the_wolfs_howl wrote:Aladdin: The Return of Jafar (you know a movie's going to suck if you take Robin Williams out of it)
I'm gonna go ahead and disagree with you here. Completely.
Return of Jafar is obviously not as good as the original Aladdin. I admit that. However, it's not a bad movie. It's actually a lot of fun and pretty decent. Besides, it's hardly an unnecessary sequel, unlike stuff like Lion King 2 or Little Mermaid 2. There was a definite opening for a sequel, that being "Hey Jafar is a genie now and in a lamp, what if someone finds it and frees him?" They didn't have to invent something stupid just for the sake of a sequel, which helped immensely.
The writing was also very good from what I remember ("I thought genies couldn't kill people!" "You'd be surprised what you can live through."), and okay yeah, Robin Williams isn't in it. It's always annoying when they replace an established character with a new actor, but I think it didn't hurt anything in this case. Dan Castellaneta is a brilliant actor, and he pulled off the role of Genie just as well as Robin Williams did. It also doesn't hurt I find Robin Williams a bit overrated; not to say he's bad, he's a brilliant actor but I don't think he's as great as some claim.
At any rate, Robin Williams did come back and play the Genie again in the third Aladdin movie, the reason he wasn't in the second was apparently due to some dispute between him and Disney. It has to do with Robin Williams NOT wanting Disney to emphasize him playing Genie in the first Aladdin movie, actually. Robin Williams was making Toys at the same time, and didn't want his role in Aladdin to overshadow that movie, so the contract they signed said that Disney was not allowed to use Robin Williams' name in advertising or promotion of Aladdin, and that Genie was not allowed to take up more than 25% of the space of advertising images for the movie.
Of course, Disney went back on both of these deals. So actually, I think the movie benefited from Robin Williams not being in it. He didn't even want to be associated with the movie in the first place. :p
At any rate, it has been years since I saw the movie, but I remember it being pretty good for a direct to video Disney sequel. Again, certainly not as good as the original, but decent in its own right.