David Cook read the previous item about the Aladdin-type movie with Phil Silvers in it and writes to ask…
There's a Fifties Bugs Bunny cartoon with a genie who is more like Phil Silvers than anyone else. Did that tie into this movie?
I don't see any particular connection. Phil Silvers doesn't play the genie in A Thousand and One Nights and I don't recall any plot similarities, although the time frame isn't far off. A Thousand and One Nights came out in 1945 and the Bugs Bunny cartoon you're recalling — A Lad in His Lamp — came out in October of 1948. A very rough rule of thumb on Warner Brothers cartoons of this period is a year lead time from when the gag men were writing the film to when it reached theaters. But I still don't think one had anything to do with the other.
The most interesting thing about A Lad in His Lamp — and here I go veering off on trivial tangents again — is that the voice of the genie was done by Jim Backus. He's not credited, of course, but it's definitely him and it may have been his screen debut. He was a radio actor before then and this was a full year before the first Mr. Magoo cartoon appeared.
What's odd is that Mr. Backus gave this wonderful performance as the genie in that cartoon, and then became a cartoon voice superstar as Magoo…but never really did anything else in cartoons; not until 1974 when Filmation turned Gilligan's Island into the first of two animated series. Backus was constantly doing animation voicing during the interim but only as Magoo. Maybe it was because he was so prolific as a film and television actor…but you'd think Warners would have used him again or Disney would have had him play a role in some movie or something of the sort.
Nope. In a 41-year career doing cartoon voices, Jim Backus seems to have played only four roles: The genie in that Bugs Bunny cartoon, Quincy Magoo in hundreds of cartoons, Thurston Howell III in The New Adventures of Gilligan (1974) and Gilligan's Planet (1982) and Gamun the Rat in a 1984 feature, Enchanted Journey. Backus was the only other actor besides Mel Blanc to regularly receive credit on animated theatrical shorts…but in four decades, he voiced fewer characters than Mel usually did in one cartoon.