Disney renamed Aladdin’s Baghdad setting to avoid Gulf War associations

Evidence

This fictionalizing strategy has many precedents. Fictional Latin America, with locations such as San Pasquale in Commander in Chief (2005), Tecala in Proof of Life (2000), and Curaguay in The A-Team (1983–86), has been a staple of mainstream film and television for decades. Similarly, fictional “Arabia” is not a new representational strategy; rather it is a strategy that is making a comeback. The Hollywood film Harum Scarum (1965), starring Elvis Presley, for example, takes place in “Abulstan” and “Lunacan.” Disney’s Aladdin (1992) takes place in “Agrabah.” Originally set in Baghdad, the location was changed to avoid associating this fairy tale with the Gulf War. These films seek to trade on the West’s long-standing, and carefully cultivated, notions of an imaginary, fantastical, and exoticized East. Recent films and television shows emphasize their portrayal of actual locations, to heighten the sense of place and create presumably realistic depictions of current and historical events. Post-9/11 TV dramas have merely conflated their methods, emphasizing their “realistic” story lines—“ripped from the headlines,” as Law and Order and others advertise—in the ideological safety of fictionalized locations. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 166

Categorization

• CANDY: The Aladdin detail — Baghdad changed to Agrabah to dodge the Gulf War — is a light, tweetable film trivia nugget that lands without much context.
• SEED: Could anchor a piece on ‘the ideological safety of fictionalization’ — how ‘ripped from the headlines’ realism pairs with made-up geography to launder political content.