Aladdin Central Messageboard

[AladdinsGenie]

[Dragonessa]

Ohh, gotta check that next time it watch the movie. Or should I check it now? I would really like to know... besides, gives me a reason to see Iago, lol!
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[AladdinsGenie]

It's up to you. It just sounds funny because it's like two different tones for Iago because no one can match Gilbert's voice.

[Iago]

[Boz]

I was an avid Disney (and cartoons in general) fan when I was a kid. I'm almost positive that I didn't see Aladdin in the movie theater but I saw it on the Disney channel and my family taped it. I loved the movie because it was so magical and adventurous and just had everything I could want in a Disney movie. And it dealt with Arabic culture, which was something completely new to me. I loved the vibrant colors of the desert, marketplace, and Jasmine's garden.

I used to watch the video all the time with my older brothers and our friends. We couldn't get enough of it. Like Hourglass, I really liked Jasmine as well as all of the characters in general. Of course, I had to get the Aladdin and Jasmine dolls. I thought Genie was hilarious and Sultan, Iago, Jafar, and Abu were funny in their own way. I thought Aladdin was a great guy (not a crush). In fact, this is one of the few Disney movies my brothers could stand to watch because it isn't as mushy as some of the other ones.

I also watched the Aladdin series religiously. I loved the idea of learning what kinds of adventures the characters went through after the movie. The Return of Jafar helped to make sense of the series for me because it explained why Iago became one of the good guys. I really liked the TV series characters as much as the ones from the movie, especially Abis Mal, Eden, Sadira, Mozenrath, and those three thieves that had been Aladdin's friends.

My love for Disney sadly died down a couple of years later. It all had to do with something that is good in its own right but has some crazy fans: anime. I had the unfortunate chance of being swayed by people who hated any type of animation that wasn't Japanese.

One day, in the summer of 2004, I decided out of nowhere to listen to "A Whole New World." I had to listen to the other Aladdin songs, as well as songs from other animated movies. I then had the urge to watch some animated movies. When Aladdin's turn came up, I was dissapointed to find out that I couldn't find my family's VHS copy. I decided to download the movie and I fell in love all over again. It had been years since I saw it. I visited the Internet Movie Database and checked out the Aladdin message board. One of the users happened to be Calluna and she had the link to this site in her sig. It was here that I first learned about Aladdin's release on DVD and I knew I had to get it.
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When in doubt, hurt the bird.
My avatar is from here: http://www.angelfire.com/dragon/pocketgirl/

[Calluna]

Yay, so some good actually came of me going to IMDB. Not just me making a big wanky fool of myself.
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"If only I could believe you. Perhaps I can! After all... you do bear the name of a flower." -- Arbutus

[Boz]

[Calluna]

Calluna isn't an Aladdin reference. My real name is Heather, and the scientific name for the plant heather is Calluna vulgaris. (Although I did write an OC with that name in one of my fics which I've taken down since...)

I was 10 in 1992. Before then I was a pretty obsessive person, but mostly over subjects, not fannish things (astronomy from age 6 to about 3rd grade, Ancient Egypt from 4th grade to about that time...) And I liked the Disney movies, but I'd basically forget about the previous one when the next came out...

When Aladdin came out was about the time that I was going through that whole phase where I'd decided I was too old -- not to like animation but to openly admit it. When I saw Aladdin I was embarrassed to tell anyone about it, but once they finally dragged it out of me and the other kids actually were cool about it. They liked it, too.

Since TLK didn't come out until summer of 1994, there was this longer period than normal between movies where me and my sisters were still really into Aladdin. And it was during that time that RoJ came out, and that's basically what did it for me...

Not that it's in itself a great movie, but it got me thinking about Aladdin in a different way. Before I'd always thought of it as self-contained, and didn't really think abou the characters as if they had lives outside the story. But just the concept of a sequel combined with the fact that it was left open-ended to introduce the series made me start thinking about what happens next? - and that's when I started thinking like fan.

That was when I started planning my fanfic ideas; of course, not having the internet and there not being an Aladdin online fandom to speak of at the time I had no idea what fanfic was. Iago was my favorite character from RoJ on (I guess because I was always kind of a doormat, and liked how he always spoke his mind...), and I had this Mary Sue who was Iago's girlfriend. (Man, was I pissed when I saw "Fowl Weather" the first time! ) The villain was Jafar's younger sister. I still have this huge plan, even though I scrapped the original OC. I'll probably never finish writing it...

I don't think I discovered the online fandom until I was in high school. By then it had been going awhile and the original Mozenrath fandom had basically died out and the AML was only a year or so old. Course I didn't have the internet at home back then, so I could only read fanfic in my dad's office when he wasn't looking; I was too embarrassed to look at school until my senior year. I used to print out a certain number of pages of fanfic to read at home every day after school (couldn't save to a disk because we had a Mac and the school had PCs). And it always frustrated me that all the fanfic was scattered all over the internet and there was no central location... Halfway through that year someone told me about free email accounts, so I signed up for one and joined AML. This was in January 2000. A couple weeks after I posted my first fics at Sedeara's Sand Scrolls.

As I just mentioned, I'd already been planning the Library of Agrabah, but I wasn't interested in having any other sites. But I wanted to have a link page for just my own Aladdin stuff I'd worked on, so I made a geocities page, gave it a plain purple background, a screenshot of the palace, links to The Lords of Mam and The Realm of Mists at Sedeara's, and called it Aladdin Central, because I'm not very original with names.

...and, well, yeah, kept finding things that I thought were good ideas but that no other sites were doing and kept adding them on to what was supposed to just be a portal site for my projects, and you can see the end result. And I had so much fun doing it that I majored in Graphic Design so I can (eventually) be a professional web designer. And I still haven't written any more of the Master Plan since Jan. 2000, which just goes to show that life is what happens to you when you're planning other things, and a huge fansite is what happens to you when you're planning a fanfic epic.

So, enough for you, Boz?
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"If only I could believe you. Perhaps I can! After all... you do bear the name of a flower." -- Arbutus

[Marisa]

[Hourglass]

[AladdinsGenie]

[Calluna]

[AladdinsGenie]

I was a lurker in the Aladdin fandom for a while. AML, Black Sand Pub, the old AC message board, etc I looked, but never joined. I joined yours first a few years later, and then you convinced me to join BSP. I was scared to join because I hadn't seen all the series and didn't want to look like a big dork

[Calluna]

Can't find the purple version. Oldest one is this:

http://web.archive.org/web/20010405024610/www.geocities.com/calluna21/AladdinCentral.html
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"If only I could believe you. Perhaps I can! After all... you do bear the name of a flower." -- Arbutus

[Nez]