The strange origins and permutations of Aladdin (DeDisneyfication, Part 12)
Aladdin (علاء الدين, “Alāʼu d-Dīn”) isn’t merely the best-known of the tales of One Thousand and One Nights (أَلْفُ لَيْلَةٍ وَلَيْلَةٌ, ʾAlf Laylah wa-Laylah, OTON hereafter), it’s emblematic of it to the point of being synecdochical.
And yet, if you consider the actual corpus of those tales, it’s an odd one.
First, there’s the fact it’s set in China. This may seem surprising given the Middle Eastern associations of OTON, but many authors, translators, and scholars collected the work over many centuries from south and west Asia and north Africa.
Some tales trace their roots back to ancient and medieval Arabic, Sanskrit, Persian, and even Mesopotamian literature. Most tales, however, were originally folk stories from the Abbasid and Mamluk eras, while others, especially the frame story, come from the Pahlavi Persian work Hezār Afsān (هزار افسان), and may ultimately be translations of still older Indian texts.
Additionally, to the original audience of the tale, China represented a distant, exotic land associated with wealth, mystery, and magnificence. While Chinese cities like Chang’an were widely renowned for their grandeur, ordinary people wouldn’t have access to the details. Instead, the names in the “China” of Aladdin are Arabic and Persian, and other cultural markers—the Sultan, the vizier, and the genie—similarly draw on Middle Eastern traditions.
In fact, Aladdin shares its origin with only 10 other tales in the original European publication of OTON. These can be traced to Hanna Diyab (اَنْطون يوسُف حَنّا دِياب), a Maronite Christian from Aleppo, who told the stories to French writer Antoine Galland in the early 18th century. Galland, who was translating OTON into French, included Aladdin in his translation despite the tale not being part of the original Arabic manuscript.
All three of the best-known tales of OTON are absent from the original canon. Of these, two can be traced to Diyab—Aladdin and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves (علي بابا والأربعون لصا, Ali Baba wal Arba’in Lisa), while Sindbad the Sailor (سندباد البحري, Sindibādu l-Bahriyy) is its own cycle apparently deriving from travellers’ tales of the Abbasid Caliphate (750–1258).
The other OTON tales transmitted directly to Galland by Diyab are:
- Alī Khawājā and the Merchant of Bagdad
- The Ten Viziers
- The Ebony Horse
- The Sultan of Samarkand and His Three Sons
- Khawājā Hasan al-Habbāl
- The Caliph’s Night Adventures
- Prince Ahmed and the Fairy Perī-Bānū
- Sīdī Nuʿmān
- The Two Sisters Who Envied Their Cadette
- Blind Man Bābā ʿAbdallāh
Following Galland’s inclusion of Aladdin in his version of OTON, the story gained immense popularity and underwent various adaptations, also being translated into Arabic and included in subsequent versions of OTON as if it had always been there.
Aladdin became a staple in Western literature, with numerous translations and retellings throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, eventually finding its way into the realm of theater and film. The 1924 film The Thief of Bagdad, while not a direct adaptation of Aladdin, drew heavily on its themes and aesthetics, influencing subsequent interpretations.
In 1992, Disney released its animated film Aladdin, falling just past the apex of the Disney Renaissance.
True to the Disney pattern, they chose a beloved tale with dozens of retellings to crib from. They threw out most of the plot apart from a few key elements—the lamp and the genie—and grafted on new characters and story elements. Where the original has Aladdin as a poor tailor’s idle son, the animation studio makes him a thief with a heart of gold. The strong-willed and independent Princess Jasmine is also reimagined from Princess Badroulboudour (بدر البدور Badru l-Budūr—full moon of full moons), whose key attribute is her beauty.
Agrabah, in fact, was intended to be Baghdad, the name being a near-anagram. This was almost certainly a legacy of The Thief of Baghdad. The film’s timing, however, between the Gulf Wars, rendered that location more toxic than exotic. But just as Diyab’s version of China was entirely imagined, so too was Disney’s version of Baghdad. The difference is Diyab projected his own culture onto a romanticized location, while Disney presented a vague amalgamation of Middle Eastern and South Asian cultures, freighting it with all the stereotyped, exoticized baggage of centuries of Western imperialism.
As is typical of Disney films, there is clear bad guy coding—ethnic accents, “foreign” features, in this case, large aquiline noses. The nose thing seems to have been so essential to the portrayal of villains in the film it inspired Jafar’s (Jonathan Freeman) henchman Iago (Gilbert Gottfried) being a parrot, so having a literal beak.
Notably, these two main baddies break the mold accent-wise. Jafar speaks in a posh English accent—another bad guy trait common across Disney films. Gottfried, of course, sounds like himself, but is there for comedic value, so it makes sense.
Of course, there is also good guy coding—American accents, Westernized features. For example, Aladdin’s (Scott Weinger) appearance and personality are modeled on Tom Cruise.¹
These elements, coupled with repeated references to chopping off various bits of people’s anatomy, seem to have slipped by the “number of Arab scholars and consultants” Disney consulted during production.² In turn, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee complained about the portrayal of their people in the film. The animation studio responded by Band-Aiding the video release with a two-line rewrite of “Arabian Nights”’ lyrics.
And, while Robin Williams’ performance as Genie was clearly a strength of the film, it gave rise to trends that are not so great. The first is the move toward using so-called named talent in animation.
The Golden Age of American Animation was populated with giants like Mel Blanc, who literally voiced most of the iconic Warner Bros. characters of the era, from Yosemite Sam to Tweety Bird. The Simpsons is a notable remaining bastion, with only six voice actors playing 30-odd main characters.
Williams, too, was a talented mimic capable of dozens of voices. He was respectful of the tradition of voice acting in animation as well, and was hesitant to accept the role, finally agreeing with the understanding his name would not be used in Aladdin’s marketing.
But studio chief Jeffrey Katzenberg, having already begun the named talent escalation, casting Vincent Price in The Great Mouse Detective, and Joey Lawrence, Billy Joel, Bette Midler, and Huey Lewis in Oliver & Company, couldn’t not exploit Williams’ box office draw. While not actually naming Williams in their advertising for the film, Disney used his voice and the Genie character in all of it, as well as for every manner of merchandise. There was little Williams could do:³
[He…] accused Disney executives of lying to him and breaching an agreement not to use his voice to merchandise products. The feud went on for a year, finally ending after Katzenberg left the studio and his replacement, Joe Roth, formally apologized.
Regardless, the film was a massive BO smash, yielding 20× its budget; 504.1M USD. Nor did subsequent actors have the qualms Williams did about attaching their names to animated films. So, as film critic Lindsay Ellis notes:⁴
[L]essons were learned from the success of Aladdin. Cynical, cheap lessons. We saw it begin to some degree with The Lion King, and then more with Pocahontas (Mel Gibson was one of the biggest stars in the world at the time), but then after that, starting with the ones that were seriously in production after Aladdin was released, every Disney movie had a Genie knockoff featuring some extremely bankable comedic talent.
The other trend sparked by Williams’ portrayal of Genie came from his heavy use of contemporary pop-cultural references. While inherent to his comedic stylings, and even the reason for his success, Disney, and indeed Hollywood writ large’s takeaway was to copy and paste. Such references became a substitute for original humor, relying on the audience’s recognition of other media rather than creating jokes inherent to the story itself. Ellis describes the trend thus:⁵
[I]n a post-Shrek celebrity-driven animated feature world, well [this type of humor]’s not all there is, but in terms of sheer volume, it’s most of it.
One specific instance of this can be scrutinized: In Aladdin, Genie is playing chess with Carpet (yes, that’s the flying carpet’s name), who takes one of his pieces. Genie morphs into a caricature of Rodney Dangerfield complete with a necktie he loosens nervously, and delivers the line, also in an impression of the comedian:⁶
I can’t believe it—I’m losing to a rug!
Is it funny? Reasonably so: Dangerfield’s Borscht-Belt one-liners were characteristically self-deprecating, so this fits the pattern. Disney seems to have seen as a high-water mark there’s even a high-end official figurine called “I’m Losing to a Rug” capturing the scene. This apparently also led to a reprise of the gag four years on, in The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Hugo the gargoyle (Jason Alexander) is playing poker with a pigeon, and utters the immortal laff line:⁷
I’m losing to a bird!
Unlike its forebear, this has been broadly mocked. Apart from the Aladdin precedent, nothing about the gag makes sense. I’ve mentioned the gargoyles before. Ellis says of them:⁸
Most people’s post-mortem will agree that the centrality of these cartoonishly grotesque gargoyles in a dark and serious story did far more harm than good […].
Where Carpet is clearly sentient, there is no logic to a gargoyle and a pigeon playing poker—beyond them both existing at the top of the cathedral—let alone the pigeon winning. Giving Disney the benefit of the doubt, the link might be that George Costanza of Seinfeld, also played by Alexander, is a loserly character like Dangerfield’s comedy persona. Uncharitably, it’s just a poorly recycled gag.
Such recycled gags have become Disney’s stock-in-trade, signaling which is the case. To keep picking on Hunchback, here’s a far-from-complete list, just of gags in the film with references external to the film’s world:
- Belle walks down a street
- A Parisian has Carpet draped over his arm
- Clopin’s “Court of Miracles” dance refers to “L’apprenti sorcier” (“The Sorcerer’s Apprentice”)
- Esmeralda (Demi Moore) is presented essentially as an exotic dancer referring to the actress’ role in Striptease
- The gargoyles’ names refer to the book’s author and one of the Andrews sisters
- The Goofy yell is heard
- The entire “A Guy Like You” number—the gargoyles play with absurd props like neon signs, wedding cakes, and other modern paraphernalia throughout the song and Hugo strikes an Elvis Presley-esque pose
- Jafar’s old man disguise is used
- The crowd carries Pumbaa on a stick
- Quasi (Tom Hulce) trying on wigs makes reference to his role in Amadeus
Though obviously hyperbolic, one meme gif even cites Hugo as “the death of comedy” overall, not merely in Disney Animation Studio films.
The 1994 Aladdin sequel, Return of Jafar, marks the beginning of Disney’s direct-to-video strategy, and, according to media analyst Matthew Ball, the beginning of the end of the Disney Renaissance.⁹ Williams doesn’t appear in it, and it does nothing memorable with the world of Aladdin, but it was certainly effective monetarily.
Read previous articles in the DeDisneyfication Series
Part 1: Straightening out “Hunchback”
Part 2 Addendum B: Your Western Wuxia Is Weak
Part 3A: “Hercules”: Myths and Mistakes
Part 4 Addendum: The Enchanted and the Postmodern
Part 5: Putting “Pocahontas” to Rest
Part 5 Addendum: Powhatan’s Mantle
Part 7A: The Wrong Rabbit Hole
Part 7A Addendum A: Curious Curation
Part 7A Addendum B: “Alice” in Revolt
Part 7A Addendum B: How “Alice” Grew Big in Japan
Part 7B: Alice’s Adventures in the Cousins War
Part 8: Guerrillas and the “Jungle”
Part 9A: Through a Magic Mirror Marred
Part 9A Addendum: The Woods “Over the Wall”
Part 9B: The Sum of its Versions
Part 9C: The “Snow White” Studio
Notes
- David Koenig, Mouse under glass: secrets of Disney animation & theme parks, 1997.
- John Evan Frook, “‘Aladdin’ lyrics altered”, Variety, July 1993.
- Koenig, 1997.
- Lindsay Ellis, “How Aladdin Changed Animation (by Screwing Over Robin Williams)”, Lindsay Ellis (YouTube), May 2019.
- Ellis, 2019.
- Aladdin, 1992.
- The Hunchback of Notre Dame, 1996.
- Ellis, “The Case for Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame”, Lindsay Ellis (YouTube), October 2017.
- Matthew Ball, “What Is an Entertainment Company in 2021 and Why Does the Answer Matter?”, MatthewBall.co, May 2021.
Deru Kugi 