Aladdin (the TV series) 20th anniversary -- Episode 17: "Plunder the Sea" (9/22/94)

Out of the entire series, this might just be the episode that, until watching it so as to write this review, I’d retained the weakest memory of. However, I did remember being nonplussed by it. As such, being merely underwhelmed by it – as opposed to actively disliking it – would account for the poor impression that it originally made on me. This time around, I hoped to discover something that I didn’t pick up on twenty years ago that would give me a wholly new appreciation for it (as happened with “Never Say Nefir”).  That hasn’t panned out; not only am I disappointed by the episode again, I'm disappointed to find that I was disappointed by it again. (I just made my own mind spin a little.)

Clinched by using Mechanicles as the antagonist, the episode recycles key components of “My Fair Aladdin”, in terms of structure, premise, and characterization: we open on a pair of characters (two nomads in “Fair”, a merchant ship captain and a lone crewman here) in the midst of their travels, alone in a remote location, suddenly and surprisingly attacked by an unidentified, fantastical, monstrous entity. Here, we cut right to the captain having obtained the Sultan’s audience, recounting his wild story and demanding that something to be done, as his ship was destroyed in the attack and his cargo lost. On the other hand, in “Fair”, the nomads weren’t seen after the opening; instead, a couple of scenes later, we returned to the scene of their encounter, which Razoul and his men are examining. (Presumably, the nomads had reported their incident to the palace, just as “Plunder”’s the captain is seen doing.) When Aladdin’s gang investigate and search for the reported monster, it ends up being a Mechanicles invention, its purpose to subject a large chunk of the world to his “clean freak” impulses. (In “Fair”, he’s trying to turn the desert into glass. Here, his intention is to filter all of the salt out of the ocean’s salt water.)

But that’s not all: in both episodes, Aladdin has as a foil a suave, pompous, self-infatuated, impeccably groomed jackass who makes Aladdin feel inadequate, which motivates him to prove himself equal or superior to this new-on-the-scene alpha male. While Daru Tavelevil had turned out to be a phony who was hiding a dirty deal that he’d made with Mechanicles, Captain Al Bahtross is the “dashing”, athletic, but aloof type in the tradition of Duke Igthorn’s brother or (the super-powered version) Comet Guy, who, despite his bravado, self-absorption, and obnoxious-to-the-average-bloke penchant for seeming to have never had anything not go his way, is basically good-hearted. The twist at “Fair”’s climax was Daru being exposed for the rat that he was, while on the other hand, Bahtross, who hitherto had appeared preoccupied with being the “reigning champ” of sensational, super-human heroic feats, redeems himself through an act of selfless heroism, urging Aladdin not to rescue him from one of Mechanicles’ vessel’s mock-giant octopus tentacles, but instead to find a way to disable the machine, which in the skirmish, Mechanicles has kicked into some type of overdrive.

One peculiar difference between the two episodes is that here, wanting to show up Bahtross is what motivates Aladdin to take on the mission; in “Fair”, he had actually brushed off the matter of the rumored giant centipede and sent Genie to look into it, because as long as Daru remained a guest at the palace, that’s where Al had to be if he wanted to best Daru in front of Jasmine. This scenario engendered my major criticism of that episode: Aladdin’s rivalry with Daru, and Daru himself, was awkwardly dropped for the duration of the Mechanicles-giant centipede set piece and abruptly forced back in at the last minute with the revelation of his “arms transfer” to the shrill-voiced inventor. On the other hand, Aladdin’s rivalry with Bahtross plays out over the course of the whole adventure; its zenith and resolution are fully integrated into the zenith and resolution of the Mechanicles scenario. Given that, it’s not just the better crafted of the two episodes, but it in fact plays as what the earlier-aired one should have been.

Also, “Plunder”’s third-act set piece is much better. In "Fair", we just had the gang dropping rocks on the goofy-looking separated, individual, autonomous but clunky giant mechanical centipede pods in a nondescript chasm in the desert at night. But the situation at "Plunder"'s climax involves Mechanicles’ submersible vessel -- with its exterior shaped as a male human head with an austere, bearded face, it has a unique design that makes it a more imposing setting-cum-obstacle. The  “majesty and might” and linear perfection of the face, and the appearance of Mechanicles' control room, which looks like it was crafted by a master metalsmith, is more befitting of the classical Greek ideals of beauty that I’m sure Mechanicles values highly. And not only are the visual ideas here better, but the action is more complex; again, instead of just dropping rocks on the bad guy’s machines, there’s interdependent stuff happening on multiple fronts: Bahtross scrapping with the tentacle, Genie at one point scrambling to and succeeding in (more on that below!) plugging the suction intake portal thing (with the treasure chest recovered from the ship that sank at the beginning of the episode, which was actually the whole point of their mission, so they won’t want to lose it or see it destroyed, but its predicament is just one of several things going on at the moment), which has and Mechanicles in turn scrambling to get things operating again, and finally, Aladdin racing to confront Mechanicles and their duel of wits which results in the machine’s destruction.

And, yes, that’s even with the incongruous and frankly ugly tentacles (whereas the face has a “unique” design, the tentacles are “generic”), but at least they serve in the opening scene to create mystery and hide the true nature of whatever it is they’re attached to, and as objects of conflict at a few points in the plot, especially when one of them is what indisposes Bahtross, allowing him to say, in essence, “No, Aladdin, it’s more important that we stop this guy – forget me, even if it means you being the hero and not me!”

But let’s take a few steps back.  Yes, “Fair” is better in execution than “Plunder”. But it’s just a better execution of a construct that’s inherently limiting and unappealing, the character arc that both episodes subjected Aladdin through: he is driven to prove himself better than some smooth, narcissistic showoff, and in the end he learns … er, something … in “Fair”, he learns that his rival isn’t so great after all, and in “Plunder”, he learns…er, I guess he learns that true heroism isn’t about hogging the glory by doing all the big flashy stuff that stops the bad guy and saves the day, but that true heroism is in acts of selflessness made for the greater good … and he learns this the optimal way, by being the one – because Al Bahtross is busy being about to get killed – who gets to do all the big flashy stuff that stops the bad guy and saves the day? In the original movie, Aladdin was shown as cocky, competitive, and, yes, prideful (see the “One Leap Forward” number and his clashing with Razoul), so the show was justified in using said traits as a starting point. And I liked the quasi-realism of the sequence in which he stubbornly keeps himself tied to the mast for the duration of the storm. But as the series had no long-term, ongoing character arc for or any of the other regulars, this “Aladdin is threatened by some big shot but learns a lesson about what really matters” episode structure template is self-defeating. They may as well have foregone the pretense and just had him defeat the bad guy and save the day … after all, it’s good enough for pretty much every other episode, isn’t it?

And speaking of being good enough for other episodes, why can’t they just do a straightforward “Al and the gang vs. Mechanicles” episode? He’s a fine villain, and the build-up around a “mystery of the sea” only disappoints when we reach the “reveal” that it’s “just” another Mechanicles scheme. He can hold his own, and it just feels like there was a “one-shot”, non-Mechanicles story that was set up but left untold.

And isn’t there something familiar about Al and signing on as crew for a ship with an overbearing captain to search for an elusive monster? In part, it’s “Raiders of the Lost Shark” redux, with a one-note (un-)comedic character confoundingly and awkwardly voiced by Jason Alexander.

Genie Watch: He actually has an extended proactive, effective involvement here – see the undersea “search” scene in which he’s accompanied by Iago and Abu, and his above-mentioned plugging of the suction portal. While he lets himself be overpowered by the vacuuming force longer than he should before doing something about it, his “moment of glory” – in which he turns himself into a “majestic” whale and “heroic” music plays – is a welcome turn of events. 

___________________

As always, written with you in mind, Chris, old friend and mentor.

Aladdin (the series) 20th anniversary -- Episode 6: "My Fair Aladdin" (4/3/94)

To my delight and relief, the apprehension that I felt toward reviewing this episode, indicated at the end of my previous post, was baseless – the episode I was actually thinking was “Moonlight Madness”, which I remember as an absolutely lifeless, banal “Aladdin and Jasmine’s romance”-oriented episode. “My Fair Aladdin” is in fact a Mechanicles episode, an episode in which Iago is well-characterized and Genie is decently-characterized (at least at certain points), and an episode with just a smidgen of social satire – it’s all of these things, all of which are good. That said, it’s not by any means a perfect episode … but for me, what’s likable about it wins out over its flaws.

First off, with Aladdin’s “street rat” background, it’s logical that a culture clash would unfold when playing him off against some refined, mannered, hoity-toity types, and its fair game to exploit such a scenario to get an episode out of it. However, much like I thought that Abu was mis-characterized in a less-than-flattering way in “Much Abu About Something”, Aladdin’s lack of confidence here doesn’t sit well. What happened to the quick-witted, smooth-talking Aladdin from original feature film? Also, by the time the end credits of the latter had begun rolling, hadn’t he largely broken through the class barrier? True, that doesn’t mean he has the education or lifelong grooming in propriety that those in the royal echelon would, but he’d been getting along fine in the episodes we’ve seen so far, so this seems like an abrupt step back. Steve Roberts’ script would have come off better had it emphasized that Daru Tavelevil’s arrival on the scene had reminded him of his supposed cultural deficiencies.

Daru Tavelevil, who in this episode, a misled 

Aladdin sees as his doppelganger.

Perhaps the reason that I’m willing to overlook this awkward characterization is because by the end of the first act, the episode largely lets it go by the wayside. Besides Aladdin remaining in his fancy duds (the same as his “Prince Ali” get-up, which I actually had totally missed until Disney Wiki pointed it out to me), most of the episode is standard Aladdin-and-the-gang-take-on-Mechanicles-and-his-latest-scheme-and-contraptions fare. There’s really no through-line from Daru subplot through most of the Mechanicles scenes. Once Jasmine points out that Genie has taken a long time in returning from his investigation, Aladdin is initially reluctant to even pursue the matter – after all, traipsing off and getting his hands dirty on some rough-and-tumble adventure isn't for NPR listeners like him and Daru. Aladdin stubbornly avowing this change in disposition is exactly what I would’ve expected, but once Jasmine forces him onto Carpet, it’s pretty much dropped – from thereon out, Aladdin does the standard hero thing, without any hesitation or protest. After all, once the episode was moving, it had to go through its paces and wrap itself up in 22 minutes – feeding the machine, as Tad Stones put it (and I seem to reference in virtually every post that's part of this ongoing project).

Apparently, Aladdin has forgotten the lesson he learned from

going through that whole big musical number in the movie.

The Daru subplot does wrap up with the rest of the episode, but practically as an afterthought – it comes out that his elitism was a farce (isn’t it always?), and that he in fact was the source of the material Mechanicles used to build his giant mechanical centipede, a deal which Daru saw through with little to no ethical qualms. The “Daru wasn’t all he was cracked up to be”/“Aladdin’s a real, genuine, person, and Daru was just a big faker” lesson was inevitable, but what’s surprising is that it plays out with Daru completely off-screen. As his transaction with Mechanicles is past-tense, I don’t know how a “caught in the act” moment would’ve worked, but it certainly seems like it would’ve been more dramatically effective. And Aladdin’s self-realization would’ve had more gravitas if Daru had been present for the whole ordeal with the centipede, with the two psychological rivals somehow competing. Of course, Daru would never see fit to soil his dainty little hands with such boorish undertakings, and if he were at hand, his cowardice and his likely lacking physical prowess would be readily apparent, so how he would’ve been able to continue making Aladdin look inferior would’ve been a trick … and that’s probably why Roberts had him stay behind at the palace in the first place. Still, the revelation that he’s a fraud and a dirty dealer barely registers when he hasn’t been in play since the end of the first act. The way that this crammed-in game-changer information is very succinctly (to the point where it’s no more than a blip) imparted only through dialogue, and we only see Daru again in a hurried, closing gag depicting his punishment, feels much like the accelerated endings to many Silver Age comic book stories, the type that would occur when the writer and/or artist realized that they were quickly running down their allotted page count.

More of a plot device than even an incidental character (especially given his lasting invisibility), where the episode comes up short in using him as a foil for Aladdin, he is used wonderfully to facilitate Iago’s role in the episode. The endearingly surly parrot’s “Awww, don’t sweat it, kid, this stuff is all about FAKING it!” approach to coaching Aladdin’s in the ways of the aristocracy is a very fitting, sharp bit of characterization. I extend my kudos to Roberts for glomming onto and running with this take on the character, and to Gottfried for bringing Iago’s lines to life with such, er, zest. (Iago/Gottfried detractors might call it something else…) To anyone from a working class background who went into their 20’s thinking that hipsters, academia, and Northampton, MA-area earthy-crunchy types just had to be the bee’s knees, only to later come out of their 20’s utterly disillusioned with such parties, Iago’s observations are aglow with more than just an ember of truth. (Iago’s flippant response to Jasmine’s horror at learning of Daru’s betrayal, “Yeah, but think of all those jobs he created!”, is far and away my favorite line of the episode. While he meant it facetiously, it reminds me of how the demographics alluded to above see “their” politicians as squeaky-clean, when they’re in reality just as corrupt and dirty-dealing as their supposed foes. Harry Reid’s fake moral outrage at the Koch Brothers, and how his naïve supporters believe he means it, is the kind of thing that I have in mind here…) (I know, I know, per the laws of time and space, that can’t possibly be what Roberts had in mind; just some free association on my part…)

"Stick with me, kid, and you'll have 'em 

eatin'outta your hand!"

Iago letting it slip that Aladdin isn’t the first ill-mannered boor that he’d gifted with the Scroll of Witty Quotations, but that he’d also exposed Daru to it is one of those “Man, Iago really can be a bastard” moments. His redemptive moment – dropping the rock on the only remaining and functioning part of Mechanicles’ centipede, its head – is both ham-fisted and (like so much else in the final act) rushed and under-developed. (Would that one little pebble REALLY put that formidable, iron-wrought machine on the fritz? Well, I guess, from what’s shown – the rock strikes the head’s protruding “stickler”, throwing it off balance, jamming it stickler-first into the ground [seems to be a running theme…], forcing Mechanicles to push some sort of “eject” button, sending the off-axis contraption careening off into the sunset … but it all happens so fast,  before a close re-viewing, I was under the impression that the rock basically “took out” the whole kit and caboodle…) 

Really?

Presumably, Iago’s off-screen backstory encounter with Daru took place even before the original feature film (because of the wording, I actually didn’t even at first realize that he meant he’d given Daru the scroll before the events of this episode), so can’t we write it off as having happened before Iago had reformed anyway?

A prime Iago-Abu moment transpires at the episode’s climax, right after Iago rescues Abu, and the former quickly sees fit to renounce the relief he’d expressed a moment earlier, as the latter in kind renounces his corresponding gratitude. 

"I'd rather not have been saved at all 

than be saved by YOU!"

Let us not forget that this is a Mechanicles episode. Obsessed with turning the desert to glass so that it's surface is smooth, much like he can't stand wrinkles in his clothing, Mechanicles is more unbalanced and volatile in his obsessive-compulsive neuroses than he was in "Getting the Bugs Out".

 I do wish that there were more intricacy and finesse in the design and animation of the centipede. Those stubby little legs and their stunted walk don’t do justice to what’s supposed to be Mechanicles’ ingenuity or to the aesthetic I believe that the production team is going for. But, I suppose we can’t expect full-on Hayao Miyazaki-type visual splendor in a `90’s weekday American TV cartoon.

(One of the episode's better rendering's of the 

giant mechanical centipede, IMHO.)

 (Yuck, those legs. Must've been a bitch to animate.)

The opening scene, set at a sand dune under the desert moon, where two nomads have a run-in with the centipede, is rich with that mystic, ancient-desert-of-legend ambience that the series has knack for imparting. Most of what follows isn’t so as atmospheric, alternately concerned with mundane situations and standard good guys-versus-bad guys kidvid fare. 

However, there are traces of an effort to build a sense of mystery and intrigue: Razoul and the other guards are put to nice use in the very fleeting scene in which they follow up on the reports of “glass sand”, only to quickly be sent by the mechanical centipede hightailing it back to Agrabah. I like the idea of them as a defense squad on a reconnaissance mission to determine the existence and viability of a supposed external, possibly encroaching threat. They’re played as buffoons for comic relief here (in sharp contrast with how bloodthirsty Razoul was in Return of Jafar and, to a lesser extent, in “Mudder’s Day”), and so the opportunity to pile on the sense of a looming unseen menace is largely squandered. But I do approve of this conception of how the kingdom is run, even if it’s only suggested here.

(Note the similarity in the guards' first reaction shot -- the wide shot, not the 
half-shot that follows -- and that of the nomads, further up. 
Not sure if the parallel was intentional, or if it was just laziness, 
falling back on what's known to work.)

Genie watch: He has his down moments here, for sure, but this is may just be his best performance in any of the episodes we’ve seen so far. In his first scene, he actually plays it straight for a couple lines, trying to console, reassure, and pep-talk Aladdin; we see far too little of their friendship in the series.

His subsequent earnest assuming of the role of butler to the newly-debonair Aladdin’s butler is both funny and charming … mainly because it stems from Genie’s affection for his friend, rather than being just another generic impression.

"HOLD IT!!! My master knows which 

forks are for what now!!!:

Later, as expected, he indulges in the kinds of impressions and “costumes”/alternate forms that he’s prone to, but on not just one but several occasions, he actually uses them circumstantially in trying to achieve something that’s actually logical, and a few times, actually succeeds! He even gets a “solo” scene, tasked with investigating the mystery of the-sand-that’s-turned-to-glass. Donning the guise of first a weather-tracking helicopter, then a traffic cop, and finally, a TV news reporter are actual intelligent and purposeful choices. 

His intermittent moments of incompetence throughout the very same bit – diving headfirst from a cliff and getting lodged head-first in the sand, getting burnt to a crisp in classic Looney Tunes/Tex Avery-fashion by the fire-blaster in the centipede’s mouth, and being duped into the glass bottle – are painful to behold … and the former two are completely unnecessary, as there already is sufficient humor in Genie’s more typical antics; and Roberts could have actually had it be difficult to trick Genie into the bottle.

But Genie in good form, as he is in the aforementioned “good” examples, is so rare in this series, that I’m practically ready to celebrate this sequence.

It seems to be a rule of the series that any Genie can be trapped in any bottle or oil lamp, but I do wish they’d have spelled this out at the get-go. At least in having Genie’s disappearance be what spurs the rest of the gang to go look into matters for themselves, he’s actually for once a character that the others care about, and not just a walking provider of gags. 

Finally, he is absolutely on his A-game (in more ways than one), when at the episode’s climax he takes on the visage of a basketball player and takes out the centipede’s now-separated segments by slam-dunking rounded rocks into their, er, smokestacks with complete competence, grace, and success. 

If only he were to have more frequently been written using his shape-shifting/impersonation powers as competently and effectively as he does here.

-- Ryan

Aladdin (the series) 20th anniversary -- Episode 1: "Getting the Bugs Out" (2/6/94)

If Wikipedia's episode list is correct, this was the first episode of the series aired … by The Disney Channel on February 6^th, 1994. Like Rescue Rangers and Darkwing Duck before it, Disney's premium cable channel aired several episodes as a "preview" in the spring immediately preceding the series' Disney Afternoon debut (and in some cases, as with Aladdin, its co-debut on network Saturday mornings). For this blog series, I'm going go by broadcast order, including Disney Channel's "preview" airdates.

Following Abis Mal's introduction in Return of Jafar (well, technically, Disney Channel premiered this episode BEFORE Return's release … but I'm cheating a little here in my ordering system), here we meet the series' second recurring villain, Mechanicles. Like Abis Mal, Mechanicles isn't a powerful sorcerer or supernatural entity of any type; he's a mere human being, and, used for comic relief, a very bumbling one. However, rather than being pure comic relief, Mechanicles' machines are a legitimate menace. Mal's villainy stems from his scheming nature, which oft results in a clusterfuck that our heroes are inevitably pulled into … whether deliberate or not.

Mehcanicles. (Not from "Getting the Bugs Out".)

A genius – at least in a highly specialized aspect – Mechanicles may be, but that is offset by his eccentric aloofness and obsessive compulsiveness. The latter trait is a clear attempt on the writers' part to give Mechanicles' a distinctive quirk or twist. It does come off as forced and unimaginative, but Charlie Adler's vocal performance (shrill and grainy as it may be), the gaunt features of his character design, and the jumpy tension in the animators' better poses work in conjunction to convey the character's high-strung irritability and misanthropic disdain. The result is consistently entertaining and, as uncongenial as the ancient tinkerer may be, endearing … at least to me; perhaps it's an acquired taste.

With little added in Return of Jafar to the environs of the original theatrical movie other than Abis Mal's lair, this is our first taste of Stones and his crew's -- I suppose in this case, writer Steve Roberts' -- world-building.The peasant village located at the bottom of a cliff that suffers Mechanicles' repeated terrorism is a modest, but by all means suiting, addition. Mechanicles himself is an acute, well-considered expansion of the series' universe: the "base" setting, Agrabah, is ambiguously Arabian in terms of time and place. So it's logical and feels natural that somewhere across the desert, there co-exists a caricaturized ancient Greece or ancient Greece-esque domain, with a least one Athenian-like elitist inhabiting it. (We never see any of Mechanicles other' people; they probably couldn't stand him as much as he couldn't stand them.)

Of course, we shouldn't overlook the very crux of Mechanicles' function as a villain: his creations. As these constructions represent technology found in whatever era the series is set in, I'm considering them a component of the world-building, even though said technology was exclusive to the villain that would literally be nothing (except a selfish, irate, somewhat autistic Poindexter) without them. The show's creators were right on the mark in designing Mechanicles' individual and various squadrons of contraptions in a fashion that look like they COULD be a product of the Ionian Enlightenment, yet are just fantastical enough to be a part of the series' amorphous reimagining of the ancient world.  

Now, where the hoity-toity one's Greek temple-patterned workshop -- being set on a hill covered with a flourishing of grass that's beneath a spring day-like blue sky – actually is in relation to the desert on which Agrabah is built is unclear, but he and the heroes seem to get back and forth between it and the peasant village – which is implied during Aladdin's crew's search for the source of the deadly toy mechanical bug to be on the outskirts of Agrabah -- with ease and rapidity. Such vague geography is curious, but I'm not gonna let it get to me. (Perhaps Mechanicles' headquarters shares a temporal wormhole with Magica De Spell's rock mountain carved in a giant-sized likeness of her head.)

Opening the episode with Jasmine exploring the marketplace "disguised" under cloak and hood is an appreciable gesture of continuity with the original movie. The same can be said for the Sultan's fascination with toys, but it's even more impressive and effective that they used that character trait to set up the plot. The mechanical toy bug carrying out its Trojan horse programming and going into predator mode makes for a whammy of a shift in tone. This revelation of its true nature facilitates a mystery as to its origins, functioning as a decided plot hook.  

On the other hand, Jasmine's disgust with Aladdin's arrogance and Aladdin learning through the course of the episode that he's nothing "without a little help from [his] friends" is a forced, trite, and overly preacher attempt at a character arc. Worse yet, it rings as out of character – I don't remember Aladdin as ever being nearly this smug or conceited in the movie. He was confident and crafty in his acts of mischief and flaunting authority, but never an outright jerk. Tad Stones has said that the most difficult thing about the series was its star already having in the movie already gone through his major character arc. This episode certainly shows that Stones and crew were struggling to figure out what to do with said character. I would contend: why was a character arc so necessary to this episode? We already KNOW who the characters are. Isn't the plot enough? The real motivation here is Aladdin and the crew being compelled to track down the source of the mechanical bug. (By the way, did have Sultan HAVE to say, "If there's more, others could be in danger!"? Did it have to be spelled out? It made it feel as though our heroes are supposed to be the Super Friends.) Why does Aladdin need to be chastised for a trait he really never exhibited before now?

The big climax, the battle with Mechanicles' biggest machine yet, is well-done in terms of action and visuals. The animation of the turning gears, acting as a gauntlet that Aladdin has to run, inside the rampant robot, is especially good. Toby Shelton's directing here is top-notch. Why does a damper have to be put on all the fun immediately afterwards, when Aladdin "wakes up" and "accepts" that he couldn't have done it without the rest of his team coordinating their efforts? Couldn't they just do that anyway, like they do in every other episode?!

Iago spends most of the episode griping over how he doesn't want to be a part of this situation – a standard performance for him, nothing more, nothing less. He'll really hit his stride in future episodes.

One point of contention: It seems to me that it'd be easy enough to just have the damaged bug 'bot that limps and sputters its way into Mechanicles' workshop BE ENOUGH to alert him that he should go to the village to find out what happened? Did we REALLY have to have the bug draw a vivid picture of Aladdin and co. fending off the fleet of 'bots?!  So, it can SEE?! And somehow store electronic memories of visual information?! Stones said that he hadn't wanted the bugs to be sentient, but it was too "complicated" to have to explain their engineering to the audience. But in this case, there was nothing that NEEDED explaining!

Genie watch: At a couple of points, when a particular dilemma arises, Aladdin effectively orders, in more or less words, "Carpet and Genie, get on it!" A couple of times, they follow through by COMPETENTLY working together, going off of some sort of strategized game plan utilizing each one's particular skills. It'd be nice if the two magic entities on the good guys' team continued to coordinate their efforts like this throughout the series, but alas, the writers decided the easiest way to handle Genie and his powers was to make him an idiot. Here, he remains distracted and oblivious as a way of holding off on the heroes' victory, but at least while being wrapped up in something else, he doesn't do anything particular dumb or incompetent. (Ryan, you have to double-check this – I think I vaguely remember an extended bit where he juts did nothing in particular.) 

 -- Ryan