The Gulf War Forced Disney to Change the Setting of ‘Aladdin’
The 1992 Disney film Aladdin is a lot of things. An accurate representation of the Middle East is not one of them.
That said, since the movie takes place in the fictional city of “Agrabah,” it’s easy to argue that it was never meant to portray the real world at all. The city was, after all, invented wholly by the creators, since the story from Arabian Nights that it’s based on originally took place in China, which, I’ll admit, is confusing enough that I understand simplifying it to minimize the amount of cultures and geography packed into an animated movie for children.
The city of Agrabah, however, wasn’t the first location change made by the movie’s creators. When they first started working on the movie that would become a modern classic, they set it in a very real city: Baghdad. Most likely because it was one of the Middle Eastern cities with the most name recognition for a Western audience.
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Now, Baghdad already wasn’t a completely baggage-free location, thanks to the ongoing reign of Saddam Hussein and Iraq's war with Iran, but I guess that fight was sufficiently in the realm of “stuff happening over there” that it wouldn’t turn off American audiences.
That changed in August of 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait and kicked off the Persian Gulf War. A war that the U.S. was about to be an active participant in. Aladdin was slated for release in the latter half of 1992, meaning that the city they’d chosen would have been, whether they liked it or not, linked to American military deaths. Generally, a good rule when making any fun cartoon, even today, is to avoid evoking Operation Desert Storm.
The decision to relocate Aladdin was pretty straightforward and unanimous. The Gulf War started, Disney realized they were making a movie set there and the directors got a call from Roy Disney with a clear message: “This can’t be in Baghdad.”
As for how it ended up Agrabah? That wasn’t exactly effort heavy. It was nothing more than a loose anagram. They basically just changed “Baghdad” to what a drunk uncle trying to remember “Baghdad” would slur out instead.
All in all, given that Baghdad only developed more baggage as time went on, probably not a creative choice they regret.
