Aladdin

[drain.you]

Hey guys,
Just wondering if someone could tell me the moral of the story of Aladdin. We all know how it goes, beggar-kid Aladdin falls in love with princess, is tricked into stealing lamp for sorceror(sp?), takes lamp for himself, becomes a prince so can marry princess, sorceror makes him a beggar again and then he is able to get married to princess regardless.
Is it just a case of 'don't pretend to be someone you're not'?

[Xvall]

Yeah. All the disney stories have a moral like that.

Alladin - Don't pretend you're someone you aren't.
Snow White - Don't eat stuff strangers give you.
Cinderalla - Your sisters are *****es.
Lion King - Kill your evil relatives before they off your dad.
Alice in Wonderland - Do drugs.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

I would bet money that the original story, Al Adin and the Forty Thieves, is a better story than the bowdlerised Disney version by light years.

[Xvall]

I remember in the original Cinderella a bird comes and plucks out the evil sister's eyes during the wedding.

[drain.you]

Al Adin and the Forty Thieves isn't the original version.
' The Book of One Thousand and One Nights' contains Aladdin's Lamp, Sindbad the Sailor, and the tale of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves
Disney incorporated Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves into the sequel of Aladdin but the stories are quite seperate and you seemed to have gotten them confused NoXion.

[novemba]

1001 Arabian Nights. Get it. Read it.

[Blackberry]

Originally posted by [email protected] 4 2005, 08:41 AM
Hey guys,
Just wondering if someone could tell me the moral of the story of Aladdin. We all know how it goes, beggar-kid Aladdin falls in love with princess, is tricked into stealing lamp for sorceror(sp?), takes lamp for himself, becomes a prince so can marry princess, sorceror makes him a beggar again and then he is able to get married to princess regardless.
Is it just a case of 'don't pretend to be someone you're not'?
Disney films are a goldmine of material to use for feminist analysis, so you might want to look at essays that deal with gender in Aladdin and Disney films in general to look for the morals that they espouse in that particular context.

I used to have a wealth of useful material on the subject, but alas, all seems to be lost because it has been almost two years since I have even considered the subject.

You might want to start with this page (http://www.units.muohio.edu/psybersite/disney/disneygender.shtml), specifically the third paragraph (ignore the second paragraph which is something entirely different and not useful or good in any case), and use that very brief and simplistic summary to do a few searches with the appropriate keywords.

Have fun. You might be unpleasantly surprised.

[our_mutual_friend]

Oooh. Cinderella was a bit awful in original version :D - something about evil sisters choping their toes and feet off to get them into the slipper and trailing blood down the road and that being the only reason the prince didnt marry them. Nice. For some reason they didn't have that in the Disney version. But they did have VERY high pitched singing that made you want to chop your toes off. The mice were cute though.

Was that a Hans Anderson or Brothers Grimm story (if either)?

Is the story version of Aladdin similar to the Disney? Or is the Disney just some mix-up of a fable/fairy story with Walt Disney's imagination?