Aladdin (1992)

Description: Aladdin is a poor street urchin who spends his time stealing food from the marketplace in the city of Agrabah. His adventures begin when he meets a young girl who happens to be Princess Jasmine, who is forced to be married by her wacky yet estranged father. Aladdin’s luck suddenly changes when he retrieves a magical lamp from the Cave of Wonders. What he unwittingly gets is a fun-loving genie who only wishes to have his freedom. Little do they know is that the Sultan’s sinister advisor Jafar has his own plans for both Aladdin and the lamp.
Directors: Ron Clements, John Musker
Writers: Ron Clements (screenplay by), John Musker (screenplay by)
Stars: Scott Weinger, Robin Williams, Linda Larkin

Photos

Trivia

During the course of recording the voices, Robin Williams improvised so much they had almost sixteen hours of material.

Because Robin Williams ad-libbed so many of his lines, the script was rejected for a Best Adapted Screenplay Academy Award nomination.

The opening scene with the street merchant was completely unscripted. Robin Williams was brought into the sound stage and was asked to stand behind a table that had several objects on it and a bedsheet covering them all. The animators asked him to lift the sheet, and, without looking, take an object from the table and describe it in character. Much of the material in that recording session was not appropriate for a Disney film.

Whenever Aladdin tells a lie, the big purple feather on his turban falls and covers his face.

When Robin Williams died in 2014, Disney honored him that week by airing Aladdin on their three children’s channels (Disney Channel, Disney XD, and Disney Junior) across three days, twice on each channel. At the end of the movie, just before the credits, they put up an image that read, “In Memory of Robin Williams, who made us laugh.” using animator Eric Goldberg’s tribute to him as a backdrop.

Scheduling conflicts with Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987) forced Patrick Stewart to turn down the role of Jafar. He has said in interviews that this is his biggest regret.

This film became the fourteenth (and the first animated) movie to gross more than $200 million.

While recording this movie, Robin Williams frequently received calls from Steven Spielberg, who at the time was working on the Holocaust film Schindler’s List (1993). He would put him on speaker phone so he could tell jokes to the cast and crew to cheer them up. Some of the material that he used was material that he was using for this film.

During script and storyboard development, the writers were already considering Robin Williams for the role of the Genie but had not approached him for the project. In order to convince Williams to do the role, Eric Goldberg animated the Genie doing several minutes of Williams’s stand-up routines, including parts from his album “Reality… What A Concept,” and screened it for him. Williams was so impressed that he signed almost immediately.