http://www.straightdope.com/columns/991224.html
(added link - Jill)
FINALLY! someone to put Disney in their place! even they are not immune to admitting when they are wrong before the great Cecil Adams! but I can’t believe you didn’t mention that The Simpsons, in their infinite wisdom, had already stumbled upon this, as evidenced by their episode #2F32 back in 1995 (http://www.snpp.com/episodes/2F32.html):
Lisa: That was for you, Bleeding Gums.
BG: [appearing in the cloud] You’ve made an old jazzman happy, Lisa.
Mufasa: [appearing in the cloud] You must avenge my death, Kimba – I mean, Simba.
Darth Vader: [appearing in the cloud] Luke, I am your father.
James Earl Jones: [appearing in the cloud] This is CNN.
BG: Will you guys pipe down? I’m saying goodbye to Lisa!
All: We’re sorry. [they vanish]
– A last request, “'Round Springfield”
(http://www.snpp.com/episodes/2F32.html)
“Avenge my death, Kimba – I mean, Simba”
Matthew Kurth writes, "This is a deliberate reference to claims that
Disney ripped off the basis for The Lion King' from a 1950s comic book called The Jungle Emperor’ produced in Japan in the 1950s by
Osamu Tezuka which was animated and shown in America in 1966 as
`Kimba, the White Lion’.
There are several striking similarities and co-incidences between
the films, the most interesting of which is, surprise, the use of
clouds to have their dead fathers `come back to life' to communicate
with their sons, named Kimba in `The Jungle Emperor' and Simba in
`The Lion King'. And while borrowing from other films is not
uncommon, this debate is particularly heated because Disney
maintains that `The Lion King' is an original film when there is
substantial evidence to the contrary."
ADMIT IT DISNEY!! YA PLAGERISTS!!! LONG LIVE CECIL!!!
I don’t know if I should be happy or afraid. The second I read Cecil’s column I thought the Kimba Simba exchange sounded fimilar. I got out my Simpsons book, looked up the episode with Bleeding Gums Murphy and behold there it was. The part that scares me is that somebody else remembered this.
I watched a lot of “Kimba the White Lion” as a child, and figured that Disney must have paid some type of royalty to that show’s producers to so thoroughly hijack their intellectual property.
Man, that WAS along time ago, and I wonder, could the copyright have expired?
Anybody remember “Clutch Cargo”–it came on at 9:30 after “Kimba”?
Maybe Disney can use that cartoon as well, how does “Butch Bargo” sound?
One of the lawyer birds should be along soon to give the definitive answer on this, but with books and music I believe it’s 50 years after the death of the last principal author. I’m not sure how this would work with movies, in which so many different creative people play a role.
Anyone I know of who remembers Simba (including myself) unanimously agrees that Kimba is a rip-off (a much better produced rip-off, but a rip-off, nonetheless).
The makers of Simba should sue Disney, any jury would find in favor of the complaint.
Simply go to www.britannica.com and have it search for copyrights and it will tell you all you want to know about American copyright laws and how they differ when it’s a work created by one person or a collaborative effort like films.
On another thread, someone wanted to know “What is the source of all knowledge?” I say the EB is a major source, but that Cecil fills in the parts they overlook!
Ummm, yeah, tired. That’s it, I was tir… no wait… I was just showing how derivative one was of the other – that their names are interchangeable, yeah, that’s the ticket!
In a 7/13/94 LA TIMES article, Tezuka Productions weighed in on the subject. The gist is that certain similarities were forced by the setting of talking animals in Africa, and many of the similarities were from both drawing from the same sorces. “Simba” is Swahili for “lion”, for example. The evil uncle theme isn’t original to either one.
