Surprise, I decided to do another Mechanicles episode! My roommate mentioned liking this one, and because I didn’t give his episodes a lot of chances as a kid, this is one I haven’t seen from beginning to end. I thought I’d watch it through before doing the full liveblog, but I realized there were things I wanted to talk about pretty much from the beginning, so here we go!
Since it’s a Mechanicles episode I’m going to go ahead and warn in advance for potential ableism or sanism, based upon what I observed the last time I did one of his episodes. No seriously.
After a very long delay (three part time jobs will do that), I’m wrapping up this episode by just focusing on the one thing that I thought needed to be discussed and then moving on to the next one.
While Jasmine and Iago are trying to steal food for themselves, they hear a mother calling her children to dinner. Jasmine climbs up to a window to look in and see what she can nick, only to discover that the family in question is so poor that all they can eat is a single date each, because they need to make their food last.
This is kind of important for Jasmine, because she’s displayed on more than one occasion before this that she’s kind of ignorant to how rough it is for poor people. She was almost seriously injured in the first movie because of it. She doesn’t understand how Aladdin can sympathize with creatures like rats because even though she’s had glimpses into this kind of life before, it’s always been from a very safe vantage point.
For the first time, I think Jasmine really gets it.
So the melon she and Iago swiped (or were about to swipe) is left on the doorstep for this family. Because nobody should have to go to bed with a single date in their belly.
This becomes important later when, after Jasmine’s ordeal is over with and she’s human again, the first thing she’s concerned about is talking to her father about the poor in Agrabah and what they should do to make things better.
The Sultan, of course, replies, “We have…poor people in Agrabah?”
I’m going to throw him a bone for this one. Jafar was the one running the city for the longest time. He was the one giving orders to the guards. He was the one handling all of these affairs and leaving the Sultan feeling perfectly content that all was well in his fair city – when in reality, there are people homeless, or starving just to keep a roof over their heads.
This is the first time anyone in the show talks about dealing with it on a state level. This is important.
Want more episodes? See the Episode Masterlist. Hop on over to the Series Theories page for organized rambling. Send me an ask if you have questions or requests or just want to talk about any ideas YOU got from reading all this. See my support page if you’d like to send a donation!
This exchange tickles me a little because I think that while Jasmine has a legitimate grievance, she’s hanging on the wrong thing, here, and I think Iago kind of helps her to see that, because she finally comes down on a really solid reason why she should still be out here.
Seriously, all the expressions in this scene.
Production Code Episode 22 – Do the Rat Thing
I kept saying I would do this episode and I was in the mood for more Jasmine and Iago bonding, so here we go. This is another one of the earliest episodes I ever saw, and I’m pretty sure it was the first Jasmine-centric episode I ever saw.
I so cannot get over the expression Genie is making in this shot.
Production Code Episode 27: Sandswitch
We knew at the end of Sadira’s first episode that she hadn’t learned her lesson yet. So here we go.
This is actually one of the very first episodes I ever saw, and definitely my first Sadira episode, and it was a long time before I ever saw another (her final episode, actually!), and I was always a little disappointed because it seemed like it would be going in other, more interesting directions for her, it just wasn’t to be. I appreciate this episode more now that I have a better grasp of Sadira’s personality, at the very least.
But this is one of several “Iago and Abu are the main characters” episodes that crop up every now and again.
I just love this entire exchange. From the split decision to announce there was never a beard, to Jasmine’s seeming assumption that all men call each other “Man” and pretty much nothing else when they’re being casual.
I want Mulan and Jasmine to have fun failed army adventures together.
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.
The DVD Fairy 