Reversing the Damsel in Distress situation: the beginning/Mozenrath and his motivations

We start this scene with Aladdin getting stuck and forbidding Jasmine from trying to help. Of course his first instinct is to protect her and if she gets involved she might get stuck too.

But of course it sets her up for still being placed in a helpless position.

Mozenrath shows and pretty much ignores her to start. He’s taken a time to recuperate since his first encounter with Aladdin, and he’s really not interested in her. Since she’s been kept uninvolved in the attempts to free Aladdin so far, he likely just assumes she’s only going to stand there and cower anyway.

He wants Genie. He was smart enough to stalk these two and figure out where they were going. He likely saw it was a date, but for whatever reason, he still seems to think Aladdin would bring the lamp with him. He knows enough to know where they were going, but apparently wasn’t in a position at any point in time to just steal the lamp without the trap.

Unless, of course, kidnapping Aladdin and holding him hostage and humiliating him is also an important part of the plan, to him. And it likely is, because their first encounter involved his precious ego getting pretty heavily stomped – first by Aladdin, and then by Genie, whom he has decided he wants to make his slave. And likely not just because he’s magic, but because he humiliated him.

What a swell guy.

Jasmine uses his gloating as an opportunity to try to do what she was likely going to do if Aladdin hadn’t told her to stay back.

She’s going to fly in and try to save the day. It’s not going to work. More on this in the next post.

Also for those of you who want to know how bad the brightness is on Moze in most scenes, the picture above this last one? is one I fixed.

Here’s what it looked like before I touched it up: 

Of course it’s a trap.

Way to go, Aladdin. I think it was Pairaka who tied this black goo stuff to the Armis from Star Trek: TNG, which I always kind of loved. I would love to know how Mozenrath got his mitts on some of it.

I think Xerxes might be torn between enjoying scaring people he doesn’t like (because he’s a little jerk) and being cute and having people actually want to pet him who don’t also regularly strangle or throw him against things.

But yes, another clear example of his ability to glamor (or Mozenrath’s ability to disguise him). (It’s probably the latter because Xerxes never appears to use this talent on his own.)

And here we see Mozenrath being a little more showy-offy with his translocation abilities. As far as I know he only does this kind of magic (in this way – with tearing a portal in reality and stepping through it) here and in “The Lost City of the Sun” but we also see him use it as a means of communicating over long distances in “Vocal Hero.” I wonder what’s more effective and takes the least amount of energy – just teleporting or stepping through like this?

Do you SEE how fucking bright this is? And he’s actually almost tolerable in this scene. In later scenes you couldn’t even see his nose or lips without Photoshop.

You’ll see what I mean about the brightness right away. See how Aladdin’s outfit appears to be glowing?

I wonder if the Sultan knows that when they go on dates, Aladdin takes his daughter to secluded places so they can make out.

But no time for making out! Cute animals in peril!

…I was about to nitpick about red foxes and where they are indigenous, but it turns out there are small and large subspecies pretty much worldwide. Points, Disney!

Also, I hear you, Frank Welker. I hear you.

Production Code Episode 74: The Secret of Dagger Rock

Apologies in advance for the wall of text. In the original airing, this is the second episode Mozenrath appears in. In the production code order, however, it’s third, coming after “The Wind Jackals of Mozenrath.” I am doing these out of order because I think they were switched around for good reasons. The way that the characters interact in that episode (particularly Moze and Jasmine) makes less sense if you argue the other came before this one. It’s a little sad, because I kind of like the idea of Aladdin immediately going home and telling the Sultan “this guy’s dangerous and you need to gather some intel on him, because he’s not going to stop looking for magic to add to his collection, and he intends to use it on us.”

We can still assume this has happened here because in this episode Jasmine and the Sultan seem to have an equal amount of understanding of what Moze can do despite neither of them being present in his intro episode. It just took a little longer for the Sultan to get spies in there (something we’ll discuss when I do that episode). (Also take note: there is a trend in Mozenrath episodes of having to steal away into his domain [or wherever he is at the time] in secret in order to foil one of his plots, which is kind of awesome.)

Okay so some disclaimers about this episode:
1. I may spam with more screencaps than usual, because I’m kind of in love with the animation; it’s all very smooth, very stylistic (the most stylistic I’ve seen for a Mozenrath episode), very distinctive, and my video player lets me take frame-by-frames.
2. These posts may take a little longer than usual because one thing that’s common of pretty much all English versions of this episode, including the original, official VHS release (on the Jasmine’s Enchanted Tales volume, which was coupled with “Forget Me Lots,” actually), have a serious problem with brightness. In that it’s too high. It’s so high, in fact, that Mozenrath’s face is pretty much invisible in almost every scene he’s in. So I’ll be running my screencaps through photoshop to try to simmer that down a bit. The only time I have EVER found a clearer transfer is in a copy of the Russian Dub someone put online.

I will probably do “Sandswitch” after I do this episode.

passingdreams answered to your post “Just a brief pause to see who thinks what: Followers, when I’m done with the Aladdin series would you still be interested in reading liveblogs of other shows/movies/things?”

The Little Mermaid series! Also, it’d be cool if you analyzed Disney movies as well, breaking them down scene by scene!

I would love to do Disney movies now and again. For srs. I’m not sure which ones I would start with. (Though I’d probably cheat and go for a non-animated Disney movie first. Like Return to Oz or Flight of the Navigator.)

“Forget Me Lots” – So I’m having more thoughts to do with this episode.

What would have happened if the cheap “love…?” plot device hadn’t broken the spell, and the rose just gives a person some standard form of amnesia the second they smell it? As in, the damage either eventually repairs itself or you NEVER recover your lost memories?

I don’t doubt that Jasmine would have eventually been convinced that Abis Mal lied to her, that she is the princess of Agrabah and she just locked her father in a dungeon. I can see it clearly that there would be a moment where she would have very nearly killed Abis Mal for what he’d done to her, but some innate part of her that still seems to find small bits of familiarity would key into right and wrong. And she’d stop.

Think of how she’d look at what she’s told of her old life, as a princess, the duties and expectations she’d be presented with and how much they clash with the way she’s been behaving throughout the episode – not just the villainy, but being assertive, athletic, and an expert combatant. Would she begin to realize that these abilities were in her all along and that, whoever she was before, following all of these rules and conforming to this role has been holding her back?

Click through for more because I have so many thinkythoughts on this 😐

I’d imagine that she would be less given to trying to chase Aladdin off, but she’d be quicker to call him on his BS, too. Because if she’s forgotten everything, even if she KNOWS this is the boy she was going to marry, initially? She doesn’t love him anymore, and doesn’t remember ever loving him. And their relationship might have to rebuild based on camaraderie rather than some initial attraction she might have had toward the freedom his life seemed to promise her when they first met.

Would a story like this focus more on how she felt when she thought Abis Mal was her father? Did she just immediately feel evil? Or did behaving like that just make her feel a little less helpless, having lost all of her identity?

Would some of the adventures Aladdin had without her (or even with her) have gone differently, with her playing the more active role? Would she continually be faced with the temptation to be as bullying as she was when she thought she was the Scourge of the Desert, because it feels easier, because not knowing herself so well and partially resenting the life being pushed back at her, still makes her feel powerless?

(Hell, imagine what ‘The Citadel’ would have been like if Mozenrath had, in spite of his childish, sexist ways, seen her defeat the creature he set loose in the Marketplace.)

k-beryl answered to your post “Just a brief pause to see who thinks what: Followers, when I’m done with the Aladdin series would you still be interested in reading liveblogs of other shows/movies/things?”

It wouldn’t annoy me to see non-Aladdin episodes. Mostly because you seemed to have watched similar shows as me so anything would be fine.

I get the most joy out of introducing people to movies and tv shows that are special to me, and liveblogging seems to be doing better for me than writing regular movie reviews. Aladdin’s such a huge part of my experiences with fandom that it was just the most obvious choice for starting out, but there’s so much more I’d love to share with everybody too. :3

mozenrathoftheblacksand replied to your post “Where was she keeping the crossbow?”

This was part if a play set! I have this doll, they were action figures, Aladdin is wearing the matching outfit. It’s more like “The Wind Jackals of Mozenrath” look but same thing pretty much. Have you seen it?

Yes, the PVC figures! But I mean like – actual dolls. Like she had a million Barbie type dolls but none like this. (She was and may still be one of the most widely marketed Disney Princesses to date, and I like to think that’s largely because the show stayed in syndication so long on channels OTHER than the Disney Channel.)

Conclusion: Aladdin, how did you manage to make me go from being on your side to wishing Jasmine would throatpunch you?

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“It’s not like you actually would have beaten me.”

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Even Genie is like “Are you serious? She totally would have.”

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“Well, it would have been close.”

Some final thoughts on this episode. I appreciate that in later outings, Jasmine is shown to be more capable, more physically daring in terms of combat, etc, but ending this episode by giving her a little more agency in defeating the bad guys rather than banking on a Genie joke that wasn’t even funny was a bad move. Having Abis Mal gloat and then having the group bounce back and take him and his minions down without additional magic? Would have been awesome. Then Aladdin and Jasmine would spend their anniversary as equals on the battlefield. Would have been awesome.

But no.

That’s just one thing I find wrong with this episode, the other major one being the way Jasmine decided to handle letting Aladdin “figure out” what she wanted him to. It’s passed off as a “typical woman” thing and is just sexist writing in general.

Beyond that? There’s a lot of good – a few funny lines from our villain team, and it was interesting to see how Jasmine would fare as a villain, herself, but more importantly, this was the first REAL look we got at how capable she could be.

Seeing Aladdin be a douche at the end of this episode also really makes me want to skip right to “The Secret of Dagger Rock” but I don’t want to inundate you guys with Mozenrath episodes so early on if you guys want me to cover other episodes.

Want more episodes? See the Episode Masterlist.
Hop on over to the Series Theories page for organized rambling.
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