Jeremy’s Tophunder №23: Aladdin

8 min readMay 11, 2020

I think it’s about time for me to talk about Robin Williams.

I want to make sure that I don’t overstate it, but I also want to make sure that I don’t understate it.

It’s not just that Robin Williams was my favorite actor, and it’s not just that Robin Williams was my favorite comedian, and it’s not just that Robin Williams was my favorite entertainer, I might feel obliged to say that Robin Williams was my favorite human being in history. It might go that far.

The funny thing is, this is one of only two Robin Williams movies that made my list. As much as I love him as an actor, I generally didn’t like the movies he was in. I loved him in Good Morning Vietnam and Dead Poet’s Society, but those never came close to making the cut. I loved him in Awakenings and The Fisher King and Hook and Mrs. Doubtfire and Jumanji and The Birdcage and Patch Adams and Insomnia, and a few of those came a little bit closer to making the cut, but in the end, none of them did. For a few of them, he’s really the only part of the movie that I like, which probably explains why they aren’t on the list. But I love Robin Williams, and I’m actually borderline annoyed at the fact that I can’t properly express how much in words.

Among the countless reasons that I love Robin Williams is his consistently riotous appearances on late night talk shows. I don’t think there’s ever been a better talk show guest in the history of television. His appearances on The Late Show with David Letterman are my personal favorite. Nobody made Letterman laugh like Robin did. If you want to go down a rabbit hole of laughing hysterically for hours on end, just type “Robin Williams Letterman” into YouTube and go nuts. But, there’s one appearance he had on the show in 2005, promoting a tiny movie called House of D that nobody saw (myself included) that for whatever reason will be seared into my memory forever. I’m going to post the clip below, my apologies for the poor quality and for the fact that it’s in three parts, but it’s the only clip I could find of it online. If you have 15 minutes or so, I really hope you take the time to watch it, because I think it encapsulates everything that Robin Williams was about.

I’ve never heard Dave laugh like that before or since. Robin was a singular and transcendent comedy force, but he was also a sentimental and sensitive man who valued his relationships and had love for everyone he encountered. He was an absurdly generous man, both materially and with his time. He did six different USO tours, traveling to 13 countries and performing for over 90,000 troops. He hosted Comic Relief 16 times, helping to raise more than $80 million for homelessness and other social causes.

I’ve never been so shaken up by the death of a person I didn’t know. In fact, I still got thrown for a loop a bit as I read about and watched some of the tributes that were done in his honor after his passing. I still miss him.

As far as I’m concerned, The Genie is the quintessential Robin Williams performance. Animation was a perfect match for his propensity to bounce from character to character and voice to voice. His brilliant lightning quickness was often lost when it was just him standing up there on stage or on screen, but when suddenly it’s just his voice, and the animation is able to capture and depict all of his weird, off the wall craziness, it creates an immersive experience that can’t be compared to anything else he’s done in his career, or perhaps any other voice-acting performance in an animated movie ever.

Williams truly paved the way for all of the great voice-acting performances of the 90s and into the 21st century. Prior to Aladdin, some Disney movies had high-profile voice actors (Bob Newhart in Rescuers Down Under, Billy Joel in Oliver & Company, a few others), but most didn’t. You probably wouldn’t recognize any names from the voice cast of The Little Mermaid or the main characters from Beauty & The Beast. Robin Williams changed all that, when his voice acting performance became the defining element of the movie. Animation studios suddenly realized hiring big-name actors to voice their characters was a streamlined way to draw attention and promote the movie, and that’s how you end up with some of the best voice acting performances of all time in the subsequent 30 years, like Eddie Murphy in Mulan and Shrek, Ellen DeGeneres in Finding Nemo, Jeremy Irons in The Lion King, and Billy Crystal in Monsters, Inc. Those were all made possible in part because of Robin Williams.

Beyond the Genie, there are plenty of high points in Aladdin — Iago is funny, Abu is funny, the Sultan is funny, and Jafar is one of the most sinister Disney villains of my lifetime. There’s one wildly overrated song that is still pretty okay (A Whole New World), and one wildly underrated song that never gets enough credit (Friend Like Me).

My personal favorite Easter Egg in Aladdin, though, is that it’s clearly set far, far into the future. It’s unclear exactly where the theory originated, but I’ll quote what I consider to be the most succinct explanation:

In one scene, Genie calls Aladdin’s clothes “so 3rd century.” However, Genie has been in the lamp for 10,000 years, so there’s no way he could know of the fashion trends which have happened since he’s been trapped. Which means the latest Genie could have been trapped in the lamp is the 3rd century. If he spent 10,000 years in there, it is now AT LEAST the year 10,300 AD when he gets out.
Aladdin takes place IN THE FUTURE. A post-apocalyptic world where only Arab (and some Greek) culture has survived. It has been so long that the name “Arabia” has evolved to “Agrabah.” The Muslim religion has atrophied to the point where there are no mosques or Imams, but people still give praise to Allah in moments of happiness. Amazing technological marvels left behind by previous civilizations, like sentient flying carpets or genetically engineered parrots which communicate with human speech rather than just mimic it are taken for granted or considered “magic.”

Woah.

There’s one thing that’s always bothered me about Three Wishes-type stories. There are always these rules attached to the wishes, and one of the rules is that you can’t wish for more wishes.

I mean, that tracks. You need the wishes to mean something in the context of the story — that clearly comes up here, as Aladdin is supposed to wish the Genie free with his third wish, but he puts it off because he needs to stay a prince in order to keep up appearances with Jasmine. It provides conflict. I get it.

But like, if I ever found a Genie, and he tried to tell me that I only had three wishes, and that I wasn’t allowed to wish for more wishes, why wouldn’t my first wish be “yeah, all of those rules about what I’m not allowed to wish for? I wish that those rules don’t apply to me.”

And then I’d wish for 10 billion more wishes.

Aladdin is my highest-ranked animated film, and the highest-ranked movie that I really fell in love with in my childhood. You would think that the 2019 live-action remake would be right up my alley, but I haven’t seen it. And I won’t see it. In fact, I’m really angry that it exists.

Obviously it does, because Disney wanted a cash grab. They did the same thing with Cinderella, The Jungle Book, Beauty & The Beast and The Lion King, the last two of which I saw and neither of which I particularly liked. I just don’t quite get the need for it. It’s not like the original animated films don’t hold up or aren’t still beloved.

I get it when a movie like Ocean’s 11 is remade — they want to replace a movie from a bygone era into contemporary times. I get it when a movie like King Kong or Godzilla is remade — the special effects have advanced to a point where the remake actually represents real improvement over the original. Then there are plenty of foreign movies that are re-made for American audiences (like The Departed or The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo). But it bothers me a little bit when the biggest motivation for re-making a widely loved movie is just “it will be profitable.” And it bothers me even more when it takes the memory of someone like Robin Williams and sweeps it under the rug. It just really doesn’t sit right with me. And yes, I get it — I have a hard time getting over it because of my attachment to Williams. I’ll cop to that. But I’m not happy about it, and I don’t think I ever will be.

Aladdin has been my favorite Disney movie for as long as I can remember, and if anything, I actually love it more now than I did 10 years ago. I just enjoy spending a little bit of time with Robin whenever I can. For just a little while, it’s like he’s still here.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

13. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

15. Skyfall

17. Ocean’s 11

18. Air Force One