Tuesday, February 26, 2008

Aladdin

Yesterday somebody left a comment on "Throne Room, Part 2". A friendly comment along with a few points that I wanted to respond to - only I couldn't because the comment was very quickly removed. Here is the comment (without the reader's name): "Cool Post ! Some of the characters remind me a lot of Jafar and the Sultan in "Aladdin". Looks very similar, well for me at least :o) Anyways I like it a lot".
I think it would be fair to say that both "Aladdin" and the "Thief" were influenced by "The Thief of Bagdad", which also featured a Grand Vizier and a Sultan. The Grand Vizier Zigzag and King Nod in the "Thief" however had been designed many years before Aladdin was made. A few scenes with them had even been shown in a TV documentary in 1982. After Dick moved into the public spotlight with "Roger Rabbit", a film that Disney had been very involved in, it was also no secret when he finally got the funding to finish the "Thief". I don't know when Disney decided to make "Aladdin", but they where able to release their film first. I'm not familiar at all with the version of the "Thief" that was released here in the US, but I believe that some efforts had been made to make it similar to "Aladdin". But this was after it was taken away from Dick. The scenes we discuss here on the blog were animated before "Aladdin" came out. I hope this clears up this point, but I would appreciate your comments if you'd like to add s.th. that might be helpful to people who find this blog and who might have a similar reaction as the reader who posted the above comment.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi there :o))
Yeah, well that was me who added that comment. But my coworker told me that apparently everybody knows that "Aladdin" was very much influenced by "The Thief and the Cobbler", so I decided to delete it. Didn't mean it the other way around that "The Thief and the Cobbler" was influeced by "Aladdin", just to avoid confusion :o))

Cheers
Vic

Holger said...

Thanks Victor!
Just a misunderstanding then, but I hope it will serve some purpose.