In the Disney movie Aladdin, ...
Naughty, naughty!: Aladdin
Question: In the Disney movie Aladdin, there's a scene in which Aladdin is on Jasmin's balcony, and when you turn the volume up, you can hear him say, "Take off your clothes...." What's the true story behind this big oops?
Answer: The true story is that it isn't true. This persistent rumor has been winging its way around the Internet ever since the movie was released in 1992. Similar stories about a minister with a visible erection in The Little Mermaid (1989) and a dust cloud in The Lion King (1994) that spells out the word "SEX" have proved equally durable. Animators are notorious pranksters, and of the three rumors, I find the one about The Lion King least unbelievable, if only because having been told that the letters are there, it's hard not to see them. But I immediately have to qualify that statement by pointing out that it's also almost impossible not to see cloud bunnies or that face on Mars once someone has pointed them out — the human mind is very suggestible. I've listened closely to the disputed line in Aladdin, and while I can see how people might hear the phrase "take off your clothes," I consistently hear "good kitty… take off and go," which is the scripted line, addressed to Rajah the tiger. There's a sound clip on Snopes.com, an excellent resource when you're trying to track down urban legends, so listen for yourself. I blame all this nonsense on Wilson Bryan Key, whose 1973 book, Subliminal Seduction, was all the rage when I was in high school; it claimed that print advertising was full of hidden images of sex and violence. I vividly remember the cover of a box of frozen fried clams, "enhanced" with magic marker so you could see that the clams looked like mutated little people having the mother of all outrageous orgies. Even as a teenager fully prepared to believe just about any perfidy of the establishment, I knew a load of nonsense when I saw it. Wilson's precursor, one James Vicary, stirred up a lot of consternation by talking about imbedding subliminal images in movies in the late '50s, but later admitted that he'd never actually done it — he was just speaking hypothetically. There are unquestionable subliminals in Cruising (1980) and The Exorcist (1973), but you can see them — clearly. I know I'm going to get a ton of e-mails from people telling me they know for a fact that Disney movies are full of smut and that subliminal imagery is widely used by advertisers and by insidious cultural manipulators in order to pervert the minds of an unsuspecting public — but you know what? I just don't believe it: It's an expression of paranoia.
