Also, for copyright reasons, the characters show are from the Aladdin that was made on Twin Earth. Twin Earth is exactly like normal Earth, except they never made any live action reboots.

My fan theory is actually that the genie was intentionally not granting Aladdin wishes, in order to "save" wishes, to give him more chances at being wished free. If Krikpe is correct in the comic, and a Prince is a Prince due to a sort of causal chain being traced back to a legitimate event which crowned him (Krikpe thought this was how all proper names worked), then in order for the genie to fulfill the wish he would have to change history. However, being as we know the genie can't bring people back from the dead, etc, it seems that altering the past would be beyond the scope of his powers. Taking inspiration from the trick Aladdin pulled just moments ago, where he got a free wish out of the genie, the genie decides to conceal this fact and pretend to make Aladdin a prince instead. He accomplishes simply by dressing him up as a prince and displaying his apparent wealth. In other words, all he tries to do is fool the king into thinking he's a prince long enough to court the princess (which was Aladdin's real goal anyway). He was probably hoping that everything would work out to how Aladdin wanted it, including Aladdin using his other two wishes for whatever he desired, and only then would he reveal that he still had a third wish. Since Aladdin would view this as a sort "found wish", he might be more inclined to grant the genie his freedom. Of course as it turned out Aladdin's second "wish" hardly seems like it would hold up in a genie court of law either, since Aladdin was unconscious at the time. The genie, quite deftly, seems to make some sort of gentleman's agreement with Aladdin that it counted as a wish, which is absurd, given the rigid nature of the wishes. So it seems like Aladdin actually might have had all three wishes left at the end of the movie when he decided to set the genie free.
Not only that, but the wish he wanted to make at the end was a little mysterious, even more-so than the first wish to become a Prince. Jafar, after all, made no indication that he was using his magic to turn Aladdin back into a non-prince. He just changed his clothes back to what they were so Jasmine would recognized him as a fraud. He says "So Ali turns out to be merely Aladdin. Just a con, need I go on?" If Jafar were making some kind of metaphysical change to revert Aladdin's royalness, he wouldn't say that he was a con and "turned out to be" a non-prince. Jafar seems to be in agreement with the genie that Aladdin was only disguised as a prince all along. So why does Aladdin have to wish to be a Prince again? What will it accomplish? Shouldn't the first wish still be in effect? The answer is no, because the first wish was never in effect. He was only disguised as a prince even after the first wish, and it doesn't really seem like the second wish would do anything more than disguise him as a prince again. The genie, however, plays along, knowing that another change of clothes is clearly going to be enough for the Sultan, who is obviously looking for a legal loophole to make the wedding happen anyway (and ironically, the wedding most likely will make Aladdin into a prince, but the genie couldn't take credit for that since it happened from the Sultan's free will, which the genie cannot change). This means that the genie would have cunningly preserved all three wishes to the very end, giving him ample chances at freedom in the future. He is, of course, under no obligation to inform Aladdin when real wishes are used, proven by the fact he never told Jafar that his wish to make Jasmine fall in love with him never counted, so his plan was probably to reveal that Aladdin had one wish left, and if that failed...one more, etc. After all, the more wishes Aladdin still has, the more chances at freedom, especially if the genie believes that Aladdin is more likely than most to perform such a wish.

Given all this, it is likely that the character of a lovable jokester who likes to play tricks, but is ultimately good at heart is tailor made for Aladdin, to make him feel sympathy for the genie, obviously to increase the odds of getting wished free.

The Compatibalist stance on free will and determinism is a premise of every time travel movie, and no one even seems to notice.

In the debate between determinists and compatibilists it is often repeated that the side arguing that free will and determinism are compatible are just playing word games, and changing the definition of "free will". However, it's probably the other way around. When the debate is first framed in philosophy 101 classes it causes people enter into a sort of confusion about what they had previously believed. It's hard to get at what people's pre-theoretical notions of freedom are, but we can certainly observe that no audience has ever gasped in shock like Marty does in this comic upon "learning" that people behave deterministically, and only by altering their environment would you alter their decisions. In fact, this is the basic premise of all time travel movies, and people find it so obvious that it never has to be explained. If the director wanted people to find it disconcerting that they supposed have no "free will", a large explanation would have to take place in order to get the audience to understand. Likewise, if the director wanted to depict the so call "libertarian" view of free will, that is that we are "truly" free and our souls or consciousness can make decisions outside of physics, the audience would also demand an explanation. I suspect that most people, upon learning that the mere act of going back in time and observing themselves again, might find themselves making different decisions for no apparent reason, would feel like they were less free. After all, if my decision to get married was based not on the kind of person I am, nor on the environment, but on something else entirely that can oscillate back and forth "freely", I might feel like the fact that I'm currently married wasn't so much my choice, but merely chance.
What concerns people about freedom in movies, it seems, is whether or not the action came from ourselves rather than a foreign object, not whether or not our decisions are somehow able to take place outside of the "laws of physics" (a strange idea to be sure, since the laws of physics merely describe what exists in reality, so whatever occurs in reality must be under them, i.e. it is definitionally true that nothing can break the laws of physics, because if they did we would just revise the laws to accomadate for this new information). While people do not react with horror that we make the same decisions every time, they probably would react with horror if a sci-fi movie shows that our decisions are secretly being made by a computer chip implanted in our brains without our knowledge. No one worries that the computer chip is deterministic, merely that it is not part of our being. The compatibilist account of free will, which seems to be taken for granted in time travel stories, is that freedom simply is having what we are be in control of our decisions.

Board games rules are based on a fundamental mistake about the nature of fun.

"What did you bring again, Marx?"
"I brought the cake."
"I thought Engels brought that."
"Uh...it's from both of us."

Early capitalist theorists like Adam Smith and Herbert Spencer believe that under free market systems, individuals would pursue their own selfish needs, but through market exchange and competition, society as a whole would benefit. Adam Smith, being an economist, focused on how trade and competition would set prices in a way that reflected the value of the work put into producing goods, and the society's desire for any given good. For example, if society was producing too much wheat, and not enough sugar, a capitalist would notice that with the same amount of labor he could switch to growing sugar and make more money, because the price of sugar would be higher relative to how much you could produce with the same amount of work. Through the selfish desire to make more money, labor would be allocated in a way that would correctly reflect what a society's wants and needs were. Herbert Spencer was more of a sociologist, and focused on how competing firms would either die out or prosper based on how good they were at what they were doing. So for two competing sugar farms, if one was inefficient, lazy, or incompetent, and the other was well run, the incompetent one wouldn't be able to survive in a market economy and would close down. He saw this as a good thing, because then society as a whole would evolve in a similar way to organisms over time, towards better and better practices, due to the free market "killing off" weaker, more poorly managed companies. He coined the term "survival of the fittest", and thought a free market system was what would improve society in this way.
Thomas Hobbes is best known for his social contract theory, where he argued that we must submit to the rule of law (even to a monarch) in order to prevent an "all against all" society, essentially giving up some degree of freedom for the security of living in a society. People like Rousseau argued that before advanced civilization people lived in relative peace because we are naturally cooperative, and Adam Smith thought that our natural moral sentiments, which are grounded in the discomfort we would feel in knowing a neutral third party observer would disapprove of our bad actions, is what keeps people behaving justly.

Serious historical question though, no joke: did Hegel have groupies?