The DVD Fairy

Back at the palace, Iago and Abu are comic reliefing too hard. I honestly don’t remember if the two of them trashing rooms in the palace when they start bickering is just a thing they do in multiple episodes or if I just rewatched this episode so many times it felt like it happened in multiple episodes. 

Either way, the humans and the Genie are disappointed and angry, especially when, like a couple kids, they come up with a tall tale about fighting off the monster that made this mess, as though nobody could hear Iago screeching at Abu about how he was going to mess up his day. 

There’s also a tired bit where the Sultan buys every line of their story because again – this show likes to whiplash between the Sultan being constantly underestimated despite his capabilities and an actual utter manchild. He seems the most willing to forgive Iago and Abu, and I’m going to headcanon here that because they are the obvious children-avatars for this episode, he’s reading that from them too. Maybe he remembers getting into similar fights with siblings. Maybe he’s feeling nostalgic for when Jasmine was wee. 

…Hell, maybe he remains cognizant of the fact that monkeys and birds are among the two messiest pets you can have, sentient or not. It’s a monkey and a parrot, you guys; what do you expect them to do? (Although, seeing it from the standpoint that even with fully developed personalities and an understanding of the English language, they’re animals, and that this might be read as “play” behavior makes it kind of cute.)

Either way, Aladdin orders them to clean up and we get little glances hinting that the sprites are watching them unnoticed. 

I say “it’s one of these episodes” because if you forget entirely about the opening scene with Carpet, you could read this as the start of one of many “comic relief characters get up to hijinks that lead to misunderstandings when the bad guy shows up” and these were stock Abu and Iago episodes. There’s a lot of them like this, and I won’t be reviewing all of them. 

And it does kind of start that way.

Traveling their highest, Carpet and Aladdin draw the attention of something new. Well, several somethings. 

In the first few minutes of the episode, they’re only shown as floating orbs of light making interested cooing noises and giggling and, for perhaps the first time, they are drawn to explore the world below, following our heroes back to Earth. 

These don’t appear to be drawn from any specific folklore, though “sprite” itself is sourced from European folklore to do with elves, fairfolk, etc. As far as I know, the writers just went with a generic word that wasn’t “fairy” for these creatures they invented, and that’s all well and good. If you do some digging you might find a few things that ring similar, though. 

This is one of very few episodes that Carpet is the central character, and I think the only one that even sort of veers in this direction is the Prophet Motive, as Carpet being kidnapped is what gets everything going. However, that one was super focused on Aladdin and his possible imminent death and was not about Carpet’s growth as a character – just his susceptibility to weirdly female-coded rugs. (I still don’t get that – also it’s weird ascribing gender to a living carpet, but you do you, Disney. Since everyone in this episode uses he/him pronouns I’m just going to stick to that.)

The main driving character arc in this episode is focused on Carpet, though, so I’m interested in seeing what they do with that. 

The dialogue in this episode seems to imply that Carpet and Aladdin just go flying alone sometimes just to have fun, and we’re shown what kinds of things they get up to when this happens. 

Trust exercises, mostly, but I’ll go with it. Aladdin practices free-falling and Carpet catches him, and don’t let my shoddy screencaps fool you. For what it is, it’s not badly animated. I remember as a kid feeling like they captured the feeling of flying in the way that movies or tv shows that tapped into that particular magical experience tend to (examples: The Neverending Story, How to Train Your Dragon, Spirited Away) – maybe not with the same budget, but you get me. 

Aladdin challenges Carpet (now against a completely different sky because screw us I guess) to take them even higher, so Carpet carries them above the clouds. Aladdin notes they have never been this high before – all in all we have a nicely packaged little scene that sets the dynamic for the two of them. 

There’s a lot that you could play with in this, especially if you’re a fanfic writer or RPer, regarding what this is for Aladdin. Most of the time when Carpet is in the picture, it’s for getting somewhere. This is one of few times where we see that flying is something that Aladdin likes to do just to let go and relax. This is private time between the two of them, so where the episode is almost purely visual in illustrating this, we can think about how this developed over time, how much we already know Aladdin implicitly trusts Carpet just based on how we see them interact here (but also in previous episodes and movies), and something kind of special develops. 

And tonight, they did something completely new.