Aladdin: The Return of Jafar started it all. Disney management took advantage of timing and opportunity to launch direct-to-video sequels to theatrical features. All images © Disney. All rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.

Live-action Hollywood has been creating sequels to its hits for years, with mixed results but always with an eye on box office gold. (Or as Mel Brooks succinctly put it, Spaceballs II: The Search for More Money) When it comes to kids and their ability to watch a favorite video ad infinitum, the temptation to sequelize directly to the home video market is irresistible. Universal may have produced two direct-to-video An American Tail sequels and the ongoing Land Before Time franchise, but it was inevitable that the Disney name and its unrivaled library of cartoon titles would make it the dominant DTV player. Now, however, Disney is rising to a new challenge: erasing the “cheapquels” stigma created by some of its earliest DTV releases.

The foundation for Disney’s DTV adventure was set in the mid 1980s when Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg and their new management team set out to make the company a major player in original TV animation. At first Disney stayed away from exploiting its classic characters, going instead with shows like the toy-based Wuzzles and candy-inspired Gummi Bears. Then, in 1987, Disney produced its first series for what at the time was a red-hot syndication market. While Duck Tales owed more to Carl Barks’ legendary adventure comics than Donald Duck’s theatrical shorts, the series was a creative and financial success that both Walt and Scrooge McDuck would have been proud of — and it convinced the company to give more of its characters a new life on TV.

The Little Mermaid, the film that revitalized Disney’s feature animation division became a CBS Saturday morning series in 1992. In the meantime, the company had entered the red-hot syndication market in a big way, with a daily two-hour block of original animation known as “The Disney Afternoon.” The Afternoon’s enormous programming appetite (a new series replaced the block’s oldest show every September) led the studio to commission a TV version of its latest theatrical feature, Aladdin — before the film’s release.

Disney assigned Tad Stones and Alan Zaslove to produce the series and shepherd its transition from a self-contained movie to an ongoing series. Stones and Zaslove were already major contributors to the Afternoon — Zaslove was one of the driving forces behind Duck Tales and the two had worked as a team on Chip and Dale’s Rescue Rangers and Darkwing Duck. “It was probably Jeffrey Katzenberg’s idea to turn the movie into a series, or it could’ve been him together with Gary Krisel, the head of the TV animation division,” recalls Stones. “We’d already done shows based on classic Disney characters and the Mermaid series was a success, so it wasn’t a big jump.

“The big problem was that the original movie had a happy ending. If kids want to see more of it, they don’t mean a married Aladdin who lives in a palace — they want to see more of the street rat. They want to see the genie, but he left at the end of the movie — how do we bring him back?”

Genie did return but Robin Williams didn’t. Dan Castellaneta took over the part in both Jafar and the weekly series. “We told Dan not to do a Robin Williams impression,” Stones explains. “He basically split the difference and found a Williams-ish type voice that was gangbusters on its own. Dan’s another comedic genius, and an improvisational genius.

“Now even though the genie was phenomenally popular, I thought the best character in the movie was Gilbert Gottfried’s Iago. He was actually smarter than Jafar — the bird had all the ideas. I thought that would be a great character to have in the series. So we came up with a convoluted story that explained everything and that ended up being The Return of Jafar.“

At the time, syndicated half-hour cartoons often premiered with a multi-part story to get kids in the habit of watching the show every day. According to Stones, Disney designed theirs to run as a feature that the stations could promote as a ‘family movie special’ on the Friday night before the series’ premiere. “The fact that it got turned into a video owes a lot to Paul Felix, one of our layout artists who later went onto features as a concept artist and production designer. He was sketching out different ideas for the movie, one of which was a band of thieves galloping across the desert toward this little crack in a mountain, which was their hideout. Alan was really inspired by those sketches and basically had the storyboard person work right off them to capture that feeling.

“The sequence went to [the Disney animation studio in] Australia, and that studio had just gotten a relatively new animator who loved horses. Now there was already some talk about releasing this as a video, even though Jeffrey Katzenberg and supposedly even Michael Eisner were worried about diluting the cachet of Disney animated features. But when we screened this very romantic footage for Jeffrey with Ashman’s Arabian Nights playing under it, he turned around and said ‘Guys, this looking pretty good.’ At the time he was used to features taking years and years, and he was like, ‘How did you pull this off?