Disney's Aladdin

The first Disney movie I saw that I really loved as a kid was Aladdin. I saw this when I was nine years old. I saw Beauty and The Beast the year before, but I liked Aladdin better - largely due, I'm sure, to the Genie, and also the fact that the love story was a little bit less important in Aladdin. I'll be doing something special with this entry, attempting to draw scenes and characters from the movie in Paintbrush, starting with Genie.

The Genie

The Genie was totally crazy. He could turn into anything, like a plane, a sheep, a scary dead guy (who I later learned was an impression of Peter Lorre). He was funny loud, and hyperactive, and he sang some catchy songs. Most of the pop culture references he made flew over my head, but he was still my favorite character in the movie.

Aladdin was a thief living in Agrabah, which is a stand-in for Saudi Arabia. He is in love with the princess, Princess Jasmine, who escapes her overbearing father be posing as a street urchin and stealing things. Aladdin rescues her, and that's how he gets to know her.

Aladdin has a pet monkey named Apu, who is especially quick and good at stealing. He can't really talk, but he can mock people by imitating their voices.

Apu stealing an apple and shaking his fist.

Aladdin winds up in the Cave of Wonders after a disguised Jafar (the villain, a powerful wizard) lures him there to try and get the lamp out. Jafar fails to get the lamp at the beginning of the movie, narrowly escaping the cave slamming shut on him as well as the poor sap he lured there. Here's my Paintbrush rendition of that scene:

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Aladdin gets out with the help of Genie, and from that point in the plot onwards he uses Genie's magic to pose as a prince and woo Princess Jasmine. Jafar tries to manipulate this to his own gain when he finds that Aladdin has the lamp, aided by his obnoxious parrot Iago, voiced by Gilbert Gottfried.

I think I captured the essence of Iago here.

This all leads up to an exciting final showdown where Jafar uses his sorcery to transform into a giant snake, and it eventually defeated when is tricked into taking the powers of a Genie (and thus having to live in a lamp and be a slave).

As far as Disney villains go, Jafar is pretty evil. He has no problem with killing people to get what he wants, tries to freeze Aladdin to death be sending him to Siberia, and tries to kill Jasmine. He's a sadistic villain, and he's also a pretty powerful one in the scale of Disney villains. Here's my masterpiece depiction of Jafar turning into a snake:

I think I made him scarier than in the movie.

A final reason I loved the movie Aladdin was the music. I got the soundtrack as a present and played it at least all day on Christmas day, and probably much more often than that, too. Consequently, I still know most of the songs. My favorites were "One Step Ahead" and "Friend Like Me."

As a final note, although this is a nostalgia blog, Aladdin was a little racist towards Arabs. I was too young to realize it at the time. The way they portray evil characters with more exaggerated and stereotypical ethnic features while making Jasmine and Aladdin have lighter skin could easily be considered racist. It's not as racist as many other Disney movies, but it is there, unfortunately.

Batman: The Animated Series

Hold onto your batarangs, ladies and gentlemen, because tonight's very special entry spotlights one of the best TV shows of all time. It's Batman: The Animated Series, the king of the '90s after-school block. This darkly gleaming gem of a "kids show" was well-written enough to win three Emmys (and be nominated for five more) and gritty enough that it was almost out of place at around 4 PM. It's easily the best adaptation of Batman, as well as quite possibly the best cartoon ever.

Batman has always been my favorite superhero.He has a cooler costume than probably 99% of them. He has all kinds of hi-tech gadgets, has trained himself in the martial arts, resisting poisons, and all kinds of other ninja-like abilities. His personality is also more interesting; he's flawed to the core. The whole reason he fights crime is because his parents were murdered. And unlike other superheroes, he has no powers. His life is always on the line.

But the show isn't just the best because of Batman. It also features all of his crazy enemies, plus tons of minor villains and even one-time villains. It has the best Joker that's ever been done, voiced by Mark Hamill. There's also a great Mr. Freeze, Two-Face, Scarecrow, Catwoman, and yes, even this show's version of The Penguin is better than the others, which is a hard task with such a goofy villain.

Then there are minor villains like Manbat, Killer Croc, Clayface, The Mad Hatter, and really strange one-shot characters like The Sewer King, Tigris, and Temple Fugate, who wants to kill the mayor of Gotham because he made him late to a court appointment. And many of them almost kill Batman.

The show is kid-friendly enough that I don't remember anyone dying (at least in any way other than an explosion), but they come pretty darn close sometimes. Batman also uses psychological torture by threatening to drop people off buildings.

Clayface transforming out of control.

I love the aesthetic of the show, which has been termed "dark deco" by critics. It's influenced by film noir, and as one YouTube comment I read said, "the dominant color in every scene is black." The show's setting in time is unclear; Batman has lots of futuristic weapons, but the gangsters all use old Tommy guns, and as a kid, Bruce Wayne watched an old black and white serial called The Gray Ghost that looks like it's from the 1920s.

And who can forget the excellent score of the show, which is used to great effect in a lot of the best episodes? It was composed by Danny Elfman on the opening credits. I've read that the company that released it has completely sold out of copies of this score.

Cartoon Network

Well, as promised in the last post, this week's blog update will be about Cartoon Network. But on further reflection (one might say sober reflection), I realized that there actually wasn't a whole lot that I found memorable about Cartoon Network. Most of the cartoons that I watched on it were later in the '90s, and other shows I like that have been featured on Adult Swim (such as Cowboy Bebop and Full Metal Alchemist), were not aired until the '00s.

To clarify,  when I did visit my grandma and grandpa as a kid, I did watch a lot of the old cartoons that they ran during the daytime- Tom & Jerry, Looney Tunes, Merrie Melodies, and so on. But they weren't very memorable. They also showed really old cartoons after midnight.

There was only one show I watched for at least half of the decade, Space Ghost Coast to Coast. This was a talk show that was on at 11 PM, hosted by a washed-up superhero named Space Ghost, and evil aliens he was holding prisoner on the phantom planet and forcing to work on his talk show - the main ones being Zorak, Moltar, and Brak. Most of the humor was based on sarcasm. Brak, the incredibly loud-mouthed and stupid cat alien, was my favorite. He later got his own show, The Brak Show, but that was in the year 2000. Here's Brak at his finest.

Other shows on cartoon network that I enjoyed were Johnny Bravo and Dexter's Laboratory. The first was about a narcissistic but vapid greaser guy who was always chasing after women. One episode I remember involved a parody of The Twilight Zone, where he had to babysit a kid who could send him to the cornfield with his mind. Dexter's Laboratory was about a boy genius with a secret mad scientist lab and his hyperactive and stupid sister Dee Dee, who was always ruining his experiments. An episode I remember from this series was about Dexter always getting pushed into the pool by his dad. Here's that Johnny Bravo episode.

Later in the '90s, there was Toonami. I really only remember this because I would watch Dragonball Z and Gundam Wing. It was probably the first Japanese animation I'd ever seen, but looking at this clip, I'm surprised I didn't think Dragonball Z was stupid.

Moral of the story; it seems that nostalgia sometimes fades away on closer inspection.