Aladdin



Look, unless you’ve been living in the sewers all your life, you should know the plot to this one. But just in case you don’t, here it is anyway, you pitiful, deprived little C.H.U.D.: A poor boy meets and falls in love with a princess. But he has no chance, cause, you know, his ass is poor. So it doesn’t take much for a dubious sorcerer to trick him into helping him retrieve a priceless treasure. But the sorcerer double crosses him, trapping him in the treasure cavern. But the double cross backfires on the sorcerer, and the poor boy gets his hands on a magical lamp with a genie inside, who is willing to grant him any three wishes he wants. Something, something, something.… Shenanigans ensue…. And eventually the sorcerer is defeated, and the poor boy and the princess live happily ever after. The end. (Occasionally musical numbers are included to accompany major plot points.)



Okay, so, usually I use January to cover remakes. And while this technically counts, as there are literally over a dozen different film and TV adaptations of the story of Aladdin (with Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp happening as early as 1917), this one can also almost be considered a de-make, because it just so happens to be a rather prominent company’s first foray with the title. What company? Disney. Before the Will Smith live-action version, and before their widely celebrated animated musical version from 1992 (or its two sequels, and various other offshoots), Disney produced this musical version of Aladdin for the Disney Channel in 1990. If you’re asking yourself why you’ve never heard of this version before, I suspect it boils down to two very prominent reasons. The first, is that while the film was partially produced by Disney, it is not solely a Disney production. The movie is actually based on a play that was originally written and conceived by Jim Eiler and Jeanne Bargy of the Prince Street Players, a family-friendly touring company that was founded in 1965, and now primarily licenses out their productions to others. So Disney may not actually have the full licensing rights to this thing. And the second is because… How do I put this delicately…. The movie kinda sucks.



For starters, this thing looks terrible. Which is shocking, because even if it wasn’t 100% theirs, this still aired on The Disney Channel, so you’d think this would still have at least some money from the House of Mouse behind it. But apparently they didn’t have that much, because the production quality behind this thing looks shoddy as hell. And I’m not just talking about the crap-tastic CGI they used, like those fake-y sparkle effects used to indicate magic, or the horrible, smeared looking overlays of characters “flying” across the screen. No, those are bad enough on their own, but it doesn’t stop there. Because just about everything else looks bad too. The sets, the outfits, all of it. We’re talking middle and high school levels of physical set design and costuming on display here. Like, it’s pretty bad. They phoned it in all that jazz. And yeah, I know this wasn’t really “their thing”, so they were probably just half-assing it, but again, this is still something that was aired by Disney, on their channel. So for something they put on their station to look this low-budget, that means that someone had to be half-assing their half-assery. It’s actually really sad. And what’s worse is that I went to the Prince Street Players website (yes, they still have a website:  https://www.princestreetplayers.com/), and some of their own bloody production stills and video examples look better than what this film version managed to pull off. So I don’t know what was going on here other than complete apathy.


Hey, Disney, did you know they stole your logo? I’m sure one of your many lawyers would like to know that.







And that’s just how the film looks. That’s not even getting into the strange story issues. “But wait,-” I hear you say, “-how could they screw up the story of Aladdin? Isn’t that pretty standard?” “Why, yes,” I reply to your theoretical question. “It is. But they still somehow managed to find a way to make a few things weird.”

For starters, you don’t even make it 5-minutes into the film before Aladdin has sung a song about flying his kite (no, really), crashed the kite over the palace wall after singing about how much he loves flying his kite (though apparently he isn’t very good at it…), climbs the wall, runs into the princess, and the two of them immediately become ga-ga over each other. And that’s basically their entire courtship ritual, because they don’t meet up again until after he has the genie and then it’s all wham, bam, let’s get married ma’am. Like holy shit, those kids moved fast. At least in the animated version two years later they sung a song together first (and there was an entire television series and two more movies in between their meeting and the actual wedding…).


Holy shit, you’ve known each other for 5 minutes! Slow the hell down!

But that’s not even the best part. The best part is that in order to impress the sultan, Aladdin needs to give him a gift. So the genie gives Aladdin a dancing doll to give to the sultan. Now, this “dancing doll” is a fully grown, scantily clad female belly dancer with accompanying rusty gear sounds just about every time she moves. And the movie/play makes it clear that this grown-ass woman is just a doll and it’s just for dancing entertainment purposes but…let’s be real, the genie basically just gave Aladdin a sexy sex doll to give to the sultan. And it works, by god (because why the hell wouldn’t it?). But the implications around her, and the fact that she’s supposed to be a semi-autonomous, obedient servant doll, is still a SUPER weird thing to include in a film they were aiming at children.


Yeah, he’s just going to watch her dance. Sure. I’ll buy that.

But other than those and a couple other strange story quirks, believe it or not the movie/play is actually a surprisingly faithful adaptation of the original story found in The Arabian Nights. It’s set in China, with appropriate costuming to match, there are two genies instead of just one, and it even follows the basic plot points involving building a bigger palace and the evil magician obtaining the lamp in a weird “lamp swapping” scheme (goodness some of these stories were convoluted…). So other than cutting out the ending, which involves thwarting the evil magician’s equally evil brother, the bulk of the story is actually shockingly faithful. The only noticeable downside to this though, is that the whole movie is supposed to be set in China, yet every actor/actress is a pale, pasty white person. I can only imagine the online outrage that would ensue if they tried to make this adaptation today without casting a single person with Asian descent. Let alone the ire that, in order to emphasize the whole “Asian” aspect, the sound of a gong is heard in the background just about every damn time China gets mentioned.



Then there’s the music…. Dear gods, the music…. Look, I’m sure Jim Eiler and Jeanne Bargy were very nice people and all, but Howard Ashman, Alan Menken and Tim Rice they are not. The music itself is serviceable enough, in that it’s clear and it fits in with whatever the hell is happening in all their weird story beats. But both it and the lyrics are often repetitive, if not outright cringe-worthy. And you know what, there’s an example of one of the songs from the play on the Prince Street Players website, and based on that I think they may have actually shortened some of these songs for the film version. So that means that even the edited-down versions of these things are still repetitive as hell. And if that’s true, that means that I have absolutely no desire to ever see this play through to its completion. Ever.


Lord, give me strength.

Finally, there’s the acting, which… Actually, you know what? The acting isn’t all that bad, come to think of it. Granted, some people clearly suck more than others (the kid who played Aladdin never went on to do anything else), but considering the quality of the source material they were working with, I’m sure they were doing the best they could under the circumstances. Plus, it does star a couple big-name actors at the time, Barry Bostwick and Richard Kiley. Kiley has a number of acting and singing awards to his name, including 4 Emmys, 2 Golden Globes and a Tony award for Man of La Mancha. So his acting is fine, and even if the songs kinda stink, at least he sounds good singing them. Bostwick on the other hand…. Well, he does quite a bit of theater, so he sounds fine. But goodness does he ham up that genie role to ungodly levels. Almost to the point where he might have given Robin Williams a run for his money. Except he’s doing it in live-action form and he lacks William’s charisma, so it looks super weird. And then he also plays the second genie as well, sort of like some odd, opposite twin thing. So instead of being overly exuberant and kooky, that version comes across as detached and creepily sinister. Or like he’s on some questionable narcotic and might shiv you in the back if you asked to grant the wrong wish or something. It’s a strange dynamic. But it does do a good job showcasing why most adaptations completely erase the whole “second genie” part from the original story. Doing so really does make things a little less silly.


As God as my witness, I’ll never complain about Will Smith again!


He’s like the creepy, drunken uncle your family doesn’t like to talk about.

So, yeah, this version of Aladdin is definitely… Different. After watching it I can see why Disney would probably want to erase this thing from existence. Family friendly or not, it’s just… not very good. The real puzzler though, is why they even contributed (someone had to pay for Kiley and Bostwick after all) and aired this thing to begin with. Their own animated version of the story had already been at least partially in development since 1988, and I’m sure that people at the Disney Channel were aware of that. So why do it? Was it just a holdover until their own version was released? Were they trying to drum-up excitement for their own musical somehow? (Well that was a failure.) Did the higher-ups have no faith in the upcoming animated venture, so they agreed to do this instead? Or was this some weird, complicated “rights” issue, where they had to air something Aladdin related in order to release their own movie? (That makes no sense…) Whatever the reason is, it exists, and it’s owned by Multicom now, so I think it’s pretty safe to say they’ve mostly washed their hands of it. The only good things to really say about the film are that it is very faithful to the source material, both in content and location, which isn’t something you see much of. And that it also happens to be one of the earlier roles of Susan Egan who, despite how crappy the movie was, must have nonetheless made an impression, because she went on to work with Disney again in several projects, including originating the role of Belle in their Broadway production of Beauty and the Beast (for which she was also nominated for a Tony Award.) And she’s also done a lot of good animated voice work (not all of it for Disney), so we can say that at least one good thing came out of this cruddy production. Other than that though? I think you can safely skip this musical version about a boy, a genie and a lamp.

Aladdin is not available on any streaming services I can find. But it is readily available on the internet. For those of you overcome by morbid curiosity whom I have not dissuaded, you can find it for free on Youtube here:

Aladdin is also available on DVD and Bluray (I’m honestly shocked) as Aladdin: The Musical. But good luck finding it for a reasonable price.

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