Sito said that by the time Disney Renaissance movies like Aladdin arrived in theaters, the company had already begun to crack down on the in-jokes, partly because the VHS era meant people would be equipped to prove the thing they thought they saw was real. “After, we were like, ‘Yeah, everyone knows about the naked billboard of The Rescuers.’ ” In both cases, before long, there were throngs of people who felt, as one mother put it, “as if I had entrusted my kids to pedophiles.” Then they showed their aunt, whose husband was a pastor. Case closed? Maybe-except, following another strand of Christian rumors all the way to the origin, Bannon found Jon Wood, a 16-year-old boy who also claimed he had first heard the line himself in 1994 while watching his “little sister’s copy” of the movie (whatever you say, buddy).

Shocked, he told his sister, who then told her best friend, and so on. Ford claimed to have noticed the line on his own. Movie Guide had itself first learned about the supposed hidden messages from letters, and Bannon traced back the rumor still further through one of the letter writers, an Iowa woman who eventually led Bannon to an Iowa college senior named Matthew Ford. The rumor’s great vessel was Christian networks, especially in the South, that were convinced the Disney Renaissance was secretly corrupting children. It all sounds like Aladdin, but it may have been an error in the sound editing and mixing that resulted in the way it is here and why it sounds jumbled.”) (I shared the moment with a Slate audio producer, who said: “I don’t necessarily buy there is a second voice there. Even Snopes’ 2000 debunk, which deemed the rumors “False,” seemed unwilling to let go of them entirely: “A close listening to the audio track revealed Aladdin,” the site wrote, “speaking the words ‘C’mon … good kitty,’ and just as Aladdin said the word ‘kitty,’ a second voice began to whisper, ‘Pssst … take off your clo- …’.” It added, ominously, “Who this second voice was, and exactly what he said, is a mystery.” Snopes even included slowed-down audio to support its claims. The rumor is silly, to my ear at least, but it’s also a schoolyard urban legend for the ages, and many of us still want to believe.

Search for “good teenagers take off your clothes” now-or, actually, don’t!-and you will quickly find Disney’s official explanation that the line of dialogue is really “Scat, good tiger, take off and go.” Listen for yourself, and what you hear will likely depend on how much you wish Disney was sending us all secret sex signals.

Subliminal messages disney