Aladdin: Everything You Didn't Know

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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

(00:22):
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

(00:46):
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

(01:09):
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

(01:29):
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,

(01:51):
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

(02:14):
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

(02:35):
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

(02:56):
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,

(03:17):
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

(03:40):
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

(04:03):
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?

(04:27):
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

(04:48):
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.

(05:09):
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.

(05:33):
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

(05:54):
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

(06:14):
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

(06:36):
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

(06:59):
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

(07:20):
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

(07:41):
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,

(08:01):
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.

(08:25):
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

(08:48):
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

(09:09):
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

(09:30):
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

(09:53):
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

(10:16):
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,

(10:36):
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

(11:00):
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

(11:21):
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

(11:43):
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

(12:05):
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

(12:27):
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,

(12:48):
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

(13:12):
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

(13:32):
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

(13:53):
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

(14:15):
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

(14:36):
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

(14:58):
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,

(15:23):
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

(15:46):
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,

(16:07):
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

(16:30):
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

(16:54):
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

(17:15):
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

(17:37):
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

(17:57):
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

(18:20):
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,

(18:40):
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

(19:02):
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

(19:23):
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,

(19:45):
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

(20:07):
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

(20:28):
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

(20:54):
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

(21:17):
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

(21:38):
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

(22:00):
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

(22:24):
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

(22:45):
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

(23:06):
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

(23:28):
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

(23:49):
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

(24:13):
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

(24:34):
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

(24:55):
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

(25:16):
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

(25:36):
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.

(25:59):
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

(26:20):
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

(26:44):
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

(27:05):
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

(27:28):
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.

(27:49):
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

(28:10):
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

(28:32):
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

(28:54):
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,

(29:18):
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

(29:40):
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

(30:03):
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,

(30:25):
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

(30:46):
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

(31:08):
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

(31:35):
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

(31:57):
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

(32:20):
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

(32:42):
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

(33:04):
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

(33:25):
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

(33:50):
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

(34:11):
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

(34:31):
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

(34:53):
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,

(35:18):
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

(35:39):
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

(36:01):
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

(36:21):
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

(36:43):
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

(37:05):
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.

(37:28):
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

(37:51):
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

(38:12):
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

(38:36):
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

(38:57):
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

(39:21):
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

(39:41):
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

(40:03):
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

(40:23):
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

(40:46):
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

(41:11):
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

(41:32):
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

(41:54):
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

(42:14):
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

(42:36):
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

(42:59):
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.

(43:23):
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

(43:44):
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

(44:04):
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

(44:24):
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,

(44:45):
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

(45:05):
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

(45:26):
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

(45:47):
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,

(46:10):
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

(46:31):
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

(46:53):
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

(47:14):
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

(47:36):
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,

(48:00):
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.

(48:24):
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

(48:47):
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

(49:09):
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

(49:30):
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

(49:51):
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

(50:14):
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.

(50:38):
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

(50:59):
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

(51:22):
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

(51:45):
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

(52:06):
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

(52:27):
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.

(52:48):
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

(53:10):
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

(53:34):
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

(53:55):
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

(54:18):
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

(54:40):
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

(55:02):
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

(55:24):
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

(55:45):
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

(56:06):
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

(56:29):
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

(56:51):
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

(57:12):
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

(57:34):
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,

(57:56):
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,

(58:19):
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

(58:40):
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

(59:02):
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

(59:22):
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,

(59:42):
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

(01:00:04):
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

(01:00:26):
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.

(01:00:47):
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

(01:01:08):
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

(01:01:28):
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.

(01:01:48):
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.

(01:02:14):
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

(01:02:36):
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

(01:02:57):
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

(01:03:18):
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,

(01:03:39):
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

(01:04:02):
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,

(01:04:25):
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.

(01:04:45):
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

(01:05:07):
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,

(01:05:29):
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

(01:05:50):
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

(01:06:12):
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

(01:06:33):
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

(01:06:56):
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,

(01:07:17):
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

(01:07:40):
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

(01:08:01):
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

(01:08:22):
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

(01:08:42):
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

(01:09:03):
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

(01:09:25):
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

(01:09:46):
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

(01:10:08):
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

(01:10:29):
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,

(01:10:53):
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

(01:11:17):
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.

(01:11:37):
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

(01:11:59):
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

(01:12:20):
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

(01:12:45):
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

(01:13:08):
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

(01:13:31):
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,

(01:13:52):
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,

(01:14:13):
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

(01:14:35):
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

(01:14:57):
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

(01:15:19):
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

(01:15:40):
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

(01:16:03):
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.

(01:16:27):
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

(01:16:47):
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,

(01:17:13):
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

(01:17:33):
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,

(01:17:56):
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

(01:18:19):
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

(01:18:41):
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

(01:19:01):
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

(01:19:24):
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.

(01:19:45):
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

(01:20:05):
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

(01:20:28):
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

(01:20:49):
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.

(01:21:12):
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

(01:21:33):
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

(01:21:55):
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.

(01:22:17):
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,

(01:22:38):
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

(01:22:59):
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

(01:23:20):
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

(01:23:44):
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

(01:24:05):
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

(01:24:27):
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.

(01:24:49):
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

(01:25:09):
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

(01:25:30):
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

(01:25:51):
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

(01:26:13):
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

(01:26:35):
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

(01:26:55):
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,

(01:27:16):
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

(01:27:36):
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

(01:27:59):
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

(01:28:21):
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

(01:28:49):
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,

(01:29:10):
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,

(01:29:33):
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.

(01:29:55):
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

(01:30:16):
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,
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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Aladdin: Everything You Didn't Know