Aladdin DVD Preview
Q&A with the filmmakers
Aladdin will finally debut on DVD on October 5, and it will be a massive Platinum Edition DVD. Disney offered us a sneak preview of the content that will be on the DVD by inviting us to the taping of one of the main features. Leonard Maltin hosted a Q&A for students of the California Institute of the Arts with the directors, artists and voice actors from the film. You’ll have to wait for the DVD to hear the whole Q&A, but here’s a preview of the discussion.
Directors Ron Clements and John Musker discussed some of the drastic changes that happened to the film midway through production, and didn’t hold back any accusations about who prompted those alterations.
“Jeffrey Katzenberg was what caused all that,” Clements said. “Aladdin particularly, and this has happened with other films, it sort of went through an early stage and a later stage where it was two different movies. The first movie actually was more calmer, more relaxed as we were first developing the story and casting the voices. We wrote the first script and later collaborated with Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio. Songs were written, voice casting was done and the film was storyboarded and put up on reels so you could actually watch the whole movie before you made the movie. In this case, relatively a year after we began, we had the movie up on reels. We showed that version to Jeffrey on sort of a fateful day. Everybody refers to Black Friday, but we showed it to him on a Thursday. Black Friday was the day after that. He didn’t like it very well and basically said start over.”
Musker recalled more specifically Katzenberg’s reaction. “When we got done, he said, ‘That’s a lotta movie’ and he kind of left it at that. We went to lunch. When we came back, we saw our coproducer Don Ernst sitting in his room, said, ‘Did you hear from Jeffrey?’ He said, ‘Yeah, yeah, he hated it!’ So it turned out Jeffrey had a lot of problems with it. He said, ‘Even though the movie’s coming out in a year and a half, start over.’”
Once Elliot and Rossio came on board, they were able to modify the story so that not all material had to be scrapped. Musker said, “The movie that you see now, 1/3 goes back to the original version, 1/3 was reworked and 1/3 is completely new.”
Clements specified, “The biggest change is that in the original version, Aladdin was younger, he had a mother, his relationship with his mother was a key element of the movie and there was a really nice song he sang to her called ‘Proud of Your Boy’ which Howard and Alan wrote that we hated to lose, but I think we were in agreement that the film wasn’t working, it needed to be changed. Although I think Jeffrey’s thing, his quote I remember was, ‘The mom’s a zero. 86 the mom.’”
Composer Alan Menken doesn’t mourn the loss of the song. “Every time you lose a song, you come up with a better one,” Menken said. “You really do. Now, ‘Proud of Your Boy’ was a ballad we wrote. He says, ‘Mom, I know I’m a screw-up but I know I’m going to make good.’ It was one of the prettiest ballads that Howard and I ever wrote. We were thinking we were going to write a song for Aladdin and Jasmine to sing on the magic carpet. We lost ‘Proud of Your Boy’ and gained ‘A Whole New World.’”
Scott Weinger, the voice of Aladdin, remembered portions of the original version. “They showed me sketches and characters who looked younger,” Weinger said. “He got older later on.”
Once Gilbert Gottfried took stage, he dominated the remainder of the session. He complained that there wasn’t a chair for him. “I was in the movie too!” When he was finally seated, he added, “Oh, this is so well organized.” He poked at Leonard Maltin, “Can I just say what a thrill it is working with John Landis?” Then he moved onto the event coordinators themselves, “I just have one question to ask. How many times did you ask Robin Williams to come here before you [settled for me]. ‘Try him 20 more times and then we’ll get Gilbert. He’ll do it for lunch.’”
Then back to Maltin, “If you open up one of your movie review books, I want to see if you ever said anything nice about me.” When Maltin replied, “I’m certain of it,” Gottfried came back, “You reviewed two Problem Child movies. How many good things can you say about me?”
He did manage to address the movie a little bit. “I work like De Niro. I lived with a family of parrots for a year. I stayed on a branch in the rain forest for months.”
What you won’t see on the DVD are the between-take bits. Musker got the crowd of students riled up about 2D animation. Asking who was still studying 2D, he got everyone to cheer, with the implication being that they all knew work in their specialty would be thin in the 3D world. To satisfy the 3D crowd, he told stories about John Lasseter as a kid. The full taping ran over two hours including retakes and transition setups. We will find out how long the DVD segment ends up being on October 5.
http://actionadventure.about.com/cs/wee ... 042904.htm
). That DVDTown review was pretty vague, just like the IGN one. Why do all of these vague reviews focus so much on disc one and then cover disc two in a short paragraph? Anyway, I'm still excited for this release and continue to hope that Disney will keep the same level of high quality from this release for Bambi and especially Cinderella. Do you guys think we should contact Disney telling them how pleased we are with the Aladdin DVD (after we get it, of course)? I know they received a lot of flack for The Lion King, so perhaps letting them know that they're on the right track with Aladdin will keep them on that road for future releases?
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. But got a poster eventually.
. I mean, she's hot but hey the movie is called ALADDIN for one reason 