Aladdin killed Jasmine.
In his efforts to impress the princess and win her hand
in marriage, this lovable street rat made one fatal error.
This: No.
Jasmine. No, it is not safe.
Magic carpet ride?
More like tragic carpet ride.
Did you see what I did there?
I'm pretty proud of that one.
Hello Internet!
Welcome to Film Theory.
You ain’t never had a channel like me.
Unless, of course, you watch Game Theory too, in which case yeah...
they are largely the same.
Cover different IP I suppose... Or not actually. Woopsy.
So anyway, Disney is not doing that hot these days, huh?
They've had flop after flop at the box office.
Tentpole brands like Marvel and Star Wars are struggling.
Their back catalog has been tarnished by an onslaught of low effort, live action
remakes and even the parks division is sweating heavily due to lower attendance
and the shut down of a $350 million hotel merely a year after its opening.
Really kind of makes you yearn for the golden days of classic Disney, right?
The Renaissance era where every movie was a certified classic
that would go on to shape the childhoods for generations of kids.
I'm talking about the OGs
here: Lion King, Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, all the ones
that have been bled dry for an extra billion dollars at the box office.
Their originals are revered for a reason.
Beautiful animation, amazing songs, timeless stories, traumatic nightmare fuel
that'll need years of therapy to process.
Oh, I'm sorry. Did you miss that last one?
Blocked it out of your memory and all that? Well, let me refresh you.
The Disney classics were rife for terror.
There were the scary moments, of course, like Mufasa's death,
the wolf attacks in Beauty and the Beast, Hercules literally withering to dust
and Prince Eric’s ship burning with him and his dogs lives on the line.
Then, of course, he had the disturbing themes
that could also scar you: Bell having to teach an angry, violent man
how to love Belle falling for the beast because of Stockholm Syndrome, Bell
being ostracized by society for being a smart woman.
Honestly, there's a lot in Beating the Beast.
But that movie's far from alone, Claude Frollo’s addiction to pain, Ariel
given up her voice for a man that she met
once, Aladdin using an enslaved creature to help him lie about his life
so he can trick a woman he's met once into marrying him.
But not only is Aladdin responsible for shamelessly gaslighting Jasmine
throughout the majority of the movie, he's also responsible for her murder.
‘But she doesn't die in the movie’, I hear you saying.
And yeah, while you're technically correct.
His actions would have definitely killed her.
See, about halfway through the film, Aladdin takes Jasmine on a magic carpet
ride during what's probably
the film's most iconic musical number, A Whole New World.
And during this little romantic getaway, the pair fly out of Agrabah to go visit
the pyramids of Egypt,
the Acropolis of Athens, Greece and the Forbidden City of Beijing, China.
Honestly, it's a pretty great date, on paper.
But when you actually stop
and think about what's going on here, you realize one huge problem.
They do all of this in the span of a single night.
I mean, is that possible?
And if it is,
they must be traveling at speeds that would rip human flesh off the bone.
Really puts this joke into a brand new context.
Goodbye indeed, Genie.
So we ran the numbers to see if Aladdin's magic carpet ride would be a one way
trip to romance or a whole new world of pain.
Join me, friends, as I make it crystal clear that now
they're in a whole screwed world with you.
Don't you dare close your eyes.
So for us to figure out exactly how badly Aladdin and Jasmine would have been
injured during their little romantic jaunt across the historical world.
I figure we should probably narrow down the main ways
that we see this killing them.
The big two, how high they're flying and how fast they're flying.
Let's start off with how high they actually flew.
We see Aladdin and Jasmine
flying through clouds at multiple points in the song,
which set off some alarm bells in my brain.
Since, you know, humans aren't technically supposed to be up that high.
See, the higher up you go, the less dense the air is and the lower
the level of oxygen.
When you get high enough, there
literally isn't enough oxygen in the air for you to survive.
And that's without even mentioning how cold it's going to be the further up
you go.
So overall, not exactly looking that great for our two little lovebirds.
That said, would going up this high straight up kill them?
To find out, I first decided to figure out how high they actually got.
And I did that by identifying the clouds that they're flying through.
Given the shape and volume of the clouds I figured that they had to be either
cumulus or cumulonimbus, given how fluffy and full they looked.
Now cumulus clouds are found up to 6,500 feet in the sky, while cumulonimbus clouds
can reach as high as 20,000 feet, much higher.
So which altitude are we talking about here?
Well, given that we also see the carpet fly through a flock of what appear
to be cranes during part of the song, we can actually identify these clouds
as cumulus,
since cranes typically fly at an altitude of roughly 6,000 to 7,000 feet.
As such, we're just going to call this altitude
right here, about 6,500 feet or 2,000 meters to keep things simple.
So how cold would it be up there?
And would Aladdin and Jasmine have died from some subfreezing temperatures?
Well, yeah.
At about 6,500 feet, the temperature is going to be about 35
degrees Fahrenheit or just about 1 to 2 degrees Celsius, slightly above freezing.
So it might be a bit nippy for this couple,
especially Jasmine, considering how she's dressed.
And given that they're spending the entire
night up there and likely experiencing some intense wind chill from flying fast.
They might be hot under the collar,
but the rest of their bodies are going to be ice cold.
And sick, they're going to be sick as well.
Altitude sickness, to be exact.
Between 5,000 and 10,000 feet in the air, the air pressure is low enough
to cause headaches, nausea, fatigue, dizziness and shortness of breath.
This happens because of a fall in barometric pressure,
which causes the tissue in your lungs and brain to swell in an attempt
to get more oxygen.
That being said at this altitude, while it would be unpleasant.
It wouldn't outright kill them.
Fun fact by the way, all of this is actually why planes are pressurized.
It keeps the pressure the same as where you took off,
so the oxygen levels remain stable.
While also protecting you from the colder temperatures
at the much higher cruising altitude.
Okay, so if the height’s going to make them
chilly and woozy, what about how fast they're flying?
Well, to figure this one out, we're going to need a few key bits of information.
How far they traveled and the timeframe they do it in.
Let's start off with the distance, shall we?
Obviously the pair start off in the city of Agrabah.
But Agrabah, it's not exactly a real place.
So how are we supposed to figure out where we're going to be?
Well, we've got ourselves a few options.
Geographically we know that it's a city in the middle of a desert,
but we also know it's close to either a lake or large river.
We know this thanks to a moment in the middle of the movie
when Aladdin is nearly drowned by Jafar’s goons.
Additionally, we have to remember that the opening song is straight up
called Arabian Nights, implying that Agrabah is in Arabia,
a very specific place.
This peninsula in West Asia between Africa and Southeast Asia.
So where exactly are we?
Well, a lot of fans online assume that Agrabah is located near the River
Jordan, because in the intro, the merchant says this.
However, when you actually break down
what he's saying here, he's not denoting how close to the River Jordan they are,
only that Agrabah has the finest goods on this side of the River Jordan.
That could literally mean anywhere to the east or the west of the river.
You know, basically the entire planet.
Plus, in the Aladdin Animated Series, though we do occasionally see
a river in the show, it's never explicitly called anything, let alone the Jordan.
So long story short, we're actually going to need something else here.
Elsewhere in the opening song, the merchant
says that he comes from a faraway place where the caravan camels roam.
Camel caravans are actually very much a real thing,
most commonly found in the Saharan desert of northern Africa.
Though certain breeds of camels were also used for this sort of travel
and trade in the Middle East, Central Asia, Mongolia and China.
Again, not really helping us narrow things down all that much.
So what else could we look at?
We could look at where
the actual story of Aladdin originated, which isn't where you'd expect.
The original version of the tale actually comes from China.
Again, not really working for our story here
because this one's clearly based on the Middle East.
So then I thought, maybe we could use the clothing of the characters
and the architecture of the city to try and pin something down.
The architecture from Agrabah’s palace clearly took inspiration from the Taj
Mahal of India.
It's even located in a city named Agra.
So I thought we might be getting somewhere.
But here's the thing, India, it’s nowhere near the Arabian Peninsula.
Arabian Nights are not happening there in that subcontinent,
so back to the drawing board.
The clothing: the clothing worn by characters
like Aladdin, Jasmine and the Sultan resemble
what would have been
worn by citizens of the Iraqi city, Baghdad, though with a lot of artistic
and cultural shortcuts and inaccuracies thrown in by Disney.
So that right there, it’s a pretty strong lead
that gets even stronger once you consider this.
According to John Musker, co-director of the film,
the first treatment of the movie was set in Baghdad, Iraq.
However, while the movie was in development,
the first Gulf War broke out in the area, and corporate executive Roy
Disney insisted that Aladdin couldn't be explicitly set in Baghdad.
And thus Agrabah was created as a stand in.
And there is a bit of evidence in the movie
for why this lines up with everything else that we've talked about.
Geographically, Baghdad lines up
with what we see around Agrabah, with the vast swaths of desert.
The city is built on the Tigris River, which could be a stand in
for all the bodies of water that we see in the movie and the show.
Baghdad was historically one of the most important urban
stops along the Silk Road, which would have seen camel caravans
stopping by frequently.
It's also right on the edge of Arabia,
so it could be argued to be a part of it, thus giving it Arabian Nights.
Additionally, in the Cave of Wonders, you can spot this statue of Lamassu,
an ancient Mesopotamian deity which originated in Sumerian territory,
very close to where modern day Baghdad is located.
Pretty much all the clues match,
which means that we're going to be using Baghdad as our stand in for Agrabah
for our purposes today.
So now that we know roughly where
Aladdin and Jasmine start their journey, where do they actually go?
Well, over the course of the song, we see them fly through the pyramids
and past the Sphinx outside Cairo, Egypt, then up to the Acropolis in Athens,
Greece, before completing their little song
at the Forbidden City in Beijing, China.
It doesn't take a geographic genius to see that that right there.
That is a long journey.
But just how long exactly is it?
Well, let's break it down.
Assuming that the carpet took the shortest possible route between each stop on its
journey, it's roughly 780 miles or 1,260 kilometers from Baghdad to Cairo.
The second
leg from Cairo to Athens is a bit shorter, 700 miles or 1,120 kilometers.
The most harrowing leg of the journey
would be from Athens to Beijing so they could catch those fireworks,
which is a staggering 4,730
miles or 7,600 kilometers.
I just feel my legs cramping up thinking about that flight.
Finally flying from Beijing
back to Baghdad to get home in time for the Sultan to not start a manhunt.
It would be another painful 4,000 miles,
3,920 miles, to be specific, or 6,310 kilometers.
Just in case you weren't keeping track there.
That means that during their little date night, Aladdin and Jasmine flew
a jaw dropping 10,130 miles or 16,300 kilometers.
That is a lot.
If you did this on a normal commercial flight, it would take you over 20 hours.
The longest normally operated
nonstop flight in the world flies between Singapore and New York City.
That one clocks in at just over 9,500 miles or 15,300
kilometers and takes nearly 19 agonizing hours.
So now that we know how far they flew, how fast were they going there?
Since Aladdin gets Jasmine back to Agrabah before any sorts of alarms of missing
princess are raised, this absolutely would not have taken the 20 plus hours
that it would take a modern airplane.
In fact, when I started researching this theory,
I actually wondered if it was going to be possible
for all of these locations to be nighttime at the same time.
But considering that Beijing is the only real outlier here,
just 5 hours ahead of Baghdad, Cairo and Athens, it should be possible.
But that does beg a bit of a bigger question here.
Sure, it's possible for all these places to be night at the same time.
But how long do Aladdin and Jasmine actually have to fly this far?
When Aladdin gets to Jasmine's window, it's already dark out with the stars
clearly visible in the night sky, which puts it decidedly after sunset.
And they still need to catch the fireworks
over in Beijing before heading back to Agrabah.
So when are those fireworks possibly happening?
Now, sadly, I have to admit, I do not have 1,000 year old fireworks
schedule from Beijing to double check the time here.
But you know what? We're going to make a pretty reasonable estimate.
First off, we're going to assume that this is happening
on the Chinese New Year for a couple of reasons.
During this scene, we see a dancing dragon,
which is a traditional Chinese puppet used during celebrations.
The large, impressive display of fireworks also tells us
that this is some sort of a festival and this is important because fireworks
during the Chinese New Year
can last into the wee hours of the morning, giving Aladdin
and Jasmine the most possible time to leave Baghdad, Agrabah, pass
by the Pyramids and Acropolis and then head on over to Beijing
to watch the fireworks on this building.
That right there. That's the Forbidden City,
an imperial palace at the center of the city of Beijing.
Of all the landmarks that they visit, this one was actually the last
to be constructed, completed in the year 1420.
So using that, we know that at the earliest
this movie can take place is the year 1420.
And just to keep things simple,
we're going to be using that as our new year here.
The Chinese New Year is a festival that celebrates
the beginning of a new year on the traditional Chinese calendar,
which usually falls on the second new moon after the winter solstice.
In the year 1420, the Chinese New Year began on January 24th,
and according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration,
the sun set in Baghdad that day at approximately 5:22 p.m.
Let's just make it an even 5:30 to keep it nice.
In modern day China, during festivals like the Chinese New Year, festivals
can be set off continuously for up to 2 hours after midnight,
so that right there gives us our flight cut off.
We are getting to Beijing by 2 a.m.
at the latest.
Using what we found out
earlier about flight distances, if you were to board a commercial flight
from Baghdad to Cairo
to Athens to Beijing, that would normally take over 12 hours to fly.
And that's not even considering the fact that they need to be back
and Agrabah by the morning.
But since Beijing is 5 hours ahead of Baghdad,
that puts the time there at 10:30,
meaning that Aladdin and Jasmine only have roughly three and a half hours
to travel the 6,000 plus miles between all their stops
before that fireworks display ends in Beijing.
So to make it, they need to be traveling just about 1,775
miles an hour or nearly 3,000 kilometers an hour.
That is more than twice the speed of sound, which opens up
a massive can of worms because moving faster than Mach 2?
That is no joke.
They're going to be subjected to some crazy forces.
Using this drag equation and the fact that Disney mandates their Aladdins in the
theme parks to be between a height of 5 foot 10 and 6 foot, we can calculate that
Aladdin and Jasmine are both facing roughly 144,000
Newtons of force every single second that they're flying on that carpet.
To put that insane amount of force into perspective, an average person
experiences about 67,000 Newtons of force in a 40 mile per hour car collision.
And that's just one quick hit.
Not every single second that they're in the air.
The strongest bone in the human body is the femur, your thigh bone.
And snapping a femur only takes about 4,000 Newtons of direct pressure.
During this date, Aladdin
forced him and Jasmine to experience more than 36 times that amount of force.
I actually wondered
if this would be powerful enough to rip the skin clean off their bones.
But running those numbers against the tensile strength of skin meant
that you needed something closer to 10 million Newtons to make it happen.
It would still be enough to break their bodies and send Aladdin
and Jasmine hurtling off the carpet, falling to the ground below.
Yeah, you can say that again.
And if they're lucky, the pain from snapping all their bones
would cause them to pass out before they hit the ground and died.
It's pretty dark.
And definitely not
what Disney wants us to imagine happening to their beloved characters.
But here's the thing, this isn't the only incarnation of these characters
to exist within the massive canon of the Disney Cinematic Universe.
In fact, there's another
official version of this tragic carpet ride in the live action remake.
If you don't remember this thing, I mean, fair.
But the long and short of it
is that this new version doesn't quite put the ‘world’ into a Whole New World.
They don't fly across continents,
they don't visit the Pyramids or the Acropolis or the Forbidden City.
Instead, everything from this musical number
in the new movie are things that you could feasibly find in
and around the immediate area of Baghdad during this time period.
You have palm trees, elephants, mountains, rivers, deserts.
This version of Aladdin and Jasmine aren't flying thousands of miles,
giving the princess a new lease on life and sparking a globe trotting romance.
It all just feels very small, very real, not very magical.
And there, I think, is the lesson that we can take away from all of this.
Scientifically speaking, yes, this remake handles
A Whole New World way more realistically than the animated version did.
But in doing so, it's really a slap to the face of what this moment
meant to the story.
It took all the fun and whimsy out of this journey.
It took away the magic, and instead it turned it into something boring.
And even though I'm a man of science, at the end of the day, sometimes
you really need that bit of magic.
But hey!
If you want another Aladdin theory right now, why not check out our video
where we tell Aladdin
exactly how to get Jasmine to marry him in just a single wish?
Or if you want to know how horrifying another Disney
Renaissance classic would be if it were real, check out our theory
where we see what a real life Little Mermaid would actually look like.
Spoiler alert, you will not want to kiss da girl.
And as always, remember, my friends, it's all just a theory.
A FILM THEORY! Aaaaaaand cut.