Humour

Shortstember: Aladdin the Series

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 Jafar and 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).

“Please. Don’t be boring.”

It’s not a job I’d want as a writer, I’ll tell you that much.

Trying to write the first movie about a black Captain America in such a viciously polarised time is a hell of a poisoned chalice and I don’t envy the approximately eighteen thousand screenwriters who worked on Captain America: Brave New World. What does it mean for a black man to represent America given, y’know, the whole business? That has to be delved into right?

Or does it? Is it fair to insist that Sam Wilson has to make some great serious statement on The Issue of Race, when you would never ask that of Steve Rogers? Shouldn’t Sam Wilson just be able to be Captain America without it being a whole thing?

Personally, and this is just my instinct as a writer, I would have focused on winning the crowd over in the first movie with a really kickass Captain America movie and keep the heavy stuff for further movies down the line once Wilson/Mackie had been accepted by a critical mass of the fanbase as the new Cap.

I don’t know how I would have done that exactly.

I can tell you one thing: I wouldn’t have done this.

This being a stealth sequel to 2008’s The Incredible Hulk where Captain America feels like a supporting character in his own damn movie.

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Into the Woods (2014)

Probably the most thankless job a director can set himself is trying to adapt a beloved stage musical to screen, as the people you most need to win over for your movie to be a success (fans of the stage version) are also the people most likely to tar and feather you in the streets over the slightest deviation from the source material. You may think comic fans get salty about adaptation changes, but they have nothing on musical theatre nerds.

That’s probably why, despite musicals still being a lucrative movie genre, stage musicals adapted to screen are a rare beast and only getting rarer. Of the 50 top grossing movie musicals, only six began life on stage. The rest are either originals like The Greatest Showman, animated musicals or jukebox musicals like Bohemian Rhapsody or (sigh) Alvin and the Chipmunks.

Of course, it wasn’t always thus. The middle decades of the 20th century were a golden age for adaptations for stage musicals as that was the point where theatre and cinema were most alike. Colour photography and improvements in sound tech meant that cinema could finally match the visual and audio splendour of theatre. But, cinema had yet to fully embrace the freedom inherent in the medium and movies of the first half of the century often closely resembled filmed plays with constructed sets and static cameras. As cinema became less and less indebted to its theatrical roots, adapting stage musical to screen became a lot more challenging. To put it simply: movies are not plays and plays are not movies. And trying to turn one into the other can result in some pretty radical changes. And all those challenges are right up on screen in Into the Woods, a movie based on one of the most inherently theatrical musicals of the modern era.

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Daria (1997-2002)

The nineties were awesome.

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.

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“Cowabunga.”

In 1984, two broke young illustrators named Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird were trying to break into comics. Eastman randomly doodled a turtle in ninja attire and the pair decided that it was a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, essentially a madlib of everything that was popular in comics at the time (except for turtles).

They then wrote a silly little issue parodying Frank Miller’s Daredevil run and that, of course, was that.

This one weird joke concept riffing on an incredibly specific moment in comic book history in a black and white indie vanished without a trace, the very definition of a flash in the pan.

Wait, no. *checks notes*

It went on to conquer the goddamn world. To this day, TMNT is quite possibly the most lucrative Western comic book property not published by either DC or Marvel. Third most successful toyline of all time. Seven TV series, seven films, multiple videogames, hundreds and hundreds of comic issues and a metric shit-ton of merch. Which, on the one hand, is crazy.

How did a concept so ridiculous, and so seemingly instantly dated become one of the most successful and enduring pop culture phenomena of the past half century? Well, success has many fathers. Firstly, I think the franchise’s longevity was sealed with this:

A theme tune that catchy only comes around once in a blue moon. Play it over NINE SEASONS and it’s practically brainwashing.

Then there’s the fact that TMNT relies on a template that has proven to be amazingly durable over the last 180 years.

Hothead. Stoic Leader. Smart Guy. Big fun doofus.

The Musketeer Archetypes are like the Four Chords of character writing. They’re bloody everywhere, but they’re there for a reason. They work, dammit. And these character traits (Leads, Does Machines, Cool but Rude, Party Dude) hold true across virtually all interpretations of the characters which gives continuity across the franchise. But, and this is crucial, with that stability and continuity there also comes incredible plasticity. The Turtles fandom is fantastically diverse in terms of its age range and that’s because TMNT can be this:

Or it can be THIS:

Once you get past the initially (very, very, very) silly premise, the Brothers Turtle can grow with their audience. There’s stuff for kids and there’s also stuff for adults. So, class, where have we heard that before? A character that has a rock solid core that’s also surprisingly adaptable and can tell stories for any and all ages?

So before we go any further, I owe you all an apology. I know I said I’d be reviewing Turtles Forever but you need to know three things:

  1. My DVD of Turtles Forever didn’t arrive in time (that’ll teach me to support physical media).
  2. There’s a Turtles movie with Batman in it, how am I NOT going to review that?
  3. It is SHOCKINGLY good.
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The Third Man (1949)

I don’t honestly know if I should feel sorry for Joseph Cotten or envy him. He had a long and storied career in theatre and film, appearing in several movies that are the mainstay of any respectable list of greatest films of all time. How could you pity any actor whose CV includes The Third Man, The Magnificent Ambersons and of course the big gorilla in the room, Kane?

At the same time, when you think of those movies Cotten’s name isn’t exactly the first one that comes to mind, is it? Of course not.

It certainly doesn’t appear that Cotten resented the fact that Orson Welles was essentially the star around which Cotten’s career orbited, as the two men maintained a close and warm friendship right up until Welles’ death in 1985. And it’s not like he was completely overlooked, either. In fact, it’s so common to say that Joseph Cotten was one of the most underrated stars of Hollywood’s Golden Age that he probably no longer even qualifies as underrated. But screw it, it’s my blog, and if I want to turn it into a Joseph Cotten appreciation corner who of you will stop me? That’s what I thought. We’ve Gotten Cotten Fever up in here!

Oh, fun fact. His hair was the model for Norman Osborn in Spider-Man. Orson Welles can’t say that, can he?
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Joseph: The King of Dreams (2000)

1998’s Prince of Egypt is what you might call a hard act to follow and the first thing any discussion of Joseph: The King of Dreams should stress is that it is neither fair nor productive to compare the two. But I’d argue there is actually a lot to learn from putting the two movies side by side.

I’ve always believed that, when it comes to animation at least, “cheap” is not the same as “bad”. Obviously, a generous budget is rarely a detriment but plenty of animators have put out stunning work on a shoe-string. And plenty of movies had absolutely scads of money thrown at them and still managed to look like something that the cat puked up on the rug. What makes the Dreamworks Torah Cinematic Universe so instructive is that it’s two movies created at the same time by largely the same team of artists, just with very different budgets. King of Dreams was, like Return of Jafar, intended to be a straight to video sequel (or prequel in this case) of a much bigger, much more-high budget theatrical release. But, Aladdin was done by Disney Feature Animation and Return of Jafar was palmed off to Disney’s TV animation studios in Australia and Japan. By contrast, King of Dreams was animated concurrently with Prince with Egypt, and by the same team of animators. This makes the two movies a fascinating case study, showing how much a budget matters in determining quality and also how much it doesn’t.

Because yeah, I’m not going to sit here and tell you that the two movies are equally beautiful. Clearly they’re not.

And yes, the wonderfully detailed, semi-realistic style of human animation that Prince uses is absolute murder for the King of Dreams team trying to render it with less time and resources and it does sometimes end up looking a little janky. But honestly, more times it doesn’t. My point is, I honestly love this film for how hard it tries and frequently succeeds in escaping the creative ghetto. This is a straight to video cartoon sequel. Hell, this is a faith-based straight to video cartoon sequel. The fact that it’s not absolutely terrible is an achievement. The fact that it’s good, often touching great, is a genuine miracle.

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“Welcome to the MCU. You’re joining at a bit of a low point.”

Around the midpoint of Deadpool & Wolverine I had a rather chilling realisation during this exchange of dialogue between Elektra and Deadpool.

ELEKTRA: Every time one of us has gone up against her, they die. The Punisher,  Quicksilver, Daredevil.”


DEADPOOL: “Daredevil? I’m so sorry.”

ELEKTRA: (with an indifferent shrug) “It’s fine.”

So let’s unpack this joke. Here is everything you, the viewer, need to know for this gag to land.

  1. This is Elektra, played by Jennifer Garner.
  2. Garner first played this role over twenty years ago, in the critically reviled Daredevil, and then again in the practically unseen spin-off Elektra.
  3. In Daredevil, she was the love interest of the title character.
  4. Daredevil was played by Ben Affleck.
  5. Garner and Affleck married shortly after making that film.
  6. They subsequently underwent an extremely public and acrimonious divorce.
  7. Hence, Elektra is not particularly cut up about Daredevil dying.

And virtually every joke in this thing is that kind of inside baseball uber-specific nerd bullshit that seems positively tailormade to appeal to me, a 40 something male who had comics instead of friends growing up. And yet…this thing made €1.8 billion dollars. This is as mainstream as movies get now.

Super niche nerd culture is no longer niche. The war is over. Everyone is a massive nerd now.

Total domination.

And I now find myself in a very difficult position as a movie critic.

I thoroughly enjoyed this movie. I laughed my ass off from start to finish.

And yet, when I read, say, Donald Clarke howling in sackcloth outside the sinful Gomorrah that is the modern movie industry, I can’t help but nod along.

This movie isn’t a movie. It’s heroin. It’s very good heroin. And I very much enjoyed it.

But…I should probably be ingesting food instead.

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Bats versus Bolts: Piss on You! I’m working for Mel Brooks!

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?

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