Fridge / Twisted: The Untold Story of a Royal Vizier

Fridge Brilliance

• On the DVD commentary for Aladdin, the filmmakers state that having Aladdin feed the poor kids at the beginning of the movie was used as a Pet the Dog moment, letting the audience know they can root for him even though he's a criminal. The kids also show up here, near the beginning, and Aladdin does not feed them and instead acts very rude. Starkid is doing the exact opposite of what Disney did, letting us know early on, that we're not supposed to root for this guy.
• Aladdin threatening the baker with death, claiming that he had bad parents, planning to kill Ja'far, and screaming "GO TO HELL MONKEY!" could be seen as his other personality temporarily taking over.
• A line of the song 'One Jump' from Aladdin goes "I steal only what I can't afford, and that's everything," emphasizing Aladdin is so poor there's nothing he can legitimately buy. Twisted takes this to its natural conclusion. "That's when I came up with this brilliant scheme: just steal everything."
• The reason that Ja'far has zero patience for the Djinn? He's learned that the Djinn can't bring his wife back from the dead.
• "A song means a dick is on the way" is a song itself. Not long after this, Aladdin (who is a total dick) enters.
  • Immediately after this (interrupting the song), the captain of the guards enters.
• Thanks to a YouTube comment: The antagonists' wishes from the title song also come true. Scar wanted "peace between the races," exemplified between the two nations ending their war. Gaston wanted to save the heroine, as The Princess is saved from the monster that is Aladdin. Capt. Hook wanted to teach "the boy" responsibility, as The Princess learns in the end. Ursula wanted her rightful place on the throne, justice, and freedom, while the Princess is made leader of the kingdom and Scheherazade gets restored to her proper place at Ja'far's side. Maleficent wanted to be included, and Ja'far is finally considered good by the Captain that was previously constantly blaming him.
  • Additionally, the crowd from the beginning are rid of Ja'far and the kingdom heads back into a golden age as they wanted. As an added bonus, they had nothing to do with this turn of events, fulfilling their wish and their thoughts on how to get it.
  • Even The Princess's wish for Aladdin to escape somehow and soar away comes true, as he escapes not just beheading, but also the Tiger Head Cave on a magical, flying carpet.
  • Even Ja'far's wish of being well remembered comes true, in the form of the Princess.
• Hook giving out the cry of never knowing his father could nod to the fact that Captain Hook and George Darling were played by the same person in both the original play and its traditional Disney animated version.
• At the end of the play, Aladdin turns into the peddler from the original movie. The movie opens with the peddler's narration, and we can assume he tells the rest of the story. So basically, the Disney movie is Aladdin telling this story with himself as the hero and Ja'far as the villain!
  • Him splitting up Ja'far's final wish (to be an all-powerful genie and freeing the Djinn in the process) solidifies this further, taking the credit for freeing the Djinn and making it seem more noble than the desperate Heroic Sacrifice that Ja'far had.
• It seems odd that Scheherazade can tell Ja'far stories about Disney villains who won't even be born for several centuries, but this is perfectly in line with the original Arabian Nights, which contains several stories — including the original story of Aladdin — set after the rise of Islam, even though the framing device with Scheherazade supposedly takes place before that.
  • The only exception for that would be Scar's Story, since, unlike the other villains, The Lion King has clearly a place where the story takes place (Africa), but not a specific TIME when the story took place.
  • Becomes more brilliant with the ending, where we learn that this version of Scheherazade ends up as a ghost who lives with Ja'far in the lamp, a place outside of time where they can view the future freely. (This explains how she can, in fact, be the narrator of the play we're watching right now.)
• Ja'far and Achmed both want the same thing: to be remembered for who they really are (a Nice Guy and a blood-thirsty tyrant), not the stories people tell about them (an evil sorcerer and a tiger-fucking Joke Character).
• Ja'far not believing in magic in a clearly magical world seems silly, until the end of the play when he admits he doesn't believe enough to get any use out of the lamp: it's not that he thinks magic itself doesn't exist, it's that he doesn't believe in wishing. He's so accustomed to having to having to scratch and claw for every inch of success in the world that when he finally does get a chance at a real wish, he can't just let the magic do its job. He wishes for things that he thinks will solve the problem the way he thinks it should be solved, not for the problem to be solved outright or to find a solution he can work with. The kind of wishes the Djinn can grant aren't limited to what is practical, but Ja'far's mindset is too inflexible to get anything out of it: he wishes to become a sorcerer instead of wishing for Achmed's army to be defeated, and he wishes for the palace and everyone in it to be evacuated to a distant cliff instead of wishing that the palace and citizens be safe. When he finally does make his third wish, he wishes for something he already fully understands: to become the loyal servant of the Princess.
  • Note that unlike Disney's Jafar, even when he becomes "the most powerful sorcerer in the world", Ja'far struggles to defeat Achmed's forces, because he lacked the sadistic imagination that made fighting Jafar a Curb-Stomp Battle. (He tries to shove the bad guys away using Mind over Matter rather than Jafar's favorite trick of Forced Transformation.)
  • This trait of Ja'far's matches how he rejected the Princess's idea that "everyone should become a Princess" simply because it sounded stupid, missing the deeper meaning of her proposal (leaving aside the wording, she is essentially stating that sovereignty resides within the people as a whole rather than in a single monarch, i.e. the philosophical foundation of a modern democracy).
• There's a lot of deconstruction of Jafar and the Sultan's conflict with Jasmine in the original movie — for instance, the fact that wanting Jasmine to marry isn't just based on sexist assumptions about a woman's place or needing a husband to protect her, it's based on the fact that Altar Diplomacy is Serious Business in this time period and Jasmine repeatedly snubbing other royals as beneath her is bound to cause diplomatic problems.
  • Moreover, as the fandom has repeatedly pointed out, the fact that Aladdin is "not a real prince" has bigger ramifications than just the fact that he's not "of royal blood" — it means that the other kingdom he's a prince of does not exist, meaning that when he marries Jasmine, Agrabah will be solidifying an alliance with nobody. This becomes a serious issue when you have a vengeful Prince Achmed about to start a war, and all the legions of soldiers the Genie bragged about in "Prince Ali" were just illusory projections.
• Sherrezade dying in childbirth doesn't just make sense as a reference to Disney's tendency to kill off mother figures — remember what Ja'far says when they find out she's pregnant? "Even when the doctors said it could not be so!" Sometimes, when a doctor says a woman can't have children, it's because she has a medical condition where even if, by some miracle, she does get pregnant, she shouldn't carry to term, because it could seriously harm her and/or cause her to have a stillbirth. The second part didn't happen to Sherrezade, but the first...
• Aladdin having a Split Personality that killed his parents might seem weird, but then there's one thing to be clear about Aladdin here: He's a Consummate Liar. He lies to the girl he knocked up, the princess, the Sultan, and all of the Magic Kingdom, it wouldn't be far-fetched for him to even lie to himself.
• Ja'far's part in "Happy Ending" is an expy of "The Wizard and I" from Wicked, which begins with Madame Morrible predicting Elphaba will become the Wizard's magic grand vizier.
• Aladdin being the seller at the beginning of the film implied that Ja'far would be twisted as the villain of his history just like the other villains (sans Cruella). However, watching the merchant scene from the beginning of Aladdin, you notice that he only talks of the lamp out of desperation to keep the customer's interest when his previous wares weren't selling and doesn't even sell the lamp to the customer in the end, since he's never seen again until way later in the franchise. This, coupled with the person who does know the full story of Ja'far having far more reputation and sway than a peddler, gives a more hopeful outcome for Ja'far in that his villainy will only be told in the mad ramblings of a shopkeeper who only has 22 years to tell his side of the story before being killed over a loaf of bread and possibly won't be able to tell his story to a lot of people.
• Achmed's song is a play on the old joke with the punchline, "but you fuck one goat..." which used to be (in slightly censored form) the Trope Namer for Never Live It Down.
• Ja'far remarks to the Djinn that he didn't appreciate the song in he sang when he first came out of the lamp, which, if going by the Disney movie, would have been "You've Never Had a Friend Like Me". Is it any wonder that Ja'far, someone who no longer has any friends in the kingdom at all, didn't appreciate being reminded of it?
• Ja'far's wish to replace the genie is ultimately what leads to him getting Scheherazade back and having a "story that never ends". And when he asked for that, the Djinn quoted Groundhog Day - a movie about a day that never ends.
• Prince Achmed's lament that "No One Remembers Achmed" is fitting, as almost nobody remembers this obscure throwaway-joke side character from the original film — but also, given the fact that much the musical doubles as a metaphor for Disney, Pixar, and animation companies in general, the idea that "no one remembers Achmed" might also be a reference to how nobody remembers "The Adventures of Prince Achmed", a 1926 German film that's possibly the first feature-length animated film of all time.