Word: aladdin
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...billion people world-wide will watch the 1993 Academy Awards, and by Tuesday afternoon, those same 1.1 billion will have forgotten who won what award. Last year's best supporting actor, anyone? Exactly. (Gene Hackman, "Unforgiven"). After all, the most memorable portion of last year's presentation was the "Aladdin" medley which featured a rotund Nell Carter, decked out in a green fez and harem pants. charging at small children...
...ALADDIN American...
...casting of Williams as an unemployed voice-over artist is obviously meant to draw on the publicity he gained as the voice of the Genie in Disney's "Aladdin." In deciding on a persona for the housekeeping job Miranda advertises, he and his make up-wizard brother (Harvey Fierstein) run through a list of accents and outfits in a ridiculous procession a la "Aladdin" 's "Friend Like Me." After ranging from a Russian babushka to Barbra Streisand, he settles down as the matronly, English accented Euphegenia Doubtfire, and the movie's triumph is that Williams is convincing in this role...
...creator of The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin for Disney, Menken has almost single-handedly revived the movie musical, albeit in cartoon form. And with the success of Disney's giddy, macabre new animated musical The Nightmare Before Christmas (it is the most popular movie in America right now), we are in a new golden era: Disney is to the '90s what MGM was to the '50s. "We came in with real respect for the established traditions of the American musical," Menken says of his blockbuster cartoon movies. Except, of course, for the tradition of filming actors...
Slightly older children are the audience for the four-minute musicals known as music videos. If Aladdin is a traditional book musical, most music videos are not even booklet musicals. VH1 has hired Francis Coppola to oversee a series of special, half-hour music videos directed by important younger filmmakers, and it seems axiomatic that if some new species of live-action long-form musical is to evolve, it will owe at least as much to R.E.M.'s video Everybody Hurts, say, as to Vincente Minnelli's Meet Me in St. Louis. A big problem with Newsies, admits Menken...