> > I recently had the 'infinite pleasure' of watching the movie "Sinbad of the Seven seas," which, quite possibly, is the best movie ever made. One question has arisen in my mind, though: Did disney's "Aladdin" completely rip that movie off? Consider it: A prince named 'Ali,' a villain named Jaffar who hypnotizes the sultan and tries to get the princess to fall in love with him, and a sultan who looks and acts almost completely identical to the sultan in "aladdin." Sinbad came out just three years before aladdin, didn't it? Can it really be that these are just coincidences? Or is this a terrifying example of blatant plagiarism on the part of Disney? Just speculating.
> > -El "Lou should sue" fred
>
> No, Disney's Aladdin is a remake of the 1940 movie The Thief of Bagdad, which was itself a remake of a 1924 movie of the same name.
>
> The 1940 movie also featured "a villain named Jaffar who hypnotizes the sultan and tries to get the princess to fall in love with him, and a sultan who looks and acts almost completely identical to the sultan in Aladdin", and also gave Prince Ahmed a sidekick called Abu (the eponymous thief), a genie trapped in a bottle for a thousand years who gets outwitted and gives the hero three wishes, and prince Ahmed begins the movie as a beggar who has to win back his kingdom.

The villain who hypnotizes the sultan (or the king) is an old plot device. Remember Gríma Wormtongue and the King Theoden?