Often Imitated, Never Dupli-dupli-dupli-duplicated...
Finally! Disney is releasing the DVD that I've been waiting for since they came out with DVDs. Aladdin is at last coming to DVD on October 5th, and it's about time.
This was THE breakout film for Disney in my opinion. Hot on the heels of The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, both of which were successful children's movies, came this pithy, endlessly funny film. It stuck close to the Disney formula but broke it in several very important ways.
Granted, I've been waiting for it on DVD for so long I don't even know if I'll like it anymore, but here's what I remember:
- This was the movie that made me love Robin Williams. He's brilliant, and they let him Ad-lib tons of dialog which made it a MUCH better movie. Eddie Murphy has tried to duplicate this phenomenon many times since (see Mulan and Shrek) with limited success.
- The story is engaging and not completely watered down.
- This movie had the best music of the second "Animated Musical" Renaissance. The songs rarely felt forced and worked well with the story, and aside from the obligatory "A Whole New World" ballad, many of the songs are up-tempo and funny.
When I was about 14, I had this movie on the same bootleg VHS as The Addams family and I fell asleep watching one or the other pretty much every night. I also, for no good reason at all, typed out the entire script on my computer (this was before the Internet was around for stuff like that).
Well, I'm embarrassed to tell this story for some reason, possibly for fear that people will find out that somewhere deep within me is a repressed Musial theatre dork, but I'd be remiss if I didn't relay it when talking about this movie.
Sometime around middle school I tried to put together a "Musical Youth Entertainment Group" of kids who went around performing in various venues. It was kind of a half-baked idea (mostly because we had no idea where we would actually do said performing) but it was something for me and my friend Brian to do. We were going to sing songs from Disney + other kids movies and distill the animated features down into stage productions.
I remember clearly working on the script for the stage version of "The Lion King" and Brian telling me it would never work. (Yeah, tell Julie Taymor that!)
We made flyers, got kids together and held rehearsals, and to think back on it, it was one of the first tastes of leadership that I ever had.
Of course, we all had the attention spans of gnats, so the idea came and went in a summer. We "grew up," and Brian started doing real High School musicals the next year. He'd gotten a role in Joseph as one of the "Chorus Kids," and watching it back on video, we were both hooked. It was like being part of a singing Hollywood, right in our own High School.
M.Y.E.G. became a memory, but a few things stuck with me.
The lessons I'd learned leading (and ultimately, failing to lead) that little group have served me endlessly as an RA, a newspaper editor, team leader, and in my job.
The memories of being 14 and all but uninhibited, belting out "Friend like me" over a crappy "You Sing..." Karaoke tape with my dad in the basement will be there forever. Sometimes the memories are bittersweet, as 10 years later, I look back and know that I may never be that completely uninhibited again... But hey, we're going to have kids of our own someday. I hope my dad hung on to a copy of that tape - somehow, I have a feeling he did.
