So I was doing that internet thing where you just fall down a rabbit hole and end up reading stuff you had no idea you wanted to know about. Like these facts about The Lion King.
Firstly, you know that song from the beginning? The one that goes something like: AAooo walaheyya! Baba heyya! It’s Swahili for There goes a lion. Hey look, a lion.
Did you know there is an expanded universe series of books? There you can find out what Scar’s name was before he had his scar. It was Taka. When he got his scar he told everyone to call him Scar. Because Taka in Swahili means garbage.
You heard that right. His parents named one son King (Mufasa means king in Swahili) and the other one Garbage. That would make me all lion-hating and hyena-loving too.
And as far as I can tell, “Taka” is “tribe” in Zulu. It is, indeed, “waste” in Swahili. On the other hand, given that Mufasa’s name is apparently in “Manazoto” (a language about which I can find no information), and Simba is indeed Swahili (for, um, “lion”), as is Sarabi, who knows what they intended.
You thought Rafiki was kidding, right? But that is actually what “wiwi nugu, mi mi apana” means in Swahili. (And “asante sana” means “thank you very much.”)
In the scene when Mufasa’s apparition speaks with Simba, found it odd that he never revealed that Scar was the murderer. It would not have ruined the movie, wonder if it was a mistake.?
Maybe Mufasa thought it more prudent for Simba to find out on his own? For him to return home and face the rest of the pride in spite of whatever guilt he felt?
This is pretty well known, but “Lion King” has many essential parts lifted from the earlier animated series “Kimba, the White Lion.” Besides rehashing yet another Disney [del]theft[/del] [del]appropriation[/del] [del]influence[/del] delightful similarity of independent development, it might be worth looking at the earlier production for story elements.
Maybe Simba could convince Scar to give up his evil ways and find redemption, and instead, Scar wanted Simba to become evil so they could rule the empire together… no, wait, that’s a different movie.
As noted, it’s more Hamlet than Macbeth. But then, many a thousand productions have recycled one of the four or five Shaksper staples - eliminate everything based on those, Lear, Romeo’s An Idiot and so forth and half the films in the vault would disappear. (Along with Sons of Anarchy.)
The Simba/Kimba thing is pretty well documented although Disney manages to scrupulously disavow any influence of work they helped train animators for and whose director was a friend of Walt’s and whose influences (a white lion cub, to start with) are evident in the earliest planning works.
And I seem to recall there’s some story about Disney being unable to include The Lion Sleeps Tonight on the soundtrack (though a bit of it is played in the movie) due to complicated copyright issues. Does anybody know that story?
Given the time frame, proximity, and intermixing, you can almost get away with Scottish (almost). But Shakespeare was as Danish as apple pie; both plays are English. If I write a play that takes place on Mars, that does not make the play Martian.
