With the upcoming live-action/CGI Aladdin remake coming to theaters tomorrow, one of our favorite YouTube channels, How It Should Have Ended, has decided to tackle the 1992 classic animated film—and already made a better movie than the remake, to be honest.
Firstly, Jamie Costa does a fantastic job capturing Robin Williams’ Genie and his pop culture references. I honestly love how these videos address little narrative “plot holes” but do so in a way that pretty much highlights that we need characters to make mistakes because otherwise there’s no conflict. After all, should Aladdin have been more careful about just leaving the lamp hanging around for anyone to find it? Absolutely.
But, it also says a lot about him that he wouldn’t. He’s a street rat who steals for survival; he doesn’t have any real concept of “property,” not to mention the Lamp is Genie’s home and isn’t just a default “thing” to Aladdin because he doesn’t view Genie as a tool or weapon, and therefore wouldn’t treat his home in such a way. Also, yes, if Aladdin revealed that he was a Prince via magic to Jasmine and the Sultan, I doubt anyone would have made a big deal about it because wealth via magic is just as legitimate as wealth by any other means.
I made my feelings about the remake clear in my review, but even watching this video made me feel more nostalgia for Aladdin that sitting through a two-hour live-action adaptation. We have really given Disney too much power to be able to pull at our nostalgia strings like puppets when it comes to these movies. Tim Burton’s Dumbo remake crashed and burned because the collective nostalgia for the big-eared elephant has waned since WWII.
While Aladdin is certainly no Dumbo, they both suffer from the same problem: being unnecessary. We literally have too much available content to be spending this much money on these movies, and I’m sure it’ll make all its money back and we’ll get live-action Pocahontas and Snow White real soon. God, I hope Mulan is good, because at least it seems like they’re making enough changes to the source material that it can actually be its own movie.
Oh well, we ain’t never had a money-grabbing friend like Disney.
(image: screengrab)
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