TIME FOR SOME NONSENSE

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Sorry, let me zoom in on this monstrosity.

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I’m not going to assume this is a “girl” carpet like the show seems to want me to.

Carpet you are consistently shown to be one of the smartest characters on the show you can’t tell me this isn’t suspicious.

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“Is there another carpet behind me this other carpet could be referring to? No, that’s impossible! This premise is already too ridiculous for that to be true!”

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Carpet 😐

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Carpet no.

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I’m going to pretend that Carpet just really likes making new friends and would be curious about meeting another magic carpet and that this has nothing to do with implied sexual attraction at all because THE FANFIC WRITERS DO NOT NEED MORE AMMUNITION.

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I’m sure there’s something profound that could be said about this but I’ve got nothing.

Aladdin is around 17 years old a year after the movie took place.

So a lot of interesting unexplained stuff is happening in this scene. Aladdin, Abu, and Iago have wandered into this alley because Aladdin is lost. In a city he’s lived in all his life. All seventeen years of it, which he clearly says in this scene. For those wanting a definitive number to go by, this episode gives you one.

This episode was written after “Forget Me Lots” – which I’ll cover at a later date. Significant because of Jasmine’s badass costume and because it’s their one-year anniversary of their first date.

Back to the weirdness of this scene.

Specifically, he says that everything seems like it’s been moved around.

Then, this guy shows up.

Fasir is a character you likely recognize from multiple other episodes, a blind seer. If you’re like me, you knew his name before this episode because this is probably one of the LAST episodes you saw him in.

He offers to help Aladdin, and Aladdin kind of bugs the Hell out of me because he assumes this man in extremely plain dress, picking his away around with a cane, who is seemingly blind, just wants his money.

I’m sure nobody ever treated you like that before, Aladdin. There is no reason why I’m extremely annoyed at your behavior right now.

Anyway, Fasir offers to tell him the future and Aladdin’s about to leave him when the old man suggests he might be afraid to hear it.

And this is enough to send Aladdin into full-on Marty McFly mode.

Nobody. Calls me. Chicken.

So he gets his prophecy, from a spirit that Fasir channels called the Mouth of Mammon-Rah.

You race to save a friend so thin.

The dark ship flies; you cannot win.

A pick you’ll find among the bones,

Then meet your doom upon the stones.

Fasir himself predicts that Iago will weep over Aladdin’s motionless form. Aladdin calls bullshit and storms away, only to find himself back in the marketplace as though he had never been lost at all. Iago and Abu are visibly shaken from the encounter, however.

So we get a first look at what Fasir can do in this scene. He was able to fully obscure Aladdin from the real world in order to lead him to a place where he could speak with him away from prying eyes. He communed with a spirit that told Aladdin the future and could produce visions himself. He then had the power to send Aladdin back to the living world.

This is all important to bear in mind if only because this character is kind of elusive and he’s never intensely explained.

So once upon a time there was a giant, named Fashoom, who was a hoarder.

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And he was forever being accosted by Picasso paintings trying to stage an intervention steal his treasures.

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So he blew shit up with an eye laser..

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And he was apparently kind of a jerk to literally everyone, so his brother stepped in and told him to eat a snickers turned him to stone.

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And then “none of this mattered” for a thousand years.

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Thanks, show. You have literally never opened this way before, not even once, but I guess this was better than trying to slip this information in some other way.

Production Code Episode 17 – The Prophet Motive

I received a request for the episode “Eye of the Beholder” and I explained I could address it when I’d introduced two key characters featured therein. One is Mirage, who’ll come up in the next episode, but before that, another key character.

I actually did not know said character’s intro episode was this one, because I always thought it came much later in the series. (I actually thought the first episode for this character was “Do the Rat Thing.”) You see, the full run of Aladdin episodes did not all come together on one channel. One set of episodes were aired weekdays on the Disney Afternoon, but concurrently, another set ran on Saturday mornings on CBS. I didn’t discover the Saturday morning episodes until I’d been watching the Disney Afternoon for a long time, so I always thought the CBS episodes took place later in the series. I was wrong. This was actually the 17th episode written.

I’m a little uncomfortable that there are so many posts hating on Aladdin as a character. Why watch the show if you don’t like him?

Oh dear. I’m sure it looks that way considering one of my major tags is “aladdin might be an asshole,“ but let me assure you I do like the character, but I also really appreciate that he’s a deeply flawed character, which isn’t uncharacteristic for Disney cartoons of the time. Darkwing Duck is so full of himself he has trouble acknowledging his own mistakes — he has an ego of Mike Wazowski proportions. Scrooge McDuck gets into trouble because of his general greed. Baloo gets into hot water when he’s too easygoing. The point is that this is standard for male leads in Disney shows of the 80s and 90’s. It makes the characters more relate-able, and true to form, sometimes people with flaws don’t learn from their mistakes.

Sometimes — a lot of times, actually — Aladdin really doesn’t learn from his mistakes. And that’s cool. I throw around the word “asshole” willy nilly, but then I also curse a lot in general. Sometimes, Aladdin is a bit of an asshole, but we still love him anyway.

What do you think of Eden/other genies appearing on the show? I was always annoyed when Eden didn’t show up after her second appearance :/

Other than Eden I don’t recall any other genies appearing in the show, but I would have liked to have encountered more because I want to know more about how they work. (Seriously, when Chaos remarks “A blue Genie!“ and suggests this means things will be extra fun, I want to know what he meant by that.)

I liked Eden in her first episode, but I am not certain she was handled by the same writers in the second one, because her personality didn’t seem quite the same to me. I’m kind of a stickler for writing consistency. (There’s also a couple scenes where you can tell that either the animators did not know what Eden’s VA was referencing and just didn’t animate her properly, or they weren’t ALLOWED to and had to just keep her normal. They’ve done this a few times already with Genie, too. It wasn’t so obvious when I was a kid, but it’s way more obvious now.) All in all, in her second appearance she was written in such a way that came off as writers trying way too hard to be clever and the jokes falling pretty damn flat.

(I also don’t appreciate that Dandi was thrown to the side and ignored completely because, honestly, if she’d found a way to sneak along, it would have been really interesting if only because we’ve never seen Mozenrath interact with children. I’m not huge on children in peril, but I’m still curious.)

Conclusion: “I want Aladdin to like me.”

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Also b’awww. The colors changed back. But I have to admit my heart broke for her just a little bit when she said that.

It’s like – the standard response would probably be “that’s not a good reason to do the right thing, but at least she did the right thing.” But I want to think about that decision for a minute. She summoned a monster to get rid of her competition because it had to make Aladdin love her. Once it turned on her she knew it wouldn’t do that, for certain. She’s offered power, prestige, even a position that rivals that of Jasmine’s – which is one reason why she thinks Aladdin would choose Jasmine over her.

I’m not sure she’s even thinking about saving her own life at this point. If she makes the monster go away, Aladdin won’t hate her. That’s enough for now.

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She apologizes for what she’s done. Aladdin makes it clear that he loves Jasmine, even if he likes Sadira. I find it interesting that Jasmine reaches out to her anyway, inviting her to the palace, and I kind of wonder what her state of mind on matters is, presently. We know they become friends much later, but we do know that right now, Sadira does not want to be Jasmine’s friend, and that’s understandable. 

When you view another person as competition it is hard to be friendly with them, and it’s a shame Sadira only sees her that way initially. Jasmine could do with a friend who’s not her boyfriend or his entourage, and Sadira needs more friends, period.

So there’s no lesson learned at the end of this. Aladdin’s friends don’t apologize to him for giving him crap about his wardrobe. Sadira apologizes but considering she’s just looking for another spell to use, she hasn’t learned her lesson yet.

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Not all of it, at any rate.

I have conflicted feelings about Sadira. On one hand I can totally understand why she’d form such an obsessive attachment to Aladdin, because even without unfortunate circumstances, I know what it’s like to be a lonely teenager with feelings of unrequited love, and I know how easy it is for a person in that situation to get certain ideas about how it should go or how it will end.

…Mostly it ends with feeling sad and embarrassed because so much of it got built up in your head. That’s one way it goes, anyway.

So I get that.

We don’t know how long Sadira has been alone. We know she learned to read. We know she somehow knew about the Witches of the Sand. We know she’s more agile than Aladdin is (and this really, really doesn’t get played up enough in her episodes).

It leaves one wondering.

Still, someone sticking their neck out for her is a big deal. It suggests it’s definitely not something she’s used to.

I have to wonder how long she’s been in Agrabah, however, because given her age and how good she is at this and that Razoul and the rest of the guards don’t already know who she is? And also that Aladdin, who has been running those streets all his life, didn’t know her?

She can’t originally be from Agrabah. So how did she get there? When?

Want more episodes? See the Episode Masterlist.
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