Plot

A lowly shoeshine boy has his attention captivated by a pretty girl and tries to follow her back to her place. After his attempt to meet with her fails due to an angry superintendent in her apartment building, he receives some help from the genie of the spittoon who provides an effective way to get to her balcony. Once they depart the angry man gives chase, aided by two mice and a bathtub, attacking with a water jet and a cannon and no concern for the girl's safety. From 1926, this is one of Rudolph Ising and Hugh Harman's earliest works.—Skyfox

The scene opens with Aladdin, a canine shoeshine boy, working on a customer's shoes outside a barber shop. Nearby, a lovely canine girl is getting herself prettied up with a generous application of perfume. The scent of the perfume quickly attracts the attention of Aladdin who sniffs the air until realizing who it's coming from and then dreamily floats away to pursue her, leaving the perturbed customer behind. As he skips along and follows the girl of his dreams with his little tail wagging and heart beating out of his chest, a gust of wind blows her skirt up to her head briefly, leaving Aladdin feeling very embarrassed.

When they reach the door of her hotel she flirtatiously waves goodbye to him, implying an invitation up to her place. He soon follows, briefly searching the floors and hanging out the windows to find her room, but quickly comes into conflict with the human hotel manager. The angry manager carries Aladdin out onto a balcony, scolds his intrusion, and then throws him to the ground. Aladdin swirls down to the street like a sheet of paper but crashes heavily through the sidewalk. Soon after, some mice from the steam tunnels carry him back to the surface and dump him at his shoeshine stand. Aladdin is very dazed from the fall and starts shining the shoes of a customer who isn't there. When he accidentally starts polishing the spittoon, a puff of smoke arises and turns into a genie. Aladdin is frightened but the genie explains who he is and offers a wish to him. Aladdin explains the situation regarding his love interest, so the genie spits out some chew from the spittoon to make a small airplane appear. Aladdin thanks the genie and quickly takes off in the airplane, headed for the balcony from the earlier scene. Along the way the airplane starts flapping its wings like a bird.

Upon arrival to the hotel balcony, Aladdin tells the airplane to wait there (floating in midair), and the airplane responds by becoming anthropomorphic and casually relaxing with a smiling face while resting its head on a landing gear arm. Aladdin calls out to his dream girl and she soon comes to the balcony. He greets her, shows her his airplane, and invites her for a ride. She tries to remain bashful but is quickly jumping at the chance for an airplane ride. Aladdin is thrilled and tells the airplane to resume being a regular airplane, the two of them hop on, and they quickly depart. The hotel manager immediately comes out to the balcony, searches around for the pair, and is shocked to see them flying away. He walks back inside and soon returns carrying a bathtub manned by two mice with oars who start paddling the bathtub through the air like a flying boat as the angry man shouts instructions to them through a bullhorn, including the sight gag of him sticking his head clear through the bullhorn while flailing his arm.

Meanwhile, the two lovebirds are flying through the sky. contentedly in each others arms and sharing kisses that cause their necks to corkscrew and twist together. When they realize they are being pursued by the angry man, Aladdin starts influencing the airplane to fly faster by smacking the tail with a leather strap, getting out to push from behind, and finally giving it a few swift kicks in the tail which causes the airplane to start swimming through the air faster with its wings. He quickly hangs on, and the view returns to the angry man in the bathtub. As the mice start paddling harder for more speed, the bathtub breaks in two, leaving one of the mice trailing behind. When he realizes what happened he starts smacking the back end of the tub with his oar to make it go faster and catch up with the rest of the bathtub until they rejoin and become a single tub. The angry man thinks for a few seconds, and then gets the idea to pull up the tub faucet, point it forward, and start blasting a jet of water at the airplane. The water causes the airplane to start tumbling and throw Aladdin out so he's standing on the jet of water. Aladdin thinks for a second on how to fix the situation, and decides to grab the water stream and pull it upwards, redirecting it to shoot backwards and land right back in the bathtub. This results in the sight gag of the mice being propelled up on a geyser of water. The angry man is made angrier at this turn of events and rips the faucet pipe out and throws it away to stop the water stream.

When the angry man instructs the mice to do something, they drop down into the bathtub and raise up a large cannon on two tall pillars which shoots bowling ball-sized cannonballs at the airplane with no regard for the girl's safety. The airplane dodges several of the cannonballs, some of which explode in a burst in the sky next to them, and uses the tail like a tennis racket to smack some of the cannonballs back at the tub. When one of the cannonballs swirls and lands right in the cockpit of the airplane, the couple stand aside while the airplane drops the cannonball out of a previously unknown bomb bay door near the tail. After that, Aladdin pulls the choke on the airplane, causing the tail to raise and thick black smoke to pour out of the bomb bay door straight backwards into the bathtub's path. The angry man, tub, and mice are all blackened by the smoke, so he responds by instructing the mice to shoot more cannonballs. Their second shot is a direct hit on the tail of the airplane, which the loving couple didn't dodge because they were in each other's arms again. The hit causes the airplane to spiral to the ground with smoke pouring out of the tail.

When the airplane crashes, Aladdin and his girlfriend are thrown out of the cockpit onto the ground. When they realize they're alright and have escaped, they start hugging and kissing each other again with swirling eyes. As they hold each other, Aladdin starts rubbing his hand down his head and face repeatedly, and the scene fades to show that it was just an affectionate cow standing there licking him and that everything had been a dream from being dazed after being thrown from the balcony earlier. When he comes to his senses he is angry at the cow and chases her off to the horizon as the screen irises out to black to end the cartoon.

Aladdin's Vamp is from 1926 and is one of Rudolph Ising and Hugh Harman's earliest works. It contains no spoken words and all dialog between characters is pantomime. The word "vamp" in the title can refer to a part of a shoe or to a flirtatious woman, tying together both Aladdin's profession and his love interest.