Theme: Arabian Nights Fantasy

Arabian Nights refers to a body of works that are adapted from or mimic the style of the Arabian Nights/One Thousand Nights and a Night/1001 Nights, a classic series of stories originating out of the Persian oral tradition around the 9th-10th centuries. These are told by the Scheherazade who has married the sultan Schariar who kills all his brides on their wedding night. Her solution is to leave the ending of each story unfinished to be completed the following night in order to spare her life. Classic tales such as the adventures of Sinbad, Ali Baba and Aladdin all originate here.

On screen, Hollywood has created a fantasticised version of Arabia (usually inhabited by Caucasian faces) filled with wily thieves, noble princes, evil viziers with ill intentions towards virtuous princesses, of flying carpets, genies and magic lamps.

The first Hollywood Arabian Nights film was the silent Douglas Fairbanks The Thief of Bagdad (1924), a grand swashbuckling adventure original to the screen. This underwent a lush colour remake as The Thief of Bagdad (1940) and was followed by a series of films throughout the 1940s, although most of these placed an emphasis on adventure, swashbuckling and romance but minimised the fantasy.

The genre regained its feet with Ray Harryhausen’s The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), which was a pure adventure designed to showcase his stop-motion animated creature effects. This inspired two sequels and a renewed series of adventures.

In more recent years, there was the success of Disney’s animated Aladdin (1992), which took an almost entirely comedic approach to the genre.