The Rewritten Lyrics in the Aladdin Remake

“Oh, I come from a land, from a faraway place,

Where the caravan camels roam;

Where it’s flat and immense and the heat is intense –

It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home!”

Aladdin (1992)

I don’t know whether you noticed. Perhaps you were too busy enjoying the beautiful, lavish costumes and sets, the dramatic chases and the skilful dancing; too busy comparing Will Smith’s portrayal of the genie of the lamp to the late Robin Williams’; too busy cheering on a newly assertive Princess Jasmine, whose major concern in life has gone from the freedom to explore her country to the right to govern it. I don’t blame you, on any count. But as for me, well, I was practically raised on Disney animated classics, and their soundtracks were about the closest thing to popular music that I had any substantial awareness of as a child, and I did then spend my first four years as a university student, as music director of the Disney society’s a cappella group – so yeah, I know the songs from Aladdin pretty blooming well. And hence I did notice. I noticed the selected careful adjustments made to the original lyrics in the recent live-action remake.

 

Will Smith as the genie, according to the talented berto654 at newgrounds.com.

The first adjustment loses no time in making its appearance, right in the first verse of the opening number, ‘Arabian Nights’ – although the version I remember from my childhood actually already represented a change from the song’s first incarnation. Here are the lyrics as they were when the film was first released in 1992:

Oh, I come from a land, from a faraway place,

Where the caravan camels roam;

Where they cut off your ear if they don’t like your face –

It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home!

Apparently some people objected to that mention of gratuitous maiming, and so in 1993, the lyrics were changed – in time for the film’s video release, hence why I remember them like this:

Oh, I come from a land, from a faraway place,

Where the caravan camels roam;

Where it’s flat and immense and the heat is intense –

It’s barbaric, but hey, it’s home!

The thread of logic frays a bit in this alternative rendering. Cutting off people’s ears if you don’t like their faces probably does qualify as barbaric in most people’s thinking, but barbarism can hardly be reasonably ascribed to mere features of geography and climate. Still, when you’re already having to patch in a new voice actor over the original recording, you’re probably keen to make as minimal a change as you can get away with while still smoothing over the controversy. This year’s remake allowed for greater flexibility than that:

Oh, imagine a land: it’s a faraway place,

Where the caravan camels roam;

Where you wander among every culture and tongue –

It’s chaotic, but hey, it’s home!

The change in the first line is presumably just because the character singing it in this version is not strictly one who necessarily comes from the place he’s describing; the more interesting change, again, concerns that second couplet. We’ve moved from geography and climate back to culture, but the image is one of positive multiculturalism rather than grim corporal punishment, and no mention of barbarism now remains at all. Controversy thoroughly neutralised. Honestly, it’s now the following ‘but hey, it’s home!’ that seems a little inconsistent with the thread of logic: ‘but hey, it’s home!’ is the kind of thing you say after you’ve said something bad about a place, as a kind of counterbalance; otherwise, what’s the ‘but’ for? Here, though, apparently the narrator can’t think of anything worse to say about this faraway place than that it’s ‘chaotic’, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing at all. Still, changing that bit would have messed up the rhyme scheme and really the whole shape of the verse, so I can see why it was left alone.

Some extra lyrics are added to pad out the song so that it fills a lengthier opening sequence, but the rest of the original lyrics remain. There are then a few changes to the first verse of ‘One Jump Ahead’, but they mainly stem from the fact that, in this version of the scene, Aladdin isn’t trying to steal a loaf of bread as he was in the animation; and there’s the odd small adjustment to ‘Friend Like Me’ as well, mainly to the effect that the genie can’t remember Aladdin’s name; but the other properly interesting lyric changes in the film come in my favourite track of all, ‘Prince Ali’.

 

'A Whole New World', with its magic carpet ride, remained entirely unchanged, as far as I could tell. Though this scene, gorgeously rendered by cesarbigstar at newgrounds.com, is actually not from then but rather the very end of the film.

Where the original had,

Now, try your best to stay calm.

Brush up your Sunday salaam.

the remake has,

Now, try your best to stay calm.

Brush up your Friday salaam.

In English, ‘salaam’ apparently usually refers to a ceremonial low bow denoting deference; the word is Arabic for ‘peace’, but came into English via the greeting ‘peace be upon you’, which was presumably quite often accompanied by a gesture of this sort. This meaning makes perfect sense in the context of ‘Prince Ali’, since just the previous line, the genie urged his audience to show some respect and genuflect (one of many very pleasing rhymes in the song). But what have days of the week got to do with it? My best guess – though I’m very aware that I may be missing something about the connotations of ‘salaam’; this isn’t my field, so do enlighten me if you can – is that the exhortation is being elevated by an appeal to religious observance: we might no longer be a society of regular churchgoers, but terms like ‘Sunday best’ are still understood in modern English as indicating a kind of decorous formality, specifically one arising out of a need to present oneself appropriately before a higher authority. It is, of course, stupendously daft to suppose that God is any way impressed or appeased by the donning of a smart outfit in which to attend church – if you’re not clothed in the blood of Christ as the fee for your ransom from sin, it doesn’t make a blind bit of difference what you’re wearing, plus the apostle James has some pretty uncomplimentary things to say about people who treat others differently based on how they’re dressed – but nonetheless, the traditions our society has emerged out of have left us cognizant of these connotations. In the same vein as ‘Sunday best’, then, though Prince Ali might not quite be God, the genie is nonetheless urging the citizens of Agrabah to adopt a quasi-religious sense of formality when in his vicinity. The attachment of these connotations to Sunday in particular, however, probably feels like a rather western phenomenon, and so a bit of an anachronism or cultural imposition in the Arabian world of Aladdin. Hence, in the 2019 version, the day is switched to Friday, the day designated for collective worship in Islam. Not that we particularly have any evidence that Agrabah is a Muslim society, or any solid way of pinning down when the film is supposed to be set – possibilities both before and after the emergence of Islam have been advanced.

Next, where the original has,

He’s got slaves, he’s got servants and flunkies.

the remake has,

He’s got ten thousand servants and flunkies.

The point of the change here is nice and obvious; the song has been scrubbed clean of any reference to slavery. We simply can’t have our hero keeping slaves – even fake ones generated by genie-magic to prop up his invented identity.

The final change I’ll mention comes in the final verse of the song – the one that begins at half-speed as Prince Ali makes his dramatic entrance into the palace. For the original’s

Prince Ali, amorous he, Ali Ababwa

Heard your princess was a sight lovely to see,

And that, good people, is why

He got dolled up and dropped by.

the remake has,

Prince Ali, amorous he, Ali Ababwa

Heard your princess was hot; where is she?

And that, good people, is why

He got all cute and dropped by.

I assume the replacement of ‘dolled up’ is simply because it feels a bit dated; the striking thing is the change in that second line of what I quoted, because it actually seems to have been made more offensive. In the animation, if you recall, Jasmine was pretty ticked off at being cast as a prize to be won, as if she were just another shiny bauble that Ali was hoping to add to his collection of possessions, and the idea that the reason why he hopes to win her is because he’s heard she’s a sight lovely to see definitely fits in with that. There’s enough disrespect there as it is. But then in the remake, Jasmine’s not even ‘a sight lovely to see’ any more; she’s just ‘hot’, which, as a term, surely carries even less respect. Put it this way: you wouldn’t expect someone to refer to the daughter of the person he was speaking to as ‘hot’, as the genie does in this scene; whereas if he called her ‘lovely’, that wouldn’t be anything like as jarring. The slight against Jasmine has worsened; it might not have worsened to any great degree, but it’s worsened. Why make that decision? Perhaps to turn the thing into a bit more of a relevant comment on how men sometimes treat women in our own society (which doesn’t usually involve bringing a procession of expensive gifts to her father’s house before you’ve even been properly introduced). Perhaps to further accentuate the objectification of Jasmine, the reduction of how she’s valued to the very basest sort of aesthetic interest, so as to emphasise her not being taken seriously as a competent political leader – a role that, in the animation, she showed no interest in, only being concerned that she should be free to make her own decisions instead of being passed from the charge of one man to another purely according to their wishes on the matter. Perhaps because Will Smith was rubbish at delivering the line in its original form; I don’t suppose we’ll ever know.

 

A lot of the contributors on newgrounds.com also think Jasmine is hot, judging by the kind of artwork of her they tend to produce. Big thanks to Twintan for using her epic art skills to draw this lovely version of Jasmine with, you know, some actual clothes on.

Indeed, trying to work out the reasons for these lyric changes is bound to be fairly speculative – but the fact remains that, if normal procedure was to keep the lyrics the same as in the original, then in every instance where they were not kept the same, there must have been some reason for that. And that reason often seems to have been the sensibilities of the cultural moment, and a desire not to impose or offend. I don’t really have a grand argument I’m trying to make here, but I do find it interesting to observe these things. Twenty-seven years is apparently long enough for the expectations of a society to shift to the extent that filmmakers decide to tweak a few lyrics to appeal to this new audience; what would happen in another twenty-seven? Which elements will be replaced in the next remake?

We can’t see the future, of course, so our only way of stepping out of our own cultural moment is to visit the past. Elements of media from the past, even the recent past, might trouble or offend us, and these reactions to them might be very right, but it’s good for us to engage with the material all the same. After all, it would be laughably arrogant to suppose that our generation is the one that’s suddenly got everything right; only by looking at how our ancestors saw things, and trying to figure out why, do we stand any chance of becoming aware of our own blind spots.

That’s a far, far broader point than can be indicated by a few rewritten lyrics, but of course, rewritten lyrics are only one small way in which the live-action remakes currently being released by Disney in absolute droves hint at the cultural shifts that have taken place since the originals on which they are modelled were released. I’m not prescribing approval or disapproval of changes either to lyrics or to any other element of a remade film; I just think it’s good to be aware of them. For the sake of being more aware of the nature of the society of we live in and how it might be shaping us for better or worse, I just think it’s worth our while to notice.