Aladdin, what an amazing story, a bumbling Sultan with a daughter who falls for a man from the streets who is hated by the sultan’s advisor who dabbles in sorcery and has a fun bird sidekick for comedic relief.
This might come as no surprise but Disney isn’t a great company on the moral side, in fact they’ve been accused of many horrible things to blacklisting actors they used in their productions to keep the ‘Disney magic’ alive and untainted. They have also been accused of faking caring about people from the LGBTQ+ community just so that they can fill their pockets. But that’s not what we’re here to talk about today, we’re here to raise the question.
Well in case you couldn’t tell by the opening were talking about Disney’s cult classic form the 90’s Aladdin. A story featuring Robin Williams as the fan favorite Genie and Scot Weinger as the titular Aladdin.
The movie follows a simple plot of a street rat-Aladdin- meeting the princess, Jasmine played by Linda Larkin and them falling in love. However the Sultan played by Douglas Seale has an advisor the villain of the movie, Jafar played by Johnathan Freeman, who wants the power of the kingdom for himself and the only way to do this is to marry jasmine so he would be the sultans successor.
You probably know the rest Aladdin gets tricked by Jafar and almost dies if not for a magic carpet. While recovering he discovers the show stopping Genie and gets three wishes to help him win the heart of Jasmine. Something he doesn’t know he already achieved.
Now the good guys win in the end and Aladdin and Jasmine get married and live happily ever after. So why is this classic being accused of stealing from another movie and what movie is it being accused of stealing from?
The thief and the cobbler, a movie that struggled to get made, it was written by a Canadian animator Richard Williams back in the 60’s and was stuck in development limbo up until the late 80’s when warner brothers picked it up for production. Even then the movie went through heavy rewrites and Williams was booted from the project, HIS project.
The reason Disney is being accused of stealing from this movie is because of the similarities between both movies, both are set in an ancient royal setting from the middle east, both feature a bumbling sultan, both feature a cunning advisor who aims to marry the princess who has a bird sidekick, and finally the main character is a peasant who falls for the princess.
So did Disney steal from the movie? Well personally I think, NO. The similarities I listed above are all the similarities between the two movies.
Thief and Cobblers main character is a cobbler not like Aladdin who is a street rat who steals to live. Now I know what you’re thinking could Aladdin have been inspired by the thief? Well no, the thief as a character is a plot device to move events in the movie forward he doesn’t even have any voice lines, at least in the version that I could find.
You see the movie is a form of lost media, due to it’s bad box office the movie was hard to find and even if you could get your hands on it what you would have would be the rewritten studio version.
The plots are pretty different. Aladdin has a genie as the helpful force to the main characters and the closest the thief and the cobbler gets to a genie is an old lady prophet/wizard who gets at most five minutes of screen time.
The main villain of both movies are similar, but that’s about all the similarities for the villains. Jafar at the end gets outsmarted by Aladdin and gets trapped in the genies lamp while Zigzag, the advisor in thief and the cobbler attempts to ally himself with the one eyes tribe and help them overthrow the kingdom using their giant mech.
