I discussed back in my King of Thieves review how Genie presents a huge problem in the Aladdin franchise: too popular to get rid of, but so powerful that he constantly has to be written around to ensure he doesn’t end the story prematurely. I think one of the reasons why The Citadel is possibly my favourite episode in the whole series is how cleverly it turns that problem into a narrative asset. The other reason of course, is Mozenrath.
Almost certainly the most popular and iconic villain in a series that, as I mentioned last time, wasn’t exactly lacking in that department. The Citadel is his first appearance and, in my opinion, represents what this series was really capable of when firing on all cylinders.
One of the big challenges for adapting Aladdin as a tv series is the absence of Jafar, one of the all time GOAT Disney villains. So props to the creators because TV Aladdin has an impressively deep bench of villains, ranging from the comically inept to the terrifyingly powerful. Firmly in the latter camp was Mirage, a literal goddess of evil voiced by Bebe Neuwirth.
They’re crafty, those furries. I’ll give them that.
After stealing the Blue Rose of Forgetfulness, Abis Mal and Haroud sneak into the palace hoping to erase the Sultan’s memory and then replace him on the throne. It’s fine, he’s an idiot, his plans don’t have to make sense.
Meanwhile, Jasmine is pissed at Aladdin because it’s the one year anniversary of the time he took her wonder by wonder, over, sideways and under…
Holy shit, was that song about sex?!
No, no. I gotta get my mind out of the gutter. Anyway, Jasmine is upset and refuses to tell him why because that’s both mature and helpful.
Hurrah! It’s back. Yes folks, this year September fell at a time when I’m not currently sweating a deadline like a hoor in church having taken on far too many writing projects.
I have been sitting on doing a review for Aladdin the series for what feels like forever because I was being good and waiting for the series to pop up on Disney Plus. Unfortunately, it’s not on there and it’s starting to look like it never will be. This is pretty shocking because the series was one of the biggest successes of Disney’s TV division in the nineties, running to an utterly staggering 86 episodes. Nobody seems to know why, either.
Some have suggested that Disney were worried some of the episodes haven’t aged particularly well, or that Genie’s pop culture references risked copyright infringement or simply that Dan Castellaneta’s royalties would be prohibitively expensive. Well, whatever the reason, I am forced to review this series from memory. That’s right. I am reviewing these episodes entirely, and perfectly legally, from my own perfect memory from thirty years ago. And the screencaps I’m using? Drawn by me. From my own memory. Allll nice and legal like. Got it? Good.
The series aired between 1994 and 1995 and takes place between Return of Jafarand King of Thieves. And if you’re wondering “how the hell did they crank out 86 episodes in two years?” it’s probably best not to think about it too hard.
But it probably helped that a whopping eight studios worked on this thing, which, if I know nineties cartoons (and I know nothing else) means that the animation consistency will be scattered over a ten mile radius.
The series is very episodic and doesn’t really do arcs so I’m just diving in and picking out episodes that sound interesting to talk about.
Season 2, Episode 6- One Enchanted Genie
Wha Happen’?
This episode opens with recurring villain Abis Mal (Jason Alexander), now paired with a…servant (?) named Haroud Hazi Bin (James Avery) having just successfully stoled Genie’s lamp from the palace in Agrabah. And it shows how long I’ve been out of the game that my first thought was “oh shit! So he’s Genie’s master now?! What stakes!”
But no, as I obviously should have remembered, Genie is free by this point and the lamp is now just what he sleeps in. There’s a funny bit where Haroud grouses that Abis Mal raised the alarm by treading on Abu and we then see Genie racing across the desert yelling “LAMP THIEF! MONKEY MASHER!”
Abis Mal manages to escape with the lamp, however, leaving Genie miserable. Which, hang on, didn’t Genie hate living in the lamp? Why is he so nostalgic for it now? I dunno, maybe the housing market’s gotten a lot worse. I can understand that.
Pictured: The average Dublin renter.
But Genie perks up when he realises that as soon as Abis Mal rubs the lamp, Genie will know where he is and kick his ass. But Abis Mal is so paralysed by trying to choose his first wish that he takes ages to rub it, leading Genie to wail “why won’t he rub my lamp?!” like a one night stand frantically waiting by the phone for him to call. Anyway, Abis Mal finally decides on a wish (a new hat) and Genie flies away to confront him only to come across a street urchin who has discovered a bottle with a genie.
These characters are introduced so fucking abruptly I cannot tell you. It feels like a different episode got randomly spliced into this one. Anyway, the girl genie is named Eden and she endears herself pretty quickly I gotta say. When Dhandhi, the urchin, makes her first wish for a sandwich, Eden flat out refuses to let her squander a wish like that and instead tells her to wish to never go hungry again. And that’s honestly heart-warming. Genie instantly falls in love with Eden and tries to impress her by also granting Dhandhi’s wishes but that just makes Eden pissed at him for muscling in on her turf. Their competition results in a stack of pepperoni pizza a mile high (guys, you do know that’s pork right?) which draws the attention of Abis Mal.
Once Eden realises that Genie already has a master (wait) it turns out she is super in to him. Dhandhi tells her to go for it and they agree to a date.
Eden shows up at the palace dressed to the nines and having switched skin colour…
…and they have a magical evening dancing amongst the stars. But, Eden feels her bottle being rubbed and promises Genie she’ll be back in a flash. But, when she returns to Dhandhi she finds that Abis Mal has the bottle and is her new master. When she doesn’t return, Genie assumes he’s been dumped and goes back to Aladdin who suggests that they continue their search for Genie’s lamp. While looking like he is off his face on something.
“Okay guys, for this scene we’re going to draw his eyes in a way to suggest that he has Bush Baby ancestry.”
They find Abis Mal and are shocked to see that Eden is now under his control. Genie goes on a furious tirade, accusing her of secretly working for Abis Mal the whole time to trick him (“the kid was a nice touch!”) which is just fucking bananas. Dude, you’re a GENIE. YOU KNOW SHE HAS NO CHOICE HERE.
Wow. Why is Genie voluntarily working with Jafar here? What an asshole!
Haroud effortlessly incapacitates Aladdin and tells Abis Mal to wish for Eden to imprison Genie at the bottom of the ocean. “Why is Haroud even working for Abis Mal when he is infinity times more competant?” is a question, sadly, that will not be answered in this episode.
After granting this wish, Eden apologises to Aladdin and he’s all “hey, no, I understand, you literally have no free will I don’t blame you” because, y’know, Aladdin’s not a fucking idiot. Abis Mal’s second wish is, hang on, let me get this word for word: “make me the biggest tough guy ever, a cosmic one! I want to blow up things and, eh, possess MEGA BRAIN ENERGY!”
So she turns him into a kaijiu and he starts trying to stomp Aladdin. But, Eden gets a message to Genie telling him how to escape because, while Abis Mal wished him to the bottom of the ocean, he didn’t wish him forever. Genie shows up, high on love, and he’s quickly able to undo Abis Mal’s wish and turn him back to normal size. So Abis Mal uses his final wish to transform Aladdin and Genie into cockroaches so that he can stamp on them. But, Abu grabs the bottle and tosses it to to Dhandhi who wishes that Abis Mal’s wish not come true and Eden instead turns Abis Mal and Haroud into cockroaches. When Dhandhi points out that she didn’t actually wish for that Eden shrugs and says “freebie”.
Now THAT’S customer service. The little extras.
Dhandhi decides that she’s going to use her last wish to free Eden, but says “I only wish we could always stay together” and wouldn’t ya know it? This means Eden has to stay with her and she and Genie can’t be together. For some reason. But she reminds Genie that they have eternity and that she’ll be free for a date in a century or so.
“You had me at “one day this child will be dead’.
How was it?
You know what? Not bad at all! It helps that this episode has an insanely high quality voice cast, like, my God. But the writing has this absurdist streak running through it that got more than a few guffaws out of me and the animation is zippy and surprisingly fluid. Yeah, we are off to a great start! Let’s see if that lasts (not foreshadowing, I am flying completely blind on this. I have no idea what episode I am going to…remember…next).
Hey folks, new episode has dropped. This go round we talk about Johnson and Friends, an Australian show for tots that aired in the nineties and that features grown ass adults in fuzzy animal costumes. What could be more wholesome?
There really should be a sub-genre for animators who left Disney during the eighties all ready to set up their own animation studio with blackjack and hookers…only for Disney to get their groove back with The Little Mermaidand eat them alive. We all know of Don Bluth, of course, the one who came closest to unseating the Mouse from its throne. And we’ve also met Phil Nibbelink. Well today we’re going to look at another of these would-be contenders; Richard Rich:
So how’s this for some animation bona fides: Richard Rich was the director of not one but two Disney animated features.
Now now, let’s be fair. Disney in the mid-to-late eighties was in its most hellish creative funk since World War Two. The kind of hellish creative funk that would not be seen again until the early 2000s and…now. Of all the hellish creative funks Disney has been in I’d rank it…somewhere in the middle. Bad times, anyway. Disillusioned by working on Oliver & Company (as anyone would be) he left in 1986, convinced that the old studio was a goner and that nothing could ever change that.
Oops.
After a stint in the desert making religious animation for the Church of Latter Day Saints, Rich watched the Disney Renaissance take off and decided to make his play for the crown with The Swan Princess, an animated re-telling of the ballet Swan Lake, without any actual ballet (thank Christ). Made on a paltry budget of 20 million dollars, it was worked on for four long years before being released in 1994, where it had to compete against The Lion King. The result was pretty much what would happen if you pitted a real swan against an actual lion, but it did have an extremely healthy second life on video. It’s not the worst of the Disney-chasers of this era, nor is it close to being the best. But it is significant for one very important reason. This was the last feature length, cinematically released animated motion picture that was created entirely by hand. Not a single cel of this was touched by the infernal machine. So let me be clear, no matter what I think of this movie…
Look, I know everybody idolises the first decade they can properly remember but this is different. The nineties really were awesome. The Cold War was over, the War on Terror hadn’t started, we’d fixed acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer (and that whole global warming thing would probably sort itself out) and the only threats to world peace were goobs like Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic who would occasionally show up to cause trouble before being punted into the air like Team Rocket.
Meowth is Gaddafi fyi.
Plus, the movies, the TV shows, the music. I love this whole era. So I was overjoyed when I finally got my hands on a boxset of the complete Daria, an animated sitcom that ran from 1997 to 2002. Not merely a nineties show, but probably the most nineties show.
And imagine my disappointment on discovering that, like so much nostalgia, it doesn’t actually hold up all that well.
Comedy is a lot like politics, all careers eventually end in failure. There have been plenty of Bats versus Bolts matchups on this blog that have been, as one commenter put it “Glass Joe versus Mike Tyson” but this really is a foregone conclusion. On the one hand, Mel Brooks’ 1974 masterpiece Young Frankenstein, which would place in the low single digits on any creditable ranking of the greatest American comedies of all time. And on the other hand we have 1995’s Dracula: Dead and Loving It, a movie so critically lambasted on its release that it killed Mel Brooks’ directorial career stone dead, which is a bit like if Frank Sinatra sang a song that was so bad he was never allowed to perform again. I mean it’s Mel Brooks. If he hasn’t earned a mulligan or two, who the hell has?
“Hey, what if cartoons, like, had sex?” is actually not as new a question as you might think. The cartoons have actually, like, having sex far longer than many people realise, with the first pornographic animations appearing at least four years before Micky Mouse did Steamboat Willy (which was not a porno which now seems like a bit of a missed opportunity).
But, while there has been sexually explicit animation for almost as long as there has been animation, it was always restricted to “stag” films. The mainstream perception of animation in the West, especially after the Hays office started cracking skulls, was that cartoons were for children.
Enter Ralph Bakshi.
Okay, if you’re a longtime reader of this blog then this isn’t your first rodeo. We have discussedhis workhere many a time and oft. Short version: Ralph Bakshi is at once a towering and transformative figure in the history of American animation and also kind of a terrible animator and film-maker. I can’t say I have actually enjoyed any of his films, but his best work tends to be the kind of grungy, ugly, politics-heavy film-making that you aren’t really supposed to enjoy. And, at least, Bakshi at his best his never boring.
No, you want really bad Bakshi you got to look at his tamer stuff. Either because he was taming himself to try and appeal to a broader audience (like Wizards) or because the studio held him down and cut his hair and forced him to conform to their, like, rules, maaaaan (like this fucking thing we’re about to review right here).
I will not mince words. This is the last of all Ralph Bakshi’s feature animations. I say “last” as in “last one he made” as well as “if all his movies were in a race, this is the one that wouldn’t even cross the finish line because it ate its own legs.”
This movie had a troubled history in the same way like, the Balkans, have had a troubled history and it’s easy to just blame the studio. In 1988 Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, gave Disney their biggest hit in history up to the that point, due in no small part to the instantly iconic appearance of Sexiest Cartoon of All Time Jessica Rabbit. Ralph Bakshi decided that, as the grandfather of sexy cartoons, the time had come for selling out. Bakshi approached Paramount and pitched them a dark cartoon horror story about a live action human who has sex with a cartoon woman and fathers a demonic half-human/half-toon child. Paramount greenlit the movie but forced Bakshi to cast Kim Basinger as the cartoon woman. Basinger wanted a more family friendly movie which led to the studio and Bakshi butting heads and resulting in the deeply compromised, barely coherent mess of a movie that we were left with. Everything that could go wrong with this movie did go wrong. Paramount launched a raunchy marketing campaign that completely oversold the limp PG 13 offering as some kind of taboo shattering sex-fest and then pretty much bribed the City of Los Angeles to allow them to descerate the Hollywood sign with a 75 foot cutout of Basinger’s character, Holly Would, which brought a hurricane of negative publicity.
What kind of monster would try and make the Hollywood sign TACKY?
Savage critical reaction and utterly abysmal word of mouth did the rest.
As I said, it’s easy to read that and assume that Bakshi was just another brilliant creative screwed over by the soulless suits but you know me. I never do things the easy way. Frankly, I think this project was doomed the second Ralph Bakshi thought he could do his own Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
See, the animation on Who Framed Roger Rabbit? was overseen by Richard Williams who I would probably rank as the single most brilliant animator I have ever had the pleasure of reviewing if Hayao Miyazaki didn’t exist. And one of the reasons why Roger Rabbit works so well (apart from the fantastic script, excellent direction, phenomenal world-building, perfect score, terrifying villain, a career best performance from the late great Bob Hoskins and Jessica Fucking Rabbit ushering an entire generation into sexual awakening) was that there was literally nothing Williams could not do as an animator. That movie has characters from eight different animation studios from across three decades and they’re all rendered flawlessly. That movie is like Once Upon a Studiobut without the benefit of modern technology and feature length. That’s Richard Williams. That’s the guy.
unshavedmouse 