Robin Williams was one of the biggest stars in the world when he agreed to voice the Genie.
At the time, huge stars didnt do cartoon voices.
The most recognizable names inMermaidandBeautyhad been Buddy Hackett and Angela Lansbury.
Credit: Buena Vista/Courtesy Everett Collection
But Williams was built to play the Genie or vice versa.
This reporter arrived with two pages full of questions, and I got through exactly… four questions.
Menken sprinkles his sentences with musical interludes.
For any animation lover, it was a wish come true.
RON CLEMENTS: Most of these films take three to four years to do.
ALAN MENKEN: Actually, Howard [Ashman] and I were developingAladdinwhile we were doingLittle Mermaid.
And then also, Harolds illness played into this period.
Then,Beauty and the Beastkind of inserted itself, if I remember.
We had had such a great experience working with John and Ron, that we continued our collaboration.
CLEMENTS: After we finishedMermaid, it was like, What are we going to do next?
We actually pitched a project that we were interested in.
The studio wasnt that interested.
MUSKER: Well, it turned out Spielberg had the rights to this book.
It wasWere Back, a book about dinosaursthat we wanted to do as a feature.
Pick one of these three.
One wasSwan Lake, and we thought that was too close toMermaid.
MENKEN: Thats never going to work!
CLEMENTS: And the third one wasAladdin.
And we were very familiar withAladdinbecause while we were doingMermaid, I remember hearing the score.
We werent involved with it but we knew Howard was developing it, and it was a great score.
MUSKER: So we said yes toAladdin, but we brought some of our stuff to it.
By the time we got on it, they had moved away from Howard.
Howard had written a 40-page treatment, had a story approach to it.
MENKEN: And a lot of what was in that version now is in the Broadway show.
Because it was more of a Hope/Crosby road picture kind of tone, with sidekicks and wide-cracking.
There was no music in the script that we read, and it was more of a live-action-y approach.
We played the princess a little differently and introduced some new characters.
CLEMENTS: I guess youd say there were three versions ofAladdin.
There was Howards original version.
MENKEN: And eventually Prince Ali.
It was actually written, sadly, on Howards hospital bed.
He was at St. Lukes.
I brought him a keyboard and we were writing.
And there was one other song that got cut.
It was Howards last song pretty much, called Humiliate the Boy.
MUSKER: It was a song for Jafar, the villain.
And then you guys wrote Prince Ali.
Great, great song.
Just full of so much fun.
MUSKER: He said, My brain is okay.
Thats what he said to us.
MENKEN: It was hard.
One of the toughest things.
FromBeautytoAladdin, that aged all of us to go through that.
But Humiliate the Boy: we all look at it as a metaphor for what Howard was going through.
Its this song in which Jafar is stripping everything away from Aladdin.
And everything was being stripped away from Howard at the time.
CLEMENTS: Its Howards last song.
And its a great song, but its very dark.
MUSKER: So we were working onAladdinwhileBeauty and the Beastwas being worked on.
It became a cause celebre and everyone loved this… it was very romantic, sincere, and passionate.
How are they going to react to this after this wonderful, beautiful, sincere love story.
Will people buy it?
CLEMENTS: In a way, thats the good thing that these things do take so long to do.
It was going to be what it was going to be.
MENKEN: But there was what did you call it?
Holy Thursday and Black Friday.
[Laughter]
MUSKER: Hes alluding to when we showed the movie to Jeffrey Katzenberg.
CLEMENTS: We showed it to him on a Thursday.
CLEMENTS: Robin Williams was in it and some of the songs were in it.
MUSKER: Its a rough assemblage before there was much animation in it.
And [Katzenberg] was a little cryptic in his initial reaction.
We didnt screen it with a whole roomful of people; it was just him.
He said, Thats a lot of movie, guys.
We were like, Is that good or…?
We went to lunch thinking, Well, that wasnt so bad, was it?
Wait, stop, stop.
I dont want to see any of the rest of this.
I dont know whos who.
So onAladdin, he ran the whole movie.
We talk to him later and we said, Well, Jeffrey, you didnt say anything?
We didnt know if you liked it.
So he sort of said, start over.Really?
Its a year and half and we have to start over?
CLEMENTS: We were in crisis mode.
We sort of started over, but some things came back.
Some songs came back right away.
We kept Arabian Nights, although its condensed version.
And we kept Friend Like Me.
Thats when Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio came on and very quickly retooled the story.
We lost Aladdins mom.
Aladdin grew up a little bit.
His relationship with Jasmine, which was there before, became much more of a focal point.
Music wise, we were sort of in a place where maybe we got maybe half.
MUSKER: You had lost your big collaborator.
MENKEN: I lost Howard, which was actually six months beforeBeautywas released.
ButBeautywas done essentially, as far as his work at that point.
He was convinced thatBeautywas not going to be a hit.
MUSKER/CLEMENTS [Together]: Really?
Theyre going to screw it up.
He was a cynic.
ButAladdinwas in a very pivotal phase, and I heard the results [from the Katzenberg screening].
I wrote a song called it’s possible for you to Count On Me.
But it just wasnt the right spot.
I love his work with Andrew Lloyd Webber andJesus Christ SuperstarandJosephandEvita.
MENKEN: Oh, hes flappable.
But hes not a key in-A flappable.
And hes definitely funny and charming.
So I sent that with a dummy lyric to Tim, and I sent two others.
And the third was A Whole New World.
I flew over to London with Chris Montan and had a few days working with Tim.
And he had whipped out these lyrics and they were working.
A Whole New World, it was very obvious that it was a pretty major song.
Good, but how do you know that?
MENKEN [singing]:Can you read my mind… Great theme.
MENKEN: Sort of like a Spanish feel.
I was also influenced by Tims work, and I knew Dont Cry For Me Argentina.
I liked that sort of South American, Spanish feel.Da-da-da-da-dum.
So I really wanted to incorporate that into the feel.
Here, youre kind of veering off toward aiming for the boys?
MUSKER: Well, it was a comedy with a boy protagonist.
But by the very nature of Robin Williams being the Genie, that set a tone.
And we didnt want to limit him.
So it was risky.
Will they get involved with the story?
Will they care about the characters?
It sort of works on multi levels.
Somehow in animation, it still was emotional and the music certainly
MENKEN: We put emotion in.
We snuck it in.
MUSKER: Emotional investment in Aladdins predicament and his plight.
CLEMENTS: And really, the Genie was Robin Williams.
When he first came in, he was like, Should I play this with an accent?
Should I create a character?
MUSKER: I think Robin as a person, he wanted to make people laugh.
And I made it very clear to Robin, I want you to really perform it like that.
Knowing that thered be improvisation, I wanted to verify we got that basic track.
Came into the studio and sang everything I wanted.
Everyone sat very patiently saying, Alan, did you get everything you need?
Now can Robin have some fun?
And then, Wow.
CLEMENTS: The Genie was let out the bottle.
But at the same time, we were thinking thats just going to be the starting point.
Some people dont realize that animation is really great for improvisation because the voices are recorded first.
And what Robin did, hed come in and hed just start playing in front of the microphone.
But he kept going, Ive go another idea, Ive got another idea.
MUSKER: His first scene, he did it about seven times the way we wrote it.
And then we said, Okay, why dont you play with it?
We ended up with 25 takes of that first scene.
All his material was transcribed.
He was such a huge star at this time, not long afterGood Morning, Vietnam.
CLEMENTS: Certainly the biggest star we had every worked with in terms of something like that.
Because at first, he was like, I dont know… Robin for this?
This isnt what I was picturing.
But it was different for the studio to have a big star.
After Robin, it became cool to do animated films.
Suddenly Tom Hanks is inToy Story…
MUSKER: [Aladdin] is a bit of a dividing line.
Tom Hanks and Mike Myers isShrek.
Stars became easier to get as a result of this, I think.
CLEMENTS: It did change things.
John and I started as animators, and we know how important a voice is.
Theres certain voices that are really ideal for animation, and Robin had one of those voices.
We had always thought that Robin would be great in animation.
We had even thought really briefly of Robin doing Scuttle inThe Little Mermaid.
But they said, You have too many characters in this movie; you have to cut one.
So we sort of cut the dolphin, but we gave some of the dolphins personality to Ariel.
CLEMENTS: But at the same time, that wouldnt have really taken advantage of Robin.
He needed really the right kind of part.
MUSKER: Sure, but we were influenced a little bit at the time too by the movieBeetlejuice.
It just seemed like so much fun.
When he came, everything lit up.
So indirectly, I think that sort of influenced what we were doing onAladdin.
Was there an alchemy that you had to adjust?
MENKEN: Yes, absolutely.
And it became something different.
MENKEN: In retrospect, I wouldnt trade the opportunity to work with Robin Williams for anything.
The thing withAladdinwas we had such a wealth of material between all these different versions.
It was just choosing what to keep.
Originally, we ended the movie with a reprise of Arabian Nights.
MUSKER: And Jeffrey was like, Hey, theyre done!
The audience is on their way out of the theater.
So we had to kind of shorten that.
CLEMENTS: And there was a bit originally where the narrator revealed himself to be the Genie.
We took that out, so now, the narrator is just the narrator.
But the original idea was that he was going to become the Genie.
I think the unsung heroes ofAladdinare the two men in the marketplace: Another suitor for the princess.
MUSKER: Thats me.
CLEMENTS: I have a line too: On his way to the palace, I suppose.
Originally, we intended to model those two characters after Siskel and Ebert, but Eberts glasses proved problematic.
MUSKER: So now weve started sticking ourselves in our various movies.
I have to ask you, Alan, about the live-actionBeauty and the Beast.
MENKEN: Theyre editing it now.
Are they just taking all the songs from the movie?
MENKEN: The songs from the movie are in.
Actually, none of the songs from the Broadway made the film.
Theres a moment where the Beast drives her away and he regrets that.
And as he watches her leave, he sings.
MUSKER: So you wrote a new song?
MENKEN: A new song with Tim Rice.
Theres actually three new songs written for the movie.
Its called Forever More, and theres also a song called Days in the Sun.
MUSKER: Is it based on any of the melodies from the film?
Sort of a cousin of If I Cant Love Her.
So yes, theres new songs and Ill be scoring that in the spring.
MUSKER: Its our first CG feature.
All the other ones weve done were hand drawn.
And its a musical.
Theres a musician Opetaia Foai whos got a band called Te Vaca.
Hes doing the music with Lin-Manual Miranda, whos doneHamiltonhere on Broadway.
Sort of a coming-of-age story set 2,000 years ago in the South Pacific.
Nowwerein our early 60s.
