The secret fact about Disney's Aladdin that somehow everybody missed...

Okay here it is. Aladdin is set in the distant future not the past and everything you thought you knew about your favourite childhood film is a lie.

I’m going to give it to you straight. Your favourite nipple-less street rat is actually from the future.

That’s right, Aladdin is living in a post-apocalyptic world.

Or so the Internet and it’s vast conspirators (aka disneytheory.com) would have you believe.

Bizarrely convincing fan theory: It was ‘Jack’ who caused the Titanic to sink.

The latest “hey-you-there-functional-adult-that-tiny-part-of-your-childhood-you-never-bothered-questioning-was-actually-part-of-a-giant-conspiracy-probably-designed-to-disrupt-your-whole-sense-of-self-at-some-point” theory goes like this…

When Aladdin gets his homeless to handsome makeover, that lovable imp Genie throws some shade on Al’s fez and vest combo calling it “much too third century”.

But wait! On emerging from the lamp the Genie has already announced that ‘ten thousand years will give you such a crick in the neck’.

Living la vida lamp would put Genie in no position to observe current fashions. THEREFORE we can infer that Aladdin MUST be set in the year 10,300 at the earliest.

THERE IS MORE… … …

What about the Genie’s impressions? He does a killer Arnie, Groucho Marx and Jack Nicholson — just to name a few — all actors who lived in the 20th century. That places us beyond the year 11,970 and explains more than a few of the film’s magical elements.

That ‘magic’ carpet? NOT MAGIC. Actually a vestige of hover-technology left over from a time that has been and gone, says the Internet. We’ve all seen Back to the Future II, we know what’s coming.

Likewise Iago, Jafar’s smack-talking sidekick, is some kind of talking robot bird, obviously.

Also, Agrabah is not a real place in the history of the Middle East.

NOT YET ANYWAY.

Didn’t think Toy Story could get any better? Watch this.

The quacks theorists don’t stop there either, looking beyond the motion picture to the a half-buried stop sign and an “unexploded atomic bomb” which can be seen in the Aladdin video game and point to a nuclear war that was.

I think the bigger question here is definitely how we reached this stateless post-apocalyptic desert world. Was it a nuclear apocalypse? Was it climate change? All the sand points to the latter.

Overall verdict? I remain unconvinced.