Robin Williams Disney Feud: How A Picasso Painting Solved The Aladdin Row

Back in 1992, Disney’s flick Aladdin brought in $504 million dollars which, in today’s money comes to over a billion US Dollars. A huge part of the success of the film, of course, was Robin Williams’s incredible performance as Genie.

Speaking to Variety, longtime Disney animator and co-director of Aladdin, Ron Clements said: “On the first day of recording [Genie’s intro] we had script pages written in Robin’s improv style and storyboards illustrating some of the visual metamorphosing we were planning. He started out recording the script as written a few times, then took off in a multitude of directions…

“And he was consistently hilarious. At one point, we had to remove the genie’s lead animator, Eric Goldberg, from the recording stage because his uncontrollable laughter was messing up takes”

Despite this, the actor actually agreed to be paid relatively little for his pivotal role.

Robin recorded around 30 hours of written and improvised dialogue for Aladdin and he revealed to New York Magazine that he did this because he wanted to “leave something wonderful behind for the kids.”

Business Insider explains: “Williams took a hefty pay cut and agreed to be paid $75,000 for his work on the Disney film instead of his usual fee of about $8 million — but there was a catch. Williams did not want his voice used to merchandise products.”

“I don’t want to sell stuff,” Williams later told New York magazine. “It’s the one thing I don’t do.”

The execs agreed to this deal, Robin said on the Today Show, adding: “The one thing I said was I will do the voice. I’m doing it basically because I want to be part of this animation tradition. I want something for my children. One deal is, I just don’t want to sell anything — as in Burger King, as in toys, as in stuff.”

“Then all of a sudden,” he added, “they released an advertisement — one part was the movie, the second part was where they used the movie to sell stuff. Not only did they use my voice, they took a character I did and overdubbed it to sell stuff.”

Perhaps surprisingly, Disney apologised in the form of a Picasso painting valued at $1 million (sure why not), a self-portrait of the artist as Vincent Van Gogh.

According to Artnet, the painting clashed with Robin’s interiors and his friend Eric Idle recommended he burn the painting on live TV.

Of course, he didn’t do that but he did return for the third Aladdin film as well as starring in Disney’s movie Jack and Bicentennial Man.

If anybody would like to apologise to me in the form of a very expensive art work, please feel free.