![genie aladdin old vs new genie aladdin old vs new](https://www.denofgeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/funny-tweets-about-smith-genie-aladdin-trailer.jpg)
Marwan Kenzari, a Dutch-Tunisian actor, takes the part of the dastardly vizier, Jafar. Princess Jasmine, whom he woos, is played by Naomi Scott, whose Ugandan mother is of Gujarati Indian descent. We have an African-American, Will Smith, as the Genie, and a Cairo-born Coptic Canadian, Mena Massoud, as Aladdin. The director of the latest “Aladdin” is a middle-aged white Brit, Guy Ritchie, but the diversity of his cast is quite in keeping with the tangled roots of the tale. Ian McKellen, no less, once braved the role.
![genie aladdin old vs new genie aladdin old vs new](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/eUOhAY-X8vo/maxresdefault.jpg)
Even the location is up for grabs: the Aladdin of the “Arabian Nights” hails not from an Arabic land but from what Horta calls “a distinctly Islamic China.” In many British theatres, around Christmas, you can still see a pantomime of “Aladdin” set in “old Peking,” with a male actor cross-dressed as Widow Twankey. In “Marvellous Thieves,” a nimble 2017 study of the “Arabian Nights” and its provenance, Paulo Lemos Horta notes that Diyab, prior to recounting “Aladdin” to Galland, had attended the royal court, in Versailles, with Lucas (who made him robe up in mock-Oriental garb), and admired the bejewelled splendor of the women-a Western detail that gleams in the Eastern princess of “Aladdin.” Thus do cultures feast upon one another. The already tall tale grew loftier over the centuries, and few of the tellers are to be trusted. Any quest for an ur-“Aladdin” will be in vain. Voilà!Īll this suggests that we should be extremely careful when assuming that Disney is in the business of polluting a pure original. From there, it is said, the lad emerged with two objects: a ring and a lamp. During their travels, they arrived at a dilapidated church, where, at Lucas’s command, a young goatherd was sent into a cave amid the ruins. And where might Diyab have heard about Aladdin? Hard to say, but Diyab’s memoirs, now in the Vatican Library, reveal that he had recently acted as a guide to another Frenchman, Paul Lucas, who had gone to Aleppo in search of treasures for the French king. (Although two manuscripts of the story were later discovered, they proved to be sophisticated forgeries, translated back into Arabic from Galland’s French.) The orphans were supplied by Hanna Diyab, an itinerant Maronite Christian, whom Galland met in Paris, in 1709. Not all of them, though “Aladdin” was among the so-called orphan tales added by Galland on his own initiative. A fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript was the main source for most of the translations. The fable of Aladdin appears in the vastly influential French translation of the “Arabian Nights” by Antoine Galland, which was published between 17. And that was based, in the loosest possible way, on “Aladdin and the Magic Lamp,” one of the tales in the “Arabian Nights,” the origins of which, you might think, are lost in the mists of time. The new live-action Disney movie, “Aladdin,” is based on another Disney movie, the animated “Aladdin,” from 1992.