of toys. You can see a little doll version of beast in there. A Latin voice actor Scott Winger Winger Wanger his favorite movie at fifteen was Dead Poets Society. He told E, So he's entertainment Newsley, that's just sounds. You can't cite that verbally, he told exclamation point. So he was very nervous about meeting Robin Williams when he introduced himself. He said, Hi, I'm Scott. I play Aladdin, he said. Williams told him, well, I'll be your Genie, which it destroys me. I can hear that. So that's the closest time when I get to cry and dropped on Mike during this. Obviously, as soon as the red light was turned on and he would start performing, it was the Robin Williams that everyone remembers. Winger continued. Winger continued, Winer continued, just punching whatever's right. But then there were these quiet moments when he was very thoughtful and contemplative, and it was so me amazing to see the process, like he was getting ready to turn it on, and he really put me at ease. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association gave Williams a Special Achievement Award for a Laddin at the Golden Globes, citing that his performance didn't fall into any of their traditional categories. Katzenberg supposedly mounted an Oscar campaign for him, which obviously did not materialized, and while it has often been repeated that the amount of improvising Williams did for the film disqualified it for an Academy Awards screenplay nomination. This just seems to be one of those things that God repeated somewhere and preserved into perpetuity. It's on IMDb, It's one of these things I've constantly seen on Reddit and everywhere. I cannot find a single primary or secondary direct source that verifies that. And in fact, I think it would have been weirder if it the film had been nominated, because no animated film at the time had ever been nominated for a screenplay. Obscarre. Beauty and the Beast was the first animated film to be nominated for Best Picture, and it still didn't get a nomination for screenplay. Toy Story is the first animated film to do so. So I'm putting that one to bed. I'm putting that that whole canard to bed Well. Ashman and Menk and the composers of the songs for the film, in keeping with the original conceit to have a Laddin be this sort of Bing Crosby style road picture. They conceived the genie as, in Mechan's words, a hip Harlem jazz singer like Fats Waller or Cab Callaway, which meant that the singing was gonna be a little bit more traditional, but so you can probably imagine this quickly changed in Robin Williams's hands. Uh to any of those who aren't up on their jazz age band leaders. Cab Callaway had a role in the Blues Brothers as Curtis the band leader, and he was too cool for this planet. Megan later told Billboard. We met at the house Robin was renting in Los Angeles while he was working on Hook. He arrived at our work session freshly released from spending hours as Peter Pan suspended at a flying harness, standing by the piano as my musical director, David Freedman plunked out the melody lines for a friend like me and Prince Ali. Robin Gamily learned our songs note by note and phrase by phrase. I wish I could say I remember zeni antics, or a touching connection, or any kind of special anecdote, but I remember was a quiet, unassuming, thoroughly professional actor, respectfully working hard to prepare for recording our songs. Next came our recording date at ocean Way Studio B. The room was packed. Everyone and anyone who had an excuse to be in the control room waited an anticipation. We had a trio of musicians there to set down rhythm tracks for both songs. Live with Robin, he dutifully sang every note and every word, making sure the phrasing, the intonation, the dramatic intention in the vocal style was all exactly as we wanted it. All the while everyone was asking, okay, Alan, do you have what you need? Can we let Robin go beyond the written notes? Now? The frustration was palpable. Finally the time came to let Robin do his thing. No one who was there can ever forget what it was like. The bursts of imagination, the endless parade of character voices, the hilarity, the sheer energy was astounding. Take after take of brilliant material poured out of him, and our minds reeled from all the possibilities. After a few hours, a few hours, we thanked Robin profusely and that was it. A few hours for two songs. Oh my god. Uh. The last fun fact the outfit that the genie wears is he prepares to leave for vacation at the end of the movie. Uh with the goofy hat. It's identical to an outfit that Robert Williams wore in a Disney theme park video he appeared in. Oh and so now on to the arc of the universe bends to Jeffrey Gatzenberg being a dick um, which touched on this briefly in our Firm Golly episode or was it Beauty the Beast? I think it was fair Golly. William's major beef with Disney and Jeffrey in this era came down to the fact that when he signed on to do a Laddin for again scale grand down from eight million, his stipulation was that Disney could not use his name in Aladdin publicity, including press kits, and the character of Genie couldn't occupy more than of whatever ad he was appearing in. Even a Disney gift book about the making of Aladdin contains nary a mention of William's name, referring to him only as the voice of the Genie or the actor signed to play Genie. There's been some kind of hindsight theorizing that this was because Williams big passion project at the time was toys and he was concerned that Aladdin was going to come out and detract from toys, which is exactly what happened. Uh Toys was a flop, right, that was Barry Levinson. Yeah, I used to love that movie. Though you got anything else to say about it? No, it's just it's a crazy movie. The whole last like twenty minutes of the movie is just like this war fought by old wind up toys. It's like it's really have you ever seen it? And the whole art direction behind it, it's like all Magreat styled. So they're all these like pictures of like an I know the cover art of him and like the bowler hat. I didn't realize that was a mcgreed clouds and realized that was a mgreed reference. Yeah, it's a very surreal looking movie. It's pretty cool. I don't remember the plot being that special, but just visually it was really cool looking. Well, there are two ground zero sources for this whole drama. One is a Today Show appearance the Williams May The other is a New York mag article from around this time. And he was promoting Mrs Doubtfire on Today's Show and he said, do you realize now, when you work for Disney, why the mouse has only four fingers because he can't pick up a check? Uh? He was a quipped to Jeane Shallott. We had a deal. The one thing I said was I will do the voice. I'm doing it basically because I want to be part of this animation tradition. I want something for my children. One deal is I just don't want to sell anything, as in Burger king, as in toys, as in stuff. Then all of a sudden they release an advertisement. One part was the movie. The second part was when they used the movie to sell stuff. Not only did they use my voice, they took a character I did and overdubbed it to sell stuff. That was the one thing I said, don't do that. That was the one thing where they crossed the line. It is hilariously evil, cartoonishly evil how they got around that rule. If you look at the poster for it, Genie does indeed take up the frame, but that is because everyone else is tiny. He is the entire top quarter of the box. And the nominal leads of the film are like the size of a dime, like lower third. Ied is so so funny. Um, this is wow. The l A Times article is wild and just such an amazing example of the power that the press used to have. Because this article, uh, they called it sour grapes. They basically said that Robin wasn't actually upset about them going back on their word. He was upset that he'd done it for scale, and the movie went on to make twelve point seventy billion dollars, you know, So they were like characterized it was a source close to the I'm putting this in air quotes. A source close to the drama said this in the in the Times, and so they refuted that. And then Disney or Katzenberg sent Robin eight Picasso like a one point five mill Picasso, which was weirdly a self portrait of Picasso as Vincent van Gogh. I'm not well versed enough in art history to know what the hell that's about, but that's what it was. Uh, it didn't work. In that New York magazine, Eric Idol for Monty Python and joked that he told Robin to take it on television and burn it. Um. So Williams didn't return for the director video sequel, The Return of Jaffar, in which the Genie is voiced by Dan Caste le Nada, the voice of Homer Simpson and like twenty other characters on that show. And then after Jeffrey Katzenberg exited Disney, they made a very public apology to Robin Williams, and he returned for not just the third film in the Aladdin trilogy is called The King of Thieves, but like it's just a boatload of Genie led extraneous materials for the theme park for educational stuff. Uh, that public apology is really something The guy who came in after Katzenberg's guy named Joe raw Off um, and not only does he allow that Disney may have been responsible for the earlier thing where they said this is Sara grapes, Robin's just pissing he didn't make enough money. And this is really funny because um, one of the things that might have brought Robin back into the Disney fold is that it was Joe Roth who greenlit Mrs. Doubtfire when he was at uh Fox and let Robin get his then wife, uh Marcia Cars's Williams to act as a producer, so that means she got paid from it. So there's this whole bit in there about Jeffrey Katzenberg getting canned and a friend of Robin coming in and making a giant public apology for something Catzenberg Dad that I just drama. Drama draws that. Yeah, And although Williams had just done Fern Gully, his turn as Genie, as we talked about earlier, really revolutionized the role of a list celebrity and animation, and the trend picked esteem with The Lion King, where you had Jonathan Taylor, Thomas, Whoopi Goldberg and James Harrel Jones, and then Toy Story of course with Tim Allen and Tom Hanks, but also Don Rickles and Jim Varney and Lulas Shawn and John Ratzenberger, among many many others in that movie. So it can really be easy to forget that pride of this animation was basically the province of either past it actors or professional voice actors, and it was kind of looked down upon. Be Arthur, for example, reportedly refused the role of Ursula and the Little Mermaid for this very reason. Aladdin also represented to step forward in the technical side of Disney's animation process, much as Beauty and the Beast had, but the inspiration for how they approached the character design was actually pretty anachronistic, by which I mean old uh. It was a long time friend of the pod long time New York Times caricaturist Al Hirschfeld, friend of the pod I love. I have. I'm right like a cup feet away from me. I have a book and old book of his inscribed in the front with a little animation that he did in the cover page. And it's one of my one of my special things. I love. He's the guy who put his daughter's name in every sketch, right, Nina, Yeah, all the hidden Nina's what's give us a Hershfield rundown style wise, I mean he's like if James Thurber got really into Art Deco. He's these uh, black line drawings with these swooping lines that I mean, it's just's like art Deco charactures essentially. I mean, he's Uh. I knew him mostly for doing like a lot of like Broadway stars, I think the later on Broadway. Uh he did caaractures for the arts and leisure sections of the New York Times. Um, I feel like he must have done stuff for the New Yorker. Yeah. He basically caricatured every major entertainment figure from the forties through to the early two thousands. I'd say he lived to be a hundred live. I think I think he died in like two thousand, two thousand one or so. Incredible life. It's a great documentary on him too. Eric Goldberg, who is Genie supervising animator, told The l A Times I look on Hirschfeld's work as a pinnacle of boiling a subject down to its essence, so that you get a clear, defined statement of a personality. There's also an organic quality in the way one line will flow into another. It may go along the back of a neck, down the spine, across the behind, and then down the leg, all in one single line. That is very, very elegant. I wanted the Genie to have that kind of elegance, so that kind of line work. Uh. You also see in the kind of classic Persian art that they were looking at. They were looking at these um uh miniature Persian miniatures. They're called um like miniature books. Uh. Supervising animator Andreas Deja said, Hirschfeld's work teaches you fluidity, appeal, and simplicity. A Laddin is composed of two interlocking triangles formed by his chest and his pants ants. Jasmine is sort of pear shaped, and Jaffar is basically a t A very skinny body with these broad shoulders. I kept that t shape in mind while I was animating, making sure it came through kept me from cluttering up the drawings. Hirschfeld, quoted in The l A Times, saw the influence of his own work most clearly in The Genie and the Flying Carpet, telling the paper, I'm more sympathetic and understanding of the abstractions than I am of the realistic representation of human behavior. Uh. Shout out to Andreas Deja, who had a hell of a Disney villain hat trick in the nineties. He was the supervising animator for Gaston, impauting the Beast Jaffar and then scar in Lion King. So wait, he must have been the guy who spent like six weeks trying to nail Gaston's chest hair configuration. Believe he was nice goals. Uh. In animation, it's important to break your character down to the simplest basic shape possible. Break your character down. Jeffrey Cassenberg taught me that. Uh. That is Glen Keane, animator Glen Keane talking to The l A Times and then to Entertainment tonight. He added, when you're animating a character, that has a lot of inside emotion. It's always going to be more difficult. Basically, he's talking about the challenges of animating human characters versus more exaggerated ones. He said on Beast, I had six animators on him. On A Laddin, we had between twelve and twenty animators working on him at the same time. In fact, there were forty principal animators on the film, more than it worked on A Little Mermaid. And art director Bill Perkins told Forbes in nineteen that try and cut corners where they could. I enforced an effort to design as many reused backgrounds and background layers as possible. I felt it would be more efficient for both layout and background, and then the artist could spend more time designing and painting more quality into each background. The average painter on Beauty and the Beast painted a hundred and twenty five paintings. On A Laddin, the average was seventy five. Artist. I know these numbers tend to make people's eyes glass over, but just the sheer quantity of all this stuff just still tends to fascinate me. It's what, twenty four pieces of paper a second frames a second, yeah, a second, so another fun statistic to anime the frenetic friend like me seeing Eric Goldberg, the Genie animation supervisor, made something in the area of ten thousand drawings. And also the Genies applause sign at the end of that song was actually necessary in test creatings, the audiences weren't applauding at the end of that song. I don't really know why they would. I can't remember the last time I was in a theater and the audience broke out into spontaneous in the middle of a movie. But apparently Jeffrey Katzenberg was. He took this personally and he didn't like this. So Eric Goldberg stuck that sign in there as kind of a delicate troll, both to audiences and also to Jeffrey Katzenbergh. Boy, We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment. A Laddin like Beauty and the Beast heavily utilized CAPS or computer assisted post production system, which is a technology made for Disney by Pixar. They first used it on rescuers down Under, but also in uh This was the technology that I believe took them three months to render a chicken leg in. Yes, but it's also how they got the ballroom background dance scene in Beauty the Beast. I think that the dancing um, the dancing forks, and the br guest scene that are doing like almost like a rockets kick. I think we're from caps as well. I think that was like the most successful use of caps in Beauty the Pieces. Background supervisor Kathy Altieri said the film relies on a blue, red and yellow color scheme. Good characters like Genie, Aladdin and Jasmine or blue villainous care arctors like Jafar and Niago are red and orange and uh, that's also in the Cave of Wonders, the lamp chambers blue and the ruby that tempts Aladdin is obviously bright red. The city of Agribao the desert, and the characters that are sort of background functionaries of that, like the Sultan are yellow and tan tones, and unlike a Laddin with Tom Cruise, Jasmine was not inspired by a celebrity. Uh. In Disney's D twenty three convention, the animator Mark Ken said, I was having some artist block. I was coming off designing Ariel and Bell and was starting to run out of ideas. So I pulled out my sister Beth's high school graduation photo and thought there was something there. Shout out to Beth Hen for inspiring my favorite Disney princess non Milan category. Yeah, I love this story. There's this behind the scenes feature at that talks a little bit more about this in detail. Mark Hen said that lots of people around the Disney Animation studio started stopping by his office to ask if his sister was single. He started animating Jasmine. I know she came to visit her brother at work. She was constantly greeted by animators shouting hey Jasmine to just be a cost off by a bunch of dorky animators trying to ask her out. I wouldn't mark your mark your sister is your sisters a babe? This is offensive, but just like as a bunch of sweaty animators being like, Mark, mark you of babe? Yeah? He I wonder how he balanced that. Um. He signed an illustration to her to Beth my inspiration with a picture of Jasmine that he gave to her and framed her. Kids would often tell their friends at school that their mother was Princess Jasmine, which I think is really cute, she's also a seamstress. And then years later, for Halloween, she made her son in a Laddin outfit and made her daughter a Jasmine outfit, and then decided, you know, what the heck, I'll make myself a Jasmine outfit to considering you know, I am Jasmine. Uh. She post for a photo as Jasmine and sent it to her brother, which was included in this featurette, which is kind of weird because she's like lying on a Chase lounge in the Jasmine outfit. Yeah, but Mark Hand, the animator, said that it was very emotional to see Jasmine brought to life. Uh, sister by my sexy sexy sister. Yeah, yeah, I don't know how. Yeah, and then have to draw that over and over and over and sister, stupid sexy sister. You mentioned the color schemes earlier. They initially considered making Jasmine's outfit pink instead of blue because it was believed that dolls in pink dresses would sell more than dolls and blue dresses, which is dumb. A similar approach was taken with aerial dolls just before The Little Mermaid was released. I guess, believing the kids didn't want redhead dolls. They made the early versions of the aerial dolls a lot blonder, and then of course they discovered once the movie is released that kids wanted dolls that looked like the character, so the hair was changed back to red once the movie opened. Another bit of elegance made possible by CAPS is a blurring effect in which different layers of background art coming in and out of focus as characters move towards or away from them. Um like the way that the human eye or camera lens would see them. You can actually see this stuff again. This is just so fascinating to me, like academically, um, not emotionally or anything or artistically because it does look kind of jankie in the Cave of Wonders, like the lava wall. And basically the way that they were doing this was hand drawing a lot of this stuff and then using CAPS to texture map it onto these surfaces that would ripple or move like they do it with the carpet. The shape of the carpet and the tassels are hand drawn, and then they mapped the design over to it and used this computer system to animate that. They spent so much time and money doing this for the carpet that Jeffrey Katzenberg started to get annoyed then and Uh called it a bunch of squiggles class act. For the Cave Escape, animator Rezul at Zani took his camera to the Magic Mountain theme park for inspiration, got on the roller coaster with his camera, got off the roller coaster, realized he'd left his lens cap on, got back on the roller coaster. Um The Tiger's head for the Cave of Wonders is believed to be the first fully computer animated character in a feature film. It was first sculpted out of clay and then animated digitally. All Right, Two controversies dogged A. Laddin upon its completion and release, one much more deserved than the other. I am speaking of the quite reasonable objection that Middle Eastern people and the Middle Eastern totality UH does not come off well in the film. Aladdin and Jasmine are these light skin They basically look like they have a tan uh englicized characters, and the Saltan looks like Santa Claus, while the rest of the supporting cast and all of the villains have very coded, caricatured Middle Eastern quote unquote arab features. Alan Mancoinn told Entertainment Tonight, it's so much of the Disney style to make characters very recognizable American types within that context. And then he said, uh so Aladdin and Jasmine are kind of valley kids as well as being these Arabian characters, which is very telling quote and if you need a finer point, put on that. Uh. In a nine article about the controversy around the film, the Washington Post quoted the former spokesman for the South Bay Islamic Association, a man named Yusuf Salem, and he said, all the bad guys have beards and large, bulbous noses, sinister eyes, and heavy accents, and they're wielding swords constantly. Aladdin doesn't have a big nose. He has a small nose. He doesn't have a beard or a turban, he doesn't have an accent. What makes him nice is they've given him this American character. They've done everything but put him into a suit and tie. There was, also, as you mentioned earlier, the lyric in the song Arabian Nights, which goes where they cut off your ear if they don't like your face. It's barbaric, but hey, it's home, and no less a person than Casey Caseum, who is of Lebanese ancestry, told The l A Times in that article, it's gratuitous arab a bashing. It just drives another nail into the casket of what has been a bad image for decades. That time to try my Casey case impression. Go for it. It's gratuda is Arab bashing. It just drives another nail into the casket of what has been a bad image for decades. Of what has been a bad image for decades. If you give me twenty minutes, I could will workshop this live on the air. Alan Mokeeber, the president of the American Arab Anti Discrimination Committee in Washington, wrote to Disney Studios chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg to suggest the lyrics to Arabian Nights be changed before the movie came out on home media. Like there are also complaints about a scene where a merchant threatened to cut off Jasmine's hand for taking an apple from a stand and giving it to a hungry child. In an incredibly tone deaf response to this, that just to show how far we've come in thirty years, A named as spokesman for Disney Howard Green. Shout out to Howard Green for the worst public response to this. It's certainly coming from a small minority, because most people are very happy with it. All the characters are Arabs, the good guys and the bad guys, and the accents don't really connote anything. As for the song, it's talking about a different time and a different place. It's a certain license that they're taking, but it's certainly not meant to reflect on the culture of today. It's a fictitious place. That was the wind up and here's the pitch. This seems kind of nitpicky anyway. Yeah. Man. Albert m'caber is the president of the American Era Anti Discrimination Committee. He also expressed disappointment that the Disney officials refused to meet with the committee. He says, certainly, I think it would have been a different situation if African Americans are Jewish Americans had been involved. I mean, this is also taking place during the backdrop of the as I mentioned earlier, Iraq one. Um. Yeah, it's just weird to think about this in the context of, you know, Disney took out Robin and his George Bush impression. Because this is happening during the Gulf War, so maybe that played into it, but man, calling those those objections kind of nitpicky good lord. Uh. Disney ended up agreeing to change the lyrics after the protests continued, and so for the home release, the lyric was changed to where it's flat and immense and the heat is intense. It's barbaric, but hey, it's home. They kept in barbaric at the opportunity to take that out, and they kept it in, and which is really puzzling because being barbaric has nothing to do with the temperature of a place. For the live action remake in ten, the line was completely changed to be where you will wonder among every culture and tongue. It's chaotic, but hey, it's home. Uh. And if you perhaps wanted to know how far as the society we had progressed in the intereating twenty years, the answer was not that much. In when Donald Trump was campaigning for president, promising a ban on Muslims entering the country, Public Policy Polling asked nearly five hundred and fifty Republican primary voters if they would support the bombing of Agroba, the fictional setting of a Laddin of respondents said they were not sure and said they supported the bombing on opposed it In fairness. Public Policy Polling also pulled Democratic primary voters are the nineteen of them percent of them said they would support bombing Agriba, thirty six percent said they would oppose it. The number of people who answered isn't that the city from Aladdin was not specified? Uh. In lighter news, it now seems that every Disney Renaissance film has to have some kind of weird sex urban legend connected to it. I think we talked about the allegedly hidden boner in a Little Mermaid, the bishop who's marrying them, right, yeah, And on the VHS case there's a phallic symbol in one of the castle turrets. Y y, yes, it's pretty unmistakable, uh, and then the swirling dust. A year or two later, in a line, King allegedly spelled out the word sex. Was it. The theory behind that was that it was actually SFX and it was a tribute to like a special effects team or something. Having said that this Aladdin one is weird, you can hear, well, you can supposedly you can hear in the scene when he's writing the carpet up to the balcony and he's confronted by Frank Woker as the Tiger. Aladdin supposedly says, good teenagers take off their clothes, or take off your your clothes. Take good teenagers, take off your clothes Snopes. If you go to the Snopes article about this, they have recordings of that line at different speed. And what is very bizarre about it is that you can distinctly hear a male voice that is not Aladdin's come in at the tail end of that line. So maybe there is something to this rumor we should punch it. It's really weird. Aladdin's line is scripted, is scat good tiger, take off and go. But why this extra line is in there remains a mystery. Snopes theorized it might have just been careless audio mixing that got this outtaken there. It almost it sounds like a mistake. Yeah, it's but you can hear two voices on that. That's what's so weird about it. But basically they started to pick up steam when Aladdin came out on VHS and conquered the world more than it already had. Word of mouth momentum about this line eventually caused it to get picked up in an Atlanta based Christian entertainment magazine called Movie Guide with the very generic name of just movie Guide. Uh. It was printed in there, and then from that it was brought to the attention of the American Life League, who claimed the phrase was evidence of a vast multi picture conspiracy by Disney to hide sexual messages in their animated films. From that, places like the AP and different regional newspapers all picked up on this story and the rest, as they say, is history. Can you sing the uh? The next topic? He I can't. I don't know this line. Sorry, tumbling, soaring, tumbling, freewheeling through an endless through an endless diamond sky. Thank you. Disney put a lot of promotional muscle behind the Ladin and the film's trailer proceeded most of their VHS releases, including One D One Dalmatians and Beauty and the Beast And there is a ton of merch and licensing tie INDs, I remember this. The film had its wide release on November two, and it only took eight weeks to surpass Beauty and the Beasts as the most successful animated Disney film at the domestic box office, a record that would then be broken a few years later by The Lion King. In Ultimately, Aladdin was the most successful film of nWo, which I didn't realize it did that. Common numbers gross two hundred and seventeen million in the United States and five hundred four million worldwide, making it the first animated film to pass the two million mark in the United States and Canada, and the first film overall to do so since Your Beloved Terminator to Judgment Day. Currently, it's the third highest grossing traditionally animated feature worldwide, behind The Lion King and The Simpsons Movie. One of those things is not like the I like the Simpson Movie. I thought it was better than it had any right to be. Really, Yeah, but it doesn't have I don't know. I think that's one of those things. Was kind of memory hold. I guess people went out and saw it in droves and then it just talking about it again. Yeah. The film was an equally big smash on home media, and in its first three days of VHS availability, it's sold ten point eight million copies, setting a record for the time, and it also went on to sell sixteen million units in three weeks, setting another record that would only be broken by The Lion King two years later, and the Sega Genesis video game adaptations sold thirty million units. Wow, these are insane numbers. I don't remember. I remember that gaming very frustrating. I don't remember. I looked. I looked it up, and it was there was too much out there about it to actually address. But it is very was enormously successful, and I think it was one of the first, one of the first, uh if not the first one to have like fully traditionally animated sequences in it. Well, I'm not sure that that's right cut that anyway. Critics were pretty unanimous in their love of the film, and almost everyone singled out Williams is the real star, although Roger Ebert, to his credit, criticized the ethnic stereotypes, writing, most of the Arab characters have exaggerated facial characteristics hooked noses, glowering brows, thick lips, but Aladdin and the Princess looked like white American teenagers. Shouts Roger Ebert for not saying, seems a bit nitpicky. Uh No, less an authority than Warner Brothers animation legend Chuck Jones called the film the funniest feature ever made. After he attended to screening and Aladdin picked up Oscars and Golden Globes for Best Original Score and Best Original Song. It really cleaned up at the Grammys. One Song of the Year for a Whole New World, which is the first and currently only Disney song to do so. Wow One Best Pop Performance for the p Bo Bryson and Regina Bell version of It, Best Musical Album for Children, Best Instrumental Composition, Best Song Written specifically for Most Picture of Television. The Whole New World was also the only song from a Disney animated film to top the Billboard Hot one hundred list until last year, when we Don't talk about Bruno from Encanto surpassed it. Frozens Let It Go did not that only made it to five. I had no idea that A Whole New World not only charted because the number one. That's crazy because it bangs bangs uh. Sadly, Aladdin has not yet been added to the Library of Congress till mark I, which means it was a failure. Um angrily writes email memo to self right Library of Congress. Dear haters at l OC, get bent, Sincerely, Jeffrey Katzenberg mail them a turn to take out talks. Well, that is sixteen pages on a ladd and George, do you have anything to say before we go out? I think I have truly never had a friend like you to do sixteen pages on Aladdin. I'd like to give the last word on Aladdin to the late writer and Disney historian John Colahane, who offered probably my favorite summation of a film, my favorite intellectualizing of the film, in the book Disney's Aladdin, The Making of the Animated Film. He wrote, in this house of the Human Spirit, there are many mansions. Animation lives in one of them, and currently the characters from Aladdin are holding a celebration there. It is a celebration that harmonizes Hamlets. What a piece of work is man, How infinite in faculty, inform and moving, How express and admirable with pucks? Lord, what fools these mortals be? Yet even Shakespeare never said it better than Disney's Genie. Why don't you just ruminate whilst I illuminate the possibilities. It's a beautiful sentiment about Aladdin. Thank you for listening, folks. This has been too much information. I'm Alex Hegel and I'm Jordan run Tug We'll catch you next time. Too Much Information was a production of I Heart Radio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan run Talk. The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June. The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan run Talk and Alex Hegel, with original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts and I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows