One Thousand and One Nights is being adapted for movies, television and games by upstart production house Picturestart.
One Thousand and One Nights is a collection of Middle Eastern folk tales allegedly compiled in Arabic between the 8th century and 14th century A.D. and translated into English in 1706 as the Arabian Nights.
There is little evidence that the Nights is particularly influential or even highly-regarded in the Arab world. According to Islamic scholar Dwight Reynolds, the work is rarely mentioned in lists of popular literature and few Arabic manuscripts of the work exist.
A list of the characters in Nights has a few well-known characters including Aladdin who first appeared in “Aladdin and The Wonderful Lamp” and Sinbad, the famous sailor from Basra.
Good luck trying to use either of those characters.
Maybe Ali Baba and his crew of thieves rogues underserved youths from high-risk communities can get their own mini-series on HBO Maxi?
Who’s Funding This?
Picturestart is a partnership between producers Erik Feig and Reza Aslan.
Erik Feig is a fairly unknown name in genre entertainment circles, having spent most of his career as an executive for Summit and then head of movies at Lionsgate.
Reza Aslan, however, is well known to almost anyone that has been paying attention to American politics.
On Twitter, he called for Trump supporters, or at least his staff, to be “eradicated.”
Of course, he was not suspended.
Instead, he said all of Trump supporters are terrorists.
This Is Who Creates Your Entertainment
It’s not surprising that Scholastic is backing PictureStart. Scholastic is a publishing house that sells directly to schools and libraries. This is its Google description:
Find the best books, literary resources and educational solutions for kids at Scholastic, a leader in publishing and education for nearly 100 years.
So this insane, violent, racist weirdo is going to be “educating” our kids?
Imagine my shock.
Do I See An Upside Here?
As with Children of Blood and Bone, we have people of color living inside of a self-contained universe completely removed from other cultures and races.
Maybe Reza and his crew can just focus on telling good stories in this universe.
Maybe then can use this material to delving into the enslaving and sale of millions of Africans by the Arab slave-traders. Millions went west, mainly to the Caribean and Brazil, but we never heard about the tens of millions who went east — I wonder why?
No, no, think of it!
Of course, he won’t because the dirty non-secret of Hollywood is that they only care about people of color so long as they can be used to attack their enemies and subvert the existing order of civilization.
You can’t talk about white racism and white male sexism without white people.
