When I was like, seven? Or eight? And still living up in Spokane Washington, I fucking loved Disney’s Aladdin. It was by far my favorite disney movie. So my dad figured out a pretty neat present for an Aladdin-obsessed kid: He took me to meet Richard Vander Wende, an early production designer for the film, who still had a lot of his old concept work for the movie set up like a gallery in one corner of his house. He had a lot of early renders and models for the cave of wonders, and several character sketch iterations of Jafar and the Genie too I think?
The thing I didn’t know about Wende until much more recently was him co-directing and co-designing Riven: The Sequel to Myst well after his stint at disney. Now I really wish I’d been a fair bit older when I’d met him, maybe some day I can go back and probe him for more actual questions about his career. It was really cool getting to see a lot of his work on the prototypical Aladdin but I just wasn’t old enough to remember it in more vivid detail.