For your more detailed perusal.
1. “The story takes place in a kingdom of lions in Africa, and was influenced by the biblical tales of Joseph and Moses and the Shakespearean play Hamlet.”
2. “…despite the protests of Mufasa’s hornbill majordomo Zazu.”
3. “Jim Cummings as Ed, a dim-witted hyena who does not talk, only communicating through laughter. Cummings also voiced a gopher that talks with Zazu and replaced Irons as Scar in certain lines of “Be Prepared” after Irons blew his voice.”
4. “Katzenberg decided to add elements involving coming of age and death, and ideas from personal life experiences, such as some of his trials in his bumpy road in politics, saying about the film, ‘It is a little bit about myself.’”
5. “By 1990, producer Thomas Schumacher, who had just completed The Rescuers Down Under, decided to attach himself to the project ‘because lions are cool.’”
6. “Hahn found the script unfocused and lacking a clear theme, and after establishing the main theme as “leaving childhood and facing up to the realities of the world”, asked for a final retool.”
7. “The script also had its title changed from King of the Jungle to The Lion King, as the setting was not the jungle but the savannah.”
8. “…James Earl Jones was cast because the directors found his voice “powerful” and similar to a lion’s roar.”
9. “For the hyenas, the original intention was to reunite Cheech & Chong, but while Cheech Marin accepted to play Banzai, Tommy Chong was unavailable.”*
10. “Jeremy Irons had at first refused the role due to not being comfortable going from the dramatic performance as Claus von Bülow in Reversal of Fortune to a comedic role.”
11. “The development of The Lion King started concurrently with Pocahontas, which most of the animators of Walt Disney Feature Animation decided to work on instead, believing it would be the more prestigious and successful of the two.”
12. “Since the characters were not anthropomorphized, all the animators had to learn to draw four-legged animals.”
13. “Five specially trained animators and technicians spent more than two years creating the two-and-a-half minute stampede sequence.”
14. “As Menken was unavailable, the producers accepted Rice’s suggestion of Elton John, after Rice’s invitation of ABBA fell through due to Benny Andersson being busy with the musical Kristina från Duvemåla.”
15. “Certain elements of the film were considered to bear a resemblance to a 1960s Japanese anime television show, Jungle Emperor (known as Kimba the White Lion in the United States), with characters having simular analogues, and various individual scenes being simular in composition to the show. Matthew Broderick believed initially that he was in fact working on an American version of Kimba, since he was familiar with the Japanese original.”
16. “Hyena biologists protested against the animal’s portrayal: one hyena researcher sued Disney studios for defamation of character.”
* doing what, though?
Tags: animals, disney, listicles, movies, the lion king
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Can you imagine if ABBA had co-written the soundtrack instead of Elton John? OH MY GOD
There would probably be like five different versions of that soundtrack now, each slightly different and each having been proclaimed the “real” version.
(yes I’m a Chess fan, why do you ask)
One night with Simba / and the world’s your warthog
FUN FACT Jim Cummings plays Scar in Lion King 2 : Simba’s Boogaloo*
*Simba’s Pride
I also enjoy telling people that I am not available without volunteering why
We can all learn something here from E. B. White:
“Thanks for your letter inviting me to join the committee of the Arts and Sciences for Eisenhower. I must decline, for secret reasons.”
100 times yes, this has changed my life.
Agreed
same here.:)
Why don’t I have a hornbill majordomo?
That particular hornbill has played a major(domo) role in my life, thanks to our being parents determined to survive our childrens’ obsession with this movie, somehow, anyhow, even if by incorporating a hornbill into our personal narrative.
16. “Hyena biologists protested against the animal’s portrayal: one hyena researcher sued Disney studios for defamation of character.”
lol wut
Like….by “Hyena Researcher” do they mean that it was a hyena who was actually a researcher who sued? Because that would make sense….I guess?
Hey, yesterday we talked about Vatican Scientists.
Wasn’t this an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Now it all makes sense.
You know, I didn’t watch Buffy, but the fact that that is a possibility makes me think maybe I should correct that.
There’s this weird digression in Michael Crichton’s The Lost World where a zoologist goes on for like eight pages about how lions suck and hyenas are awesome lol. It only occurs to me just now that Crichton was taking a swipe at The Lion King, which came out while he was writing the book and almost overtook Jurassica Park’s box office records.
“one hyena researcher sued Disney studios for defamation of character.”
I love research scientists. So passionate.
Earlier today I was in another corner of the Internet and came across a group of people agreeing that The Lion King was mediocre, cheesy and easily the weakest of the 90s Disney revival films.
I’m still looking to fight someone over this blasphemy.
No. That is flat out wrong. I will join you in your fight.
You have my sword.
do you need a posse? where do i sign up for your posse? i will defend the lion king to the death TO THE DEATH I SAY!
Long
Live
The
(lion)
KINNNNNNNNG
Thank you, I was having a conversation with someone today who did not think The Lion King was good and I was all wut, now I feel better.
Those people were both wrong and foolish.
Thomas Disch wrote a film treatment…
To enlarge on that part: Disch wrote the book that Disney adapted into The Brave Little Toaster, which is why he was on their speed dial in 1998. You can read a bit of his treatment (‘KING OF THE KALAHARI’) here.
(After The Brave Little Toaster, Disch’s next most famous book is probably Camp Concentration, in which the government performs medical experiments on political prisoners.)
This comment is exquisite because it exemplifies so much what the article about the unnecessary amount of detail on this children’s movie’s wiki page was trying to convey.
Please summarize the rest of wikipedia for me, thanks.
Scar, a comedic role? Did Irons even read the script? Scar is clearly Claudius, and Hitler, and apparently, um, Pharaoh all rolled into one sleazy lion. I mean, Hitler *wishes* he had written and choreographed “Be Prepared.”
I read somewhere* that that scene was actually based on Hitler rallies
*probably buzzfeed
ETA: thanks wikipedia! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Prepared_%28song%…
Oh, it’s straight out of Triumph of the Will. That was deliberate.
Anyone binge-watch Youtube videos of Disney songs in other languages? I really feel that Irons/Cummings’ version is one of the weaker “Be Prepared”s. The Korean “Be Prepared” should be mandatory watching for any Lion King fan. I don’t speak a word of Korean, and the delivery still has me cowering under the table.
are we not going to say anything about Jeremy Irons saying that Scar was a COMIC ROLE though.
(now THERE is a man used to playing dark characters.)
Oh yeah. Remember that he LITERALLY accepted the role of the most famous fictional pedophile.
Jeremy Irons played Batman?
Oh my fucking god he so should.
My lady and I watched Lion King 1 1/2 the other day. It’s kinda bizarro. It’s the same time period as the original Lion King, but told from the perspective of Timon and Pumbaa, a la Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (which makes sense because Lion King = Hamlet, anyway).
Anyway, it’s like a feature-length meta-joke and it wasn’t too bad!
“Katzenberg decided to add elements involving coming of age and death, and ideas from personal life experiences, such as some of his trials in his bumpy road in politics, saying about the film, ‘It is a little bit about myself.’”
Remember when Jeffrey Katzenberg took over Hollywood with his army of Nazi hyenas?
Also, MANDY FROM THE WEST WING VOICED ADULT NALA. MANDY. FROM THE WEST WING. APPARENTLY, THE SAVANNAH IS MANDYVILLE.
” Cummings also voiced a gopher that talks with Zazu and replaced Irons as Scar in certain lines of “Be Prepared” after Irons blew his voice.”
ENTER GOPHER, DRESSED IN DRACULA CAPE.
“Behold! I am Scar, the Gopher! Yes! On account of a magic spell, from that monkey with the gourd! I may be a gopher, but I will not be deterred in my plan to usurp my brother’s throne! Fear me, army of hyenas, for I am Scar, the Gopher! In fact, I think I feel a song coming on! A song such as Jeremy Irons could only dream of singing, since he blew his voice! YES! BLOW YOUR VOICE, JEREMY IRONS! BLOW IT LIKE THE WIND, FOR THIS IS MY TIME! A GODDAMN UNDERSTUDY WARMING THE BENCH IN THE ANIMATION STUDIO SINCE 1942, BUT NOW IT IS ALL FALLING INTO PLACE! I RULE! I, GARY THE GOPHER, AM THE STAR NOW! CENTER STAGE IS MINE, NOW AND FOREVER! I AM THE GOD! BOW DOWN NOW BEFORE ME, BOW DOWN!” (TACKLED AND DRAGGED OFF SET BY CARTOON FLAMINGOS)
I am unironically enthused about learning all of this (that is, the parts that I didn’t already know).
Let’s all pause to fondly reflect on this Jezebel article about Lion King from last year. <3 <3 <3
Simba isn’t just a baby, he’s a KITTEN. Can you imagine if there was a kitten that was also your nephew? The only thing less murderable than that would be if, like, the knowledge of how to make chocolate chip cookies only existed in the mind of a mini-horse that was also your grandma.
Sometimes you’re writing about an almost completely unrelated topic, and you realize belatedly that once again you’ve involuntarily made an oblique allusion to your private fantasy life as Applejack from My Little Pony. And even as you pray that nobody noticed, you are forced to acknowledge the conflict between the convenient deception of your social facade and the reality of your personal awareness that you are a beautiful cartoon farm pony. Honor the element of honesty, Jezebel author. Embrace your cutie mark.
I watched my lion king VHS so many damn times that i can still quote from memory not only the movie, but the previews for other disney movies that came before. in order.
i was a cool kid, is what i’m saying.
I also have that ability!
Wait, are you my son?
If not, are you my other son?
When the VHS first came out, my fourth grade self resolved to watch the movie every day for the rest of my life. I made it to just over a month.
My brother, my mother’s best friend’s daughter, and I could all recite the lines in unison when we were kids. I think I still could with the movie running in front of me, but not independently.
I don’t think I could handle spending two years of my life animating a two-and-a-half-minute stampede sequence.
Every single wildebeest is an individual design, with its own name, backstory, and motivations. Their stampede traces out a complex algorithm that reveals the orbital mechanics and destination of Disney’s Imaginarium Ad Astra generation starship. The last wildebeest appearing out of the dust was not animated, it appeared spontaneously on film, seemingly as an emergent property of the scene’s complexity. In at least six documented cases, people viewing VHS copies of The Lion King have reported that the tardy wildebeest paused, stared directly at the camera, and uttered bleak words of prophecy in the voice of Sterling Holloway. When rewound, the tapes in question showed no such scene.
None of the animators who worked on the stampede sequence can be located today.
I never saw The Lion King, but boy, it sounds a whole lot like “Kimba the White Lion,” which was a cartoon I watched on TV when I was a kid. I smell plagiarism.
I never saw The Lion King, but boy, it sounds a whole lot like "Kimba the White Lion," which was a cartoon I watched on TV when I was a kid. I smell plagiarism.