The Ultimate Guide to Aladdin
Page 5
SCOTT WEINGER
The scene on the balcony, when he’s Cyrano de Bergerac-ing Aladdin and telling him what to say in his ear, that was really fun. He made me laugh so hard during a session that I fell down on the floor. I was trying to cover my mouth. It looked unprofessional, but it was my way of getting away from the microphone and not ruining the take.
MARK HENN
Genie had such a huge, huge influence. I think there may have been a little bit of one-upmanship at times amongst the animators to try to be just as funny as Genie.
RON CLEMENTS
With Robin Williams, we felt that we could push the movie more and more in a very comedic mode. It just became a question of, How far can you go and still hold on to the sincerity? . . . It was considered a risky movie at the time, particularly coming right after Beauty and the Beast, which was so successful and got nominated for [a Best Picture] Academy Award. Animation was riding high. John and I were thinking, “This is all cool, but our movie is nothing like Beauty and the Beast [Laughs]. What are people going to think?”
Overwhelmingly positive things, as it turned out. Aladdin became the No. 1 movie of 1992 and remained the animated feature with the highest worldwide gross until The Lion King surpassed it a year and a half later. The music won two Oscars, and “A Whole New World” is still the only Disney song to win Song of the Year at the Grammys. Thanks to sequels, video games, stage productions and more, Weinger, Larkin and Freeman continue to voice their characters. Freeman has been playing Jafar on Broadway since 2014.
RON CLEMENTS
Aladdin set the tone for a lot of animation—not just Disney, but other studios. Most animated films now are out-and-out comedy, but at the time, especially for a Disney movie, it was [rare]. Aladdin broke through probably more than Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast in terms of finding an adult audience. That was really gratifying.
LINDA LARKIN
Jasmine was ahead of her time. In 1992 this wasn’t how young women were being represented—certainly not in film. She was courageous and passionate and politically active. She stands up and says the law is wrong. And she changes the marriage laws. Then, 25 years later, the kids who watched Jasmine in 1992 grew up and changed the marriage laws in their own country. I have people coming up to me at these conventions, like hundreds of people, who say, “You have no idea what Jasmine meant to me.”
JONATHAN FREEMAN
I have a sense of pride that I created the template that’s been used for people [playing Jafar in other productions around the world]—at least a starting place. I’ve done all these other projects, but he’s always there. In fact, I’ve got a book sitting on someone’s desk at a publishing house about my life as Jafar for the last 27 years. Maybe we’ll try to put the book out when it’s been 30 years.
SCOTT WEINGER
I’m a dad, and my son loves the movie; his friends love the movie, and that’s incredibly satisfying. . . . I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of being Aladdin.
Left to right: Scott Weinger (the voice of Aladdin) and directors John Musker and Ron Clements.
Linda Larkin, the voice of Jasmine, records for Aladdin.
Alan Menken, who won two Academy Awards for his work on the score.
Mark Henn, the supervising animator for Jasmine.
Tim Rice, who took over lyrics for Howard Ashman, poses in 1993.
Eric Goldberg said the toughest thing about animating Genie was “making people believe he’s sincere.”
Robin Williams records for a straight-to-video sequel, 1996’s Aladdin and the King of Thieves.
Jafar (center) tries to persuade the sultan to agree to his evil plans.
Andreas Deja, Jafar’s supervising animator, also later handled Scar in The Lion King.
Jonathan Freeman, the voice of Jafar.
Gilbert Gottfried, who lent his unmistakable vocals to Jafar’s parrot Iago.
Aladdin won the box office in 1992, eventually going on to earn more than $500 million worldwide.
Carpet got its own supervising animator: Randy Cartwright.
Aladdin and Jasmine sail toward new horizons.
Tribute
REMEMBERING ROBIN WILLIAMS
ALADDIN SUPERVISING ANIMATOR ERIC GOLDBERG RECALLS THE INDELIBLE ACTING TALENT WHO GAVE HILARIOUS VOICE TO GENIE IN THE 1992 ANIMATED FILM AND WHO DIED TRAGICALLY IN 2014. By Jeff Labrecque
Williams in 2010.
ED SULLIVAN. JACK NICHOLSON. ROBERT De Niro. Groucho Marx. Rodney Dangerfield. William F. Buckley Jr. Peter Lorre. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Arsenio Hall. Those were just some of the impressions that Robin Williams performed in the guise of the almighty blue Genie in 1992’s Aladdin. Perhaps another comedian could have supplied similarly outrageous voices, but no one could have infused that dynamic, shape-shifting character with so much heart and humor. It’s hard to think of a single sentence Genie uttered that didn’t become etched in the brains of a generation of children. Often improvising on the spot, Williams created a genre of kid-friendly, hyper-referential comedy whose legacy can be seen in almost every animated movie that has followed.
Eric Goldberg has only fond memories of working with Williams, who died in 2014 at age 63 after taking his own life. Goldberg was recruited to Disney by Aladdin directors Ron Clements and John Musker and supervised the team of about eight animators (including himself) who created the look of Genie. In recording sessions he watched up close as Williams zoomed in every direction, taking Genie to inside-out hilarious places that the filmmakers never imagined. There’s a lot of Goldberg DNA in Genie too—he does spot-on voice imitations of Williams’s character—but he marvels at the comic genius he witnessed and that lives forever in one of Disney’s most beloved classics.
“John and Ron have an amazing talent for being able to write in the voice of the actor they would like to cast,” Goldberg says. “So they handed me the script, and it was very clear they wanted Robin Williams to do this voice. They had written archetypes for him to be, like a game-show host and evangelist, all these kinds of things Genie can turn into. But when we got Robin in the recording studio, out came all the celebrity impressions. So aside from busting a gut laughing, we just looked at each other and said, “We can’t not use this stuff. It’s just gold.”
After Aladdin, Goldberg and Williams would see one another from time to time, and the animator says that the Oscar-winning actor was always unfailingly kind. “Aside from Robin’s amazing pyrotechnical talent in terms of his voices, his impersonations, his characters, he’s also a very, very warm person,” Goldberg says.
He recalls one occasion when he was invited to a San Jose theater to introduce screenings of Fantasia 2000, on which Goldberg worked. “So I introduced the film, and as it’s playing, I go out and take a break, and who’s walking toward me with his hand outstretched is Robin Williams, bless him,” Goldberg says. “It was like we hadn’t really separated for very long. I think that’s the kind of warm guy that Robin was. He certainly put an awful lot of people at their ease.”
Robin Williams lent his voice to Genie in 1992’s Aladdin.
Behind the Songs
THE MUSIC MAN
OSCAR-WINNING ALADDIN COMPOSER ALAN MENKEN RECALLS MAKING SONGWRITING HISTORY WITH COLLABORATORS HOWARD ASHMAN AND TIM RICE. By Missy Schwartz
Menken on the set of 2019’s Aladdin.
ALAN MENKEN AND HOWARD ASHMAN arrived at Disney at the dawn of the studio’s animation renaissance. It was the late 1980s, and the big-screen adaptation of the songwriting duo’s smash stage musical Little Shop of Horrors had just earned them their first Oscar nomination. While they worked on their first collaborative Disney film, The Little Mermaid (which would earn them their first Academy Awards), Menken and Ashman were also turning an Arabian folktale into a jaunty animated musical with an Old Hollywood spirit. “Aladdin was on our wish list from the moment we arrived at Disney,” says Menken.
In their version, Aladdin was not an orphan (he even sang a song, “Proud of Your Boy,” to
his mother) and he ran around Baghdad with three friends in search of adventure, not romance. Jasmine was a secondary character. “It was a wink at the Hope-Crosby Road pictures,” Menken says. Musically he and Ashman were inspired by jazz greats like Fats Waller and Cab Calloway, especially for their genie of the ring (not to be confused with their genie of the lamp).
While that vision failed to impress Disney’s Jeffrey Katzenberg, Menken and Ashman kept writing songs for the revised scripts, even when Ashman was hospitalized as he battled AIDS. When he died in March 1991, a devastated Menken faced working without his creative partner for the first time since 1979. “Part of my career did perish along with Howard, because that collaboration was never to be again,” he says. “There was a sense of stepping up to represent what the two of us did together.”
Menken considered finishing Aladdin on his own, but he was also polishing up Beauty and the Beast and composing for yet another Disney musical, Newsies. So the studio pulled in British lyricist Tim Rice, who was working on The Lion King. “I knew that I was going over to London to meet with Tim, but I didn’t want to go empty-handed,” Menken says. “A couple weeks before I was heading over there, I bolted up middle of the night and went to my studio and wrote three pieces of music.” Among them was the ballad “A Whole New World,” which became the most successful song of both his and Rice’s careers. A No. 1 single, it won an Oscar and is still the only Disney entry to win a Grammy for Song of the Year.
“It was life at its most intense,” Menken says. “I was involved with these beautiful projects, and there was a push and pull between the loss and the excitement. Throughout all of it, I felt Howard’s presence.” Now Menken is finding new ways to tell Aladdin’s story, thanks to the Broadway show (in its sixth year) and the live-action film. “I’m still on the ride,” he says.
Alan Menken (right) and Howard Ashman in 1991.
The Songs
SOUNDTRACK STORY
COMPOSER ALAN MENKEN REVISITS THE MEMORABLE MUSIC THAT HELPED ALADDIN CAST A SPELL OVER MOVIEGOERS BACK IN 1992. By Missy Schwartz
“Arabian Nights” (Menken/Ashman)
The movie’s first song has the most obvious Middle Eastern influence. “‘Arabian Nights’ originally was a big, over-the-top opening number that traced the entire backstory,” Menken says. “In the Broadway show and the live-action movie, there’s a fuller version that’s much closer to what we actually did.” The song was controversial: After Arab Americans denounced as racist the lyrics “Where they cut off your ear/ If they don’t like your face/ It’s barbaric/ But hey, it’s home,” they were changed for the home video release to “Where it’s flat and immense/ And the heat is intense/ It’s barbaric/ But hey, it’s home.”
“Friend Like Me” (Menken/Ashman)
Sung by Robin Williams as Genie to explain his powers to Aladdin, this bouncy tune reflects the Harlem jazz mood that inspired Menken and Ashman’s earliest vision for Aladdin. With lyrics like “So dontcha sit there slack-jawed, buggy-eyed, I’m here to answer all your midday prayers. You got me bona fide, certified, You got a genie for your chargé d’affaires,” the song captures, according to Menken, “Howard Ashman’s brilliance at its peak.”
“Prince Ali” (Menken/Ashman)
Genie sings this one to announce Aladdin’s royal entrance, and it too owes a debt to 1930s jazz. “It was more like Cab Calloway, ‘Hi-De-Ho’—you know, just struttin’,” Menken says. “Harlem jazz matched with a big parade. I think of ‘Friend Like Me’ and ‘Prince Ali’ as companion pieces.”
“One Jump Ahead” (Menken/Rice)
“Howard and I originally had this backstreet jazz song called ‘Babkak, Omar, Aladdin, Kassim,’ where Aladdin and his buddies are busking in the streets,” Menken recalls. “Tim and I wrote this song, where instead of busking, he’s running for his life because he’s stolen stuff and people are after him. We’re celebrating this kid’s ingenuity and energy as he outsmarts all these people.” In the song’s reprise, Aladdin sings “Riffraff, street rat, I don’t buy that. . . . There’s so much more to me,” offering a more reflective moment.
“A Whole New World” (Menken/Rice)
When Menken presented a working version to Tim Rice, it was called “The World at My Feet.” “And in his wisdom, Tim decided that there might be better words than ‘feet’ in the title of a love song,” Menken says with a laugh. “Foot fetishists have mourned that loss ever since, but other than that, it wasn’t missed.”
Broadway and Beyond
STAGE MAGIC
ALADDIN HAD ENJOYED TWO DECADES OF POPULARITY WHEN IT FOUND NEW LIFE—ON BROADWAY. By Gina McIntyre
Aladdin … now on Broadway! The musical opened to fanfare in 2014.
IT WAS A TONY AWARD WINNER IN THE making. In 2010 composer Alan Menken revealed that Aladdin would be adapted as a family-friendly musical with a book by Chad Beguelin. By 2014 the production had opened on Broadway.
Part children’s theater, part magic show, all eye-popping design and choreography, the musical retained the film’s plot: “Street rat” Aladdin falls for independent Jasmine as evil Jafar schemes to take over the kingdom of Agrabah. But the new incarnation allowed Menken to revisit some of the ideas he and longtime creative partner Howard Ashman had had for the 1992 animated film.
Restored were Aladdin’s troublemaker pals Kassim, Omar and Babkak that the composers had included in the original 40-page treatment for the movie they’d presented to then-Disney head Jeffrey Katzenberg. Back were three songs they had penned—including “Proud of Your Boy” and the sidekick number “Babkak, Omar, Aladdin, Kassim”—along with four new compositions with lyrics by Beguelin. “There [was] a graveyard of songs . . . we’ve been able to resurrect,” Menken says.
Disney musicals already had an established Broadway track record thanks to the unprecedented success of The Lion King, and when Aladdin moved into the New Amsterdam Theatre, it replaced a popular staging of Mary Poppins. Still, Aladdin proved a worthy follow-up, earning five Tony nominations—for Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical, Best Original Score, Best Choreography and Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Musical. (James Monroe Iglehart won for his turn as Genie.) Actor Jonathan Freeman, who reprised the role of Jafar from the animated hit, told EW that the lavish staging never lost its charm. “Not to sugarcoat it, but I really do like the ‘Persian Room in Las Vegas 1949 presents Aladdin’ part of it, you know? I mean, ‘Prince Ali’ and ‘Friend Like Me,’ they’re so extravagant. It really is like working the big room in Vegas.”
Adds director-choreographer Casey Nicholaw: “The show delivers all of the things that people love from the movie but makes them theatrical. You get to see ‘Friend Like Me’ live onstage, and you get to see what we can do with that number, which is so awesome and fun to do.”
“A whole new world, a new fantastic point of view…a hundred thousand things to see ”
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ALADDIN