He Speaks For Aladdin

Robin Williams's return as the mile-a-minute voice of the Blue Genie in Aladdin and the King of Thieves is the hot news about tomorrow's release of the made-for-video movie. Williams appeared in the original Aladdin feature film in 1992 and isgiven a lot of credit for making that film a huge success.

Yet don't count out Scott Weinger in that equation. Weinger has been doing the voice of Aladdin from the beginning - through all three feature-length films and for 107 episodes of the TVseries.

Weinger, who is now nearly 21 and about to enter his junior year at Harvard, has grown up in the role - having started at age 15. That's not unlike Aladdin himself, who has gone from being a self-centered street urchin to a young man who finally gets to marry Princess Jasmine in the new film . Aladdin also goes looking for his long-lost father and teaches the old man a few lessons about family and love and responsibility.

"I think people would make a big mistake by just labeling this as a little cartoon when it's got very significant themes," says Weinger over the phone from his home in Los Angeles.

Weinger himself knows a lot about responsiblity, having balanced full-time college work with a career that includes not only Aladdin's voice but also the youth reporter for Good Morning America.

But even the workaholic Weinger, who strapped on in-line skates to cover the first Extreme Games last year in Providence, found the stress of all that a little too much. He was doing reports for GMA up to twice a month and found "toward the middle of my sophomore year that it was getting so crazy that I wanted to stick to Cambridge for a while. They had me running all over the country."

Yet he hopes "this fall, when I'm back in Massachusetts, to start pitching a lot more stories to them."

He's also a good student. "Not to brag or anything," Weinger says with a laugh, "but my grades are fine. What you have to put in your mind is the distinct possibility that you have to apply to law school, even though I don't intend to. You always have to say those two words - law school - to yourself before you write a paper or before you take an exam. And it motivates you. But I've always been pretty self-motivated. It's been a very busy, fun couple of years."

One thing he really enjoys is working on the Aladdin films and TV shows. He has recorded so many of the latter that some haven't even been put into animation yet.

It proved to be the perfect job for a college student on the go. "I started working on Aladdin the King of Thieves at the very beginning of my freshman year. It was made entirely while I was in college, without ever having to take any time off.

"Working on an animated film is one of the best jobs you can have because you can do it anywhere and at any time. A lot of it was recorded right in Boston, and a lot of it was recorded in Manhattan, and there was a part I did in California."

It was a long-distance affair, worked through something called a "phone patch." Weinger would be in a recording studio in Boston or New York, and his voice would be transmitted to technicians at a recording studio in California.

Mostly he did his recordings alone, although in New York he occasionally worked with Linda Larkin, who plays Jasmine, and Gilbert Gottfried, who plays the opportunistic parrot Iago. He didn't work with Williams this time, although he did on the original feature film. Williams did his lines in San Francisco, near his home.

The entire process lasted nearly two years - "up to about a month ago. We worked up to the day where they printed the videos. Every little detail is scrutinized."

In the beginning, the actors recorded the entire script. But then there were always little refinements - a new line of dialogue here, a new word there. "Two years later, we'd gone from doing whole paragraphs to little lines to phrases. And by the very end we were only doing little sounds that they wanted."

Although much of Weinger's work has been limited to his voice lately, he has often appeared on screen. He was a regular on TV's Life Goes On. For 22 episodes he was Gregory Harrison's son on The Family Man. And for two seasons he played Candace Cameron's boyfriend on Full House, leaving that comedy in 1994 to go to Harvard.

But he hasn't given up on acting. He'd love to go home to California when he gets his diploma and resume his acting career full time . . . or maybe work at a studio in the production end. He also has been writing screenplays with one of his best friends at Harvard. At the moment he isn't sure which direction fate will take him.

And then there's Aladdin. Disney has said that Aladdin and the King of Thieves marks the end of the feature-film trilogy, but Weinger says mischievously, "Who can say?

"That's what they're saying now. However, if it becomes a huge, wild success and the public proves there's a great demand for more, I wouldn't rule anything out.

"I would vote for another one. It's a great job."

Written by Michael Janusonis
for The Providence Journal-Bulletin, 08/12/1996