I am glad this has been brought up - I was extremely disappointed in NPR for using the “like the Genie, he is Free now” line that was circulating around twitter Monday. It would of been 100x better to point out that it is important to understand mental illness, and that despite him bringing joy to millions, it is possible to of been dealt a bad hand. Robin Williams was a genius, The world will miss him greatly.
Edit- that line about him being a free Genie distraughts me the most because you cannot call Death a release, its just death. Ending is not a release, its just Death. Embracing it as a release just reinforces it as an escape. He did not escape, he ended, and that is tragedy.
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Well, I know it was intended as a joke, but I did look it up, and Williams-Sonoma was founded by a Mr. Williams in the town of Sonoma, CA.
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Dammit, I appreciate all of your grammatical stylings! Take heart in that, at least.
I’ll just submit that people who do not believe that material death is the “end end” might disagree, and those people represent the majority. I will, however, agree with you, that I think the emphasis on suicidal death equalling freedom is not positive. However, it’s interesting to consider that we’d likely be OK with using this terminology to refer to someone dying after a long painful fight with cancer, but not from a mental diseases (with clear-cut physical components) like bipolar disorder plus chemical addiction. Is there really much difference, at the end of the day? Something to ponder, perhaps.
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I’m no anarchist, but some of the things they do, and some of the outcomes people suffer … I’ve often been astounded at the fact that, however problematic the issue, people remain relatively within the bounds of civil behaviour - they don’t go nasty, brutish and short.
Personally, I always thought the “Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem,” line was rather counterproductive, because every time I hear it, a part of me thinks, “Yeah, but at least it’s permanent, right? Because the problem might be temporary in the grand scheme of things, but it sure as hell is persistent and recurring, and a permanent solution to it still sounds pretty sweet.”
Yeah; of all the first -world problems, this seems like one of the first-worldiest. That amount of money represents a median American household’s income over the course of 20 years (median household income is $50k), and we Americans are in the global 1%.
I get the part where he was a beloved entertainer (I for one love the Genie character) and certainly once a company enters into an agreement, they should fulfill their end of the bargain. But…another part of me hears about the Big Bang Theory cast getting obnoxious amounts of money per episode, and wonders why a small percentage of people who perform for a living get big bucks, why we give a small number of people who can play the sportsball CEO-like salaries, and people who perform tasks like working in ERs get comparatively little money.
I guess the interesting part to me is that Williams was definitely a big star at that point, and Disney felt the need to renege on an agreement.
Consider that the alternative to those people getting obscene amounts of money is that the NFL and the studios get to KEEP all of that obscene amount of money.
We can argue all day about the relative merits of pop culture and free markets, and whether they ought to be able to generate that kind of money, but no matter what we conclude or believe, Guardians of the Galaxy just had a half a billion dollar opening weekend. All things considered, I’d rather see a reasonable chunk of that go to talented people who made the movie (actors, directors, screenwriters, etc ) than all of it go into the maw of Marvel/Disney/Conglomo… and the same is true of the NFL, and the NCAA, and the NBA, and all of the other sports acronyms.
I was working at Disney during the making of that Aladdin sequel…Robin Williams’ agreement to do the voice came late. When he agreed, about 20 minutes of animated, coloured and shot film was dumped and the project went back to scripting to increase the genie’s role etc.
Hollywood has a number of rules and agreements, some of them unwritten. If your name is on advertising, then you’re usually bound to do promotion rounds and press junkets, and you have to follow certain union rules in terms of compensation etc. He likely wanted to concentrate on promoting Toys and didn’t want to be dragged in the Disney PR machine; he might also have been under some exclusive obligation from the contracts for Toys. Also, I don’t know about release timeframes, but having “two Robin Williams movies” out at the same time would have confused people.
As it happens, Toys bombed and Aladdin exploded, so Williams ended up losing quite a bit out of the whole story, a factor that probably contributed to his overall bitterness.
Aladdin isn’t Chinese – the character, nor the tale. The French translation was just done by an extremely Orientalist European living in an extremely Orientalist Europe. It’s an Arabic tale.
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