NEED TO KNOW
As many fans slowly discovered throughout season 1 of It: Welcome to Derry, the horror series has an unexpected connection to the 1992 Disney animated classic Aladdin.
It turns out that the co-showrunner is Brad Caleb Kane, who served as the singing voice for the titular “street urchin” who discovers a hidden genie and later disguises himself as a wealthy prince in order to woo the sultan’s daughter.
However, as the TV writer and producer, now 52, tells PEOPLE, his goal was never to be an actor — and getting cast in Aladdin almost didn’t happen as a result.
After years of doing commercials in New York City, Kane says, “I got a call for an audition during my senior year of high school and I was really getting out of the industry. It was not what I wanted to do with my life. I had just gotten into NYU Film School — and I was very much a film kid obsessed with Stephen King and Steven Spielberg.”
Alamy
As a teenager who grew up seeing slashers in theaters and reading King novels, all he wanted to do at the time was study film — that and rock out with his grunge band, which “had a bunch of gigs” lined up.
According to Kane, he initially met with composer Alan Menken and lyricist Howard Ashman before he graduated from high school. “I didn’t even know who they were at the time. I didn’t really think much of it. They had me read some sides. They had me sing a song, which I realized was ‘Proud of Your Boy,’ which had since been cut from the movie. And then I went off and lived my life,” he recalls.
It wasn’t until about eight months later, after he already started his freshman year at NYU, that he finally heard back from them. By that time, Kane says he had gone through several life changes. “I had a band. It was the height of grunge so I wore a lot of flannel. I did the crowd surfing thing,” he says of his college days, which included life on the road, from playing in Chicago to sleeping on floors in Pittsburgh. “I was a different guy” — who, he says, “did not want to be an actor.”
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Then, “I got a call from my mom saying, ‘As soon as you do your first gig in Chicago, you gotta jump on a plane and come back. Alan Menken wants you to sing with Lea Salonga to hear how your voices sound together,’ ” Kane says. “I said, ‘Mom, I don’t wanna do that.’ ”
Despite his initial resistance, Kane returned to N.Y.C., where he met with Menken and Salonga. “We sang ‘A Whole New World’ together once and I left,” he says. Soon after getting back to Chicago to be with his band, he got another call: “You’re gonna be doing this thing. They want you to do the singing voice of Aladdin.”
While Kane was cast alongside Scott Weinger, who was tapped to be the speaking voice of the main character, he was admittedly “not over the moon excited about it.” As he explains, “There was no golden age of Disney at the time. Only one movie had come out, which was The Little Mermaid. A couple of years later, Beauty and the Beast was about to open. But when I got Aladdin, it hadn’t become this whole thing yet.”
Alamy
Of course, Kane’s appreciation for the movie has since changed. But at the time, “I was just living life in real time. I sang a couple of songs over three recording sessions,” says Kane, who is now married to Sarah Thompson, who he shares two daughters with. “And it became what it became, which is this wonderful legacy that my kids love and that I’m very proud of.”
He also recalls realizing just how special it was to work with Ashman, who wrote many of the original songs for Aladdin before he died of complications related to AIDS at age 40 in March 1991.
“One of my first recording sessions was with Howard. I have memories of him — and at that point, Tim Rice had already come into it, writing more of the lyrics,” Kane says. “But Howard was there and he was ill at the time. But I remember him being an incredibly lovely man. I remember being absolutely obsessed with Little Shop of Horrors and realizing what this man’s legacy would be.”
He adds, “Obviously, it’s even greater now than it ever was and deservedly so. I’m very fortunate to have worked with a number of legitimate creative geniuses and I don’t take that for granted.”
“It’s so many years in the past now and I’ve done so much since then,” says Kane, who went on to sing for Aladdin in two animated sequels before shifting into life as a TV writer and producer on shows, like Fringe, Black Sails, Tokyo Vice as well as Welcome to Derry and the upcoming Crystal Lake series, which is a Friday the 13th prequel. “It’s a nice thing to look back on and know that’s a nice legacy to leave. I feel good about that. It gives me a good warm glow.”
