4/5/2023 0 Comments Aladdin magic carpet ride![]() The musical number “Friend Like Me” was openly patterned after the numbers Calloway sang in those films. Portraying the Genie of the Lamp as a Cab Calloway type called back to Calloway’s appearances in several Betty Boop cartoons by the Fleischers. The Fleischer influence was expressed in a broader way. If Ashman took any deliberate choices from this film, it went unmentioned in his treatment, and besides sharing an irreverent tone and the idea of a frame story, they bear little resemblance to one another. ![]() ![]() ![]() They released a trilogy of Technicolor Popeye cartoons done on Arabian motifs, the final one being Aladdin and His Wonderful Lamp in 1939. The Fleischers beat Disney to the punch on adapting anything from One Thousand and One Nights by several decades. Besides centering the mother/son relationship, Ashman also decided to go in an anti-materialistic direction with the story’s resolution: Aladdin would reject the fame and riches his adventures brought him in favor of a simple, honest living. This introduced an emotional core not present in the fairy tale, which plays out as the magical equivalent of winning the lottery. Close to his own mother, Ashman envisioned that the primary motivation for Aladdin in his film would be to make his mother proud. The original tale also has as a prominent character Aladdin’s mother. The more powerful Genie of the Lamp fulfills Aladdin’s every wish and raises him into the sultan’s good graces, but when the jealous sorcerer steals away the lamp, Aladdin resorts to the Genie of the Ring and his own wits to save the day. Aladdin obtains not only the lamp, but the Genie of the Ring as well. His treatment followed the basic skeleton of the original tale from One Thousand and One Nights fairly closely: Aladdin, a ne’er-do-well youth, is tricked by a wicked sorcerer masquerading as his uncle into entering a cave in search of the Genie of the Lamp. Ashman’s earliest work on the stage was as a child actor, and he had starred in a production of Aladdin. That project was Aladdin, a story he had long ties to. But the effort impressed Katzenberg enough that he offered Ashman his choice of projects to take up next, and Ashman chose to work as the lyricist for another animated film Disney had in production: The Little Mermaid. Ashman went to work for Disney on Oliver & Company, writing lyrics for just one of the songs in a patch-job soundtrack. Geffen recommended Ashman’s talents to Jeffrey Katzenberg, then executive in charge of production at Walt Disney Studios. But a Broadway flop in the mid-1980s made an escape to California sound appealing, and Ashman already had Hollywood connections through producer David Geffen, who had put up the money for the stage and film productions of Little Shop. Rosewater and Little Shop of Horrors, written with composer Alan Menken. It wasn’t the area of show business he had planned for trained in musical theater, Ashman’s early successes were in writing and directing offbeat and off-Broadway musicals like God Bless You, Mr. Disney compared Ashman to his uncle Walt in describing his pull over the animation department. Animator and director Kirk Wise has said “ if you had to point to one person responsible for the Disney renaissance, I would say it was Howard,” and in the documentary Waking Sleeping Beauty, no less a figure than Roy E. Would that Aladdin have made the same mark on American culture? This alternate version, tongue firmly in cheek, would give you a stuffy parrot named Sinbad in place of Gottfried’s Iago, offer four human sidekicks instead of Abu the monkey, and would have stressed a family bond more than Aladdin’s romances or magical responsibilities. An Aladdin where the princess’ big number isn’t a love ballad sung with the hero, but a comic character song boasting of how spoiled she is. It all lingers long in our collective consciousness.īut imagine, if you can, an Aladdin with two genies, neither of them a comic in the Robin Williams vein, instead taking after the likes of Cab Calloway. The flowing line of the animation, inspired by the work of Al Hirschfeld the beginning of Gilbert Gottfried’s second career voicing birds the love ballad that sweeps across the globe on a flying carpet and the madcap energy Robin Williams brought to animation with his performance as the Genie. The original fairy tale was well-known before 1992, and had seen several film adaptations over the years, but the images and sounds from Disney’s first take on the story have become definitive.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |