A Thousand and One Nights

Alfred E. Green's A Thousand and One Nights is a really fun movie. It's a totally silly romp through the Arabian Nights with Aladdin and a magic lamp but also with anachronistic jokes. Phil Silvers plays Aladdin's friend Abdullah in 1940s glasses as if he just dropped into a fantasy version of the medieval Orient from mid-century Los Angeles. It's quite silly.

 I enjoyed myself a lot, and the costumes are exquisite. I also really loved Cornel Wilde in 1945 – I always forget how handsome he was back then. Sign me up!

This movie is quite obviously what Disney's 1992 Aladdin film is based on. The parallels are too striking for this not to be true. And, coincidentally, I just finished reading Sean Griffin's Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: the Walt Disney Company from the Inside Out, in which he claims that Howard Ashman, who was one of the main creative forces behind Aladdin had imagined the Genie as a giant black man – an image he would have taken directly from A Thousand and One Nights.