FILM 1439: ALADDIN
TRIVIA: During the course of
recording the voices, Robin
Williams improvised so much they had almost 16 hours of material.
Because Robin Williams ad-libbed
so many of his lines, the script was turned down for a Best Adapted Screenplay
Academy Award nomination.
The Genie's celebrity
impersonations are (in order): Arnold
Schwarzenegger, Ed Sullivan,
Groucho Marx, William F. Buckley, Señor Wences, Robert De Niro, Carol Channing, Arsenio Hall, Walter Brennan, Mary Hart, Ethel Merman, Rodney Dangerfield, Jack Nicholson, and Peter Lorre. For release
in India, Disney replaced the game show host with a cricket commentator.
Scheduling conflicts with Star Trek: The Next Generation
(1987) forced Patrick
Stewart to turn down the role of Jafar. He has said in interviews
that this is his biggest regret.
While filming this movie, Robin Williams frequently
received calls from Steven
Spielberg, who at the time was working on Schindler's List (1993).
He would put him on speaker phone so he could tell jokes to the cast and crew
to cheer them up. Some of the material that he used was material that he was
using for this film.
During script and storyboard
development, the writers were already considering Robin Williams for the
role of the Genie but had not approached him for the project. In order to
convince Williams to do the role, Eric Goldberg
animated the Genie doing several minutes of Williams's stand-up routines,
including parts from his album 'Reality... What A Concept', and screened it for
him. Williams was so impressed that he signed almost immediately.
To capture the movement of
Aladdin's low-cut baggy pants, animator Glen Keane looked at
videos of rap star M.C. Hammer.
In the preview screenings for the
movie, nobody applauded after the big song numbers. The animators wanted
applause and so somebody stuck the Genie with an "Applause" sign at
the end of "Friend Like Me". The joke worked and the sign was kept
for the movie.
On what came to be known among the
Aladdin animators as Black Friday, then Disney head Jeffrey Katzenberg told
the team to scrap virtually everything they'd been working on for months and
start all over again. He also refused to move the film's release date. Directors
John Musker and Ron Clements were able to
completely turn around the film's new plot and screenplay in just eight days.
This was the first major animated
film which was advertised on the strength of having a major movie star
providing one of its voices (Robin
Williams). This has since become the norm with animated features.
Tim Curry, Kelsey Grammer, John Hurt, Christopher Lloyd and Ian McKellen were
considered for the role of Jafar.
Though loosely based on the
original short story from Arabian Nights, many plot elements are created just
for the film: Jafar's desire for Jasmine, framing Aladdin for a crime and
having him imprisoned, Aladdin meeting another prisoner (actually Jafar) who
helps break him out of prison and tells him of a hidden treasure, Aladdin using
the treasure (the lamp) to falsely portray himself as a prince, and to take
revenge on Jafar. These plot elements are all quite similar to the plot of Alexandre Dumas père's
novel, The Count of Monte Cristo. Appropriately, the novel itself makes
reference to the Arabian Nights several times: the treasure of Monte Cristo is
compared to that of Ali Baba, the cave in which it is hidden is compared to the
one in Aladdin, and the protagonist Edmond Dantes at one point calls himself
Sinbad the Sailor.
The color design of the film was
inspired by old Persian miniatures and Victorian paintings of the Middle East.
During the "Whole New
World" sequence, Aladdin and Jasmine fly over future settings of Hercules
and Mulan.
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