The Lion King (1994)

To be, or not to be... based on Hamlet? Join Chris and Lizzie as they brave the predator laden hunting grounds of Disney during the Animation Renaissance, try to unearth the true author of the studio's most successful film in decades, Katzenberg's crazy claims, Jeremy Irons' beef with the animators, who was nearly cast before James Earl Jones and Matthew Broderick's suspicion that the movie wasn't as original as it was being advertised. *CORRECTIONS: Jonathan Taylor Thomas was not in 'The Indian in the Cupboard', Hal Scardino was. #Mars_Partner Find Mars product at local retail. Visit @MarsGlobal on Instagram and Mars.com to learn more about our brands. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:15Speaker 00

  And action.

• 0:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Hello, dear listeners, and welcome back to another episode of What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one, let alone one good enough to satisfy the entire family, from your toddler to your grandma. And in the spirit of having a little something for everyone, this episode is sponsored by Mars, the authority on Halloween and maker of beloved snacking food and pet brands. We've made it to October, the heatwave is finally fading here in Los Angeles, and it's getting cool enough for family movie nights before the kids go down. And so, in honor of our sponsor, we're doing snack pairings for our viewings because Mars makes some of our favorite treats. Now, our daughter prefers

• 0:59Chris Winterbauer?

  colorful candy, so she chose a few Starburst fruit juice. But I love peanut butter M&Ms, especially mixed into popcorn, so I added a small bowl to our family movie night spread.

• 1:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay, since we're covering The Lion King today, David and I decided to show it to our daughter. And suddenly, the circle of life was just Eve screeching out every single animal sound as they appeared on screen. Now, an elephant next to a zebra was plenty of excitement for her. But if you really want to impress your kids, theme your snack pairings to the movie you're watching. So, Timon, Pumba, and Simba bust out Hakuna Matata, you bust out a trio of family favorites: Snickers, Cheez-It crackers, and Pringles, a mix of sweet and salty snacks for everyone to share. Now, I have an eccentric child, and for her, there's nothing more exciting than a rice and bean dip. I'm not kidding, she is completely obsessed. Since Halloween is on a Saturday, we're planning to watch

• 1:53Lizzie Bassett?

  a movie in the afternoon, and I'm going to make a spooky seven-layer dip with Ben's original ready rice. It's insanely easy to pull together, and will give her plenty of fuel for her first real trick-or-treating. We're so excited. Oh, unless you think I forgot about my dog Q, think again. I'm making him a Halloween treat jar, which we will share with all of his dog friends, of course, full of Greenies and Pedigree Tasty Biscuits. I'm basically the snack queen of Washington State now.

• 2:20Chris Winterbauer?

  As you may know, Washington holds a special place in our hearts. I grew up there, and Lizzie just moved there. And Tacoma, Washington, is also where Mars was started out of a family kitchen 115 years ago. So grab your favorites and shop Mars brands at your local retailers. Visit @MarsGlobal on Instagram and Mars.com to learn more about Mars brands.

• 2:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Chris, what are we talking about today?

• 2:44Chris Winterbauer?

  We are talking about The Lion King, the movie that has inspired every American millennial man to lift his child too high into the air and shout "Ha! Ah! Ah!" to the dismay of their partner, spouse, or whatever it may be. Lizzie, we have a lot to talk about today, so I'd like to keep our thoughts relatively brief up top. But I have to ask you, what is your experience with this film? It came out when we were a wee four or five years old. I think you were technically still four, but you know, we won't hold that against you.

• 3:14Lizzie Bassett?

  I was advanced.

• 3:15Chris Winterbauer?

  She was an advanced four. So, what were your thoughts then? What are your thoughts now? Talk to me.

• 3:20Lizzie Bassett?

  I saw this in theaters. This is one of the earliest movies I remember seeing in theaters, although Beauty and the Beast was technically the first. I was very little for that. Yeah, I saw movies starting early. And I remember how just gorgeous this looked on the big screen. I believe I've seen it more than once on the big screen. I think I saw it in a, like, science museum IMAX dome at one point, and that was really amazing. Loved it then, love it even more now. This movie is truly remarkable. I genuinely think this is the greatest Disney movie of all time. I felt that way upon re-watching it this time. It moves so well. Every song is a banger. I love all of the little inside jokes that they include for parents in this, whether it's, you know, a line from Reversal of Fortune,

• 4:04Lizzie Bassett?

  or, you know, spiking the camera with-

• 4:06Chris Winterbauer?

  "What's in the name?"

• 4:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes. You have no idea. Jeremy Irons as Scar is just some of the greatest casting of all time. I was struck this time by how upsetting the sequence with Mufasa is. Obviously, I know it's sad, but watching it now as a parent, we turned this on with our daughter, and as soon as they started getting to the elephant graveyard, we were like, this is, she can't do this. I think it requires your kids to be a bit more mature than maybe some other things did in terms of how scary and dark it gets, because it does get quite scary. And the death of Mufasa is, like, honestly, I think, one of the most dramatic moments

• 4:49Lizzie Bassett?

  in film history. And they just, they really don't shy away from it, which is impressive. All to say, I loved it, really enjoyed re-watching it, can't wait to learn more about how it was made. But it did really strike me as funny this time that they won't let Pumba talk about farting, and yet, the whole movie is like, watch your dad get trampled by 100 million wildebeests. But farts, not allowed.

• 5:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Not allowed. Well, I think many, many people would probably agree with you. I've been watching a lot of Disney movies. My daughter's three years older than yours, and so we're, you know, really diving into the classics, the Disney Renaissance, obviously a lot of great female protagonists in a lot of these films, not The Lion King. I loved this movie growing up, like you. I had it in my mind as kind of the peak of the Disney Renaissance, and perhaps the greatest Disney film ever made. That was something I'd kind of assumed for a long time. I have to say, upon re-watching it, and having just watched The Little Mermaid 100 times, Beauty and the Beast 50 times, Aladdin, all of these movies, I do not actually think that The Lion King is the best Disney movie. I would

• 5:56Chris Winterbauer?

  argue it is either the lesser of the initial five years of the Disney Renaissance, or the greater of the tail five years of the Disney Renaissance. And we can get into the specifics there.

• 6:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, give me an example. Give me a hot take of what your top choices are.

• 6:10Chris Winterbauer?

  I would put The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast solidly above The Lion King. I would potentially put Aladdin above it, too.

• 6:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, wow. I would not. And I've recently watched Aladdin and Beauty and the Beast.

• 6:22Chris Winterbauer?

  I think The Lion King has some good highs, and I think it's got some interesting problems that we can talk about. But it's still a beautiful movie. The highs are very high. The music is great, as you mentioned, in particular, a couple songs.

• 6:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, and it's not just the songs. I mean, obviously, we'll get into this, but the Hans Zimmer score is gorgeous. I mean, it's one of his best.

• 6:41Chris Winterbauer?

  And we will talk about that as well.

• 6:43Lizzie Bassett?

  Are we gonna talk about the Nazi hyenas? Because that always, every time I forget that that's coming, and then Triumph of the Will shows up on my screen, and I'm always surprised.

• 6:51Chris Winterbauer?

  You know, it is, it's funny how the criticism of the film took issue with a different interpretation of the hyenas that we can discuss.

• 6:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, okay.

• 6:59Chris Winterbauer?

  But this is, it is a monarchical society, and so, when the fascist leader shows up, there are, you know, it evokes certain imagery, especially the Tanzanian sort of style rocks behind them, or brutalist and angular in the way that perhaps in Nazi Germany was.

• 7:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, I mean, they're literally goose-stepping hyenas. But yes, continue.

• 7:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes. And Jesse, our researcher, did mention, like, yes, that sequence was Nazi-inspired in particular.

• 7:22Lizzie Bassett?

  It's straight-up Triumph of the Will, yes.

• 7:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Lenny Reifensoll clapping from her grave.

• 7:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Maybe missed the point.

• 7:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Let's get into it, Lizzie, because there's a lot to talk about today. So, guys, before we dive in, as always, the details. The Lion King is a 1994 coming-of-age animated musical comedy film directed by Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff. Lizzie, what do you know Rob Minkoff most for?

• 7:45Lizzie Bassett?

  I know Rob Minkoff as being husband to Crystal Kung Minkoff, who was a now-former Beverly Hills housewife, who I actually really liked. And he was great, too. They both came across very well.

• 7:56Chris Winterbauer?

  The screenplay is credited to Irene Metchie, Jonathan Roberts, Linda Wolverton, with an additional 26 names credited as contributing to the story. This episode will dive deep into the convoluted, painful, and protracted writing process of bringing The Lion King to the screen. It stars Jonathan Taylor Thomas and Matthew Broderick as Simba, James Earl Jones as Mufasa, who, as my sister put it, awakened something in her as she watched this movie. She found him very attractive. Jeremy Irons as Scar.

• 8:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Jesse, you have mature days.

• 8:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Robert Guillaume as Rafiki, Nikita Kalam Harris, and Maura Kelly as Nala, Maj Sinclair as Sarabi, Rowan Atkinson as Zazu, Jim Cummings as Ed and some additional voices, Whoopi Goldberg as Shenzi, Cheech Marin as Banzai, Nathan Lane as Timon, Ernie Sabella as Pumba, and many, many more. Quite the cast. It was released in the United States on June 24th, 1994. What, two and a half months, two months shy of Lizzie's fifth birthday? So, yes, you were four. Distributed by Walt Disney Pictures by way of Benavista Pictures, and as always, the IMDb logline reads, "Lion Prince Simba and his father are targeted by his bitter uncle, who wants to ascend the throne himself."

• 9:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I mean, it kind of misses the whole exile part of the movie, but sure, that's fine.

• 9:16Lizzie Bassett?

  They could have just said, "It's Hamlet, but better and shorter."

• 9:20Chris Winterbauer?

  It's kind of Hamlet. We'll talk about that, too.

• 9:22Lizzie Bassett?

  They're compositing a lot of characters and leaving other things out. Honestly, it's a lot more active than Hamlet, which it has to be.

• 9:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Sources for today's episode include, but are not limited to, The Lion King Memoir, Don Hahn's video documentary about the making of the film, The Making of The Lion King, the 1994 documentary, Disney War by James B. Stewart, Forbes' Circle of Life and Oral History of The Lion King for its 25th anniversary, and we do want to mention the Journal of Screenwriting's Creating the Lion King: Story Development, Authorship, and Accreditation in the Disney Renaissance. And I just want to point out, if you guys want a lot more detail on the scripting of this film, check out that Journal of Screenwriting article compendium about the creation of the film. So, Lizzie, authorship is at the core of today's episode, because Victory has many fathers, including Jeffrey Katzenberg. So

• 10:12Chris Winterbauer?

  we're gonna try to figure out exactly who it was who came up with The Lion King, and why it's perhaps not quite as original as the Disney lore would have us believe. But it is often said colloquially that The Lion King was Disney's first animated feature film, full-length feature film, to lose the crutches of existing IP.

• 10:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, that's completely false.

• 10:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, yes. So what was the first Disney feature film? We've covered it on the show, Lizzie, although you weren't on that episode.

• 10:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Snow White.

• 10:41Chris Winterbauer?

  And so, some people argue Fantasia included original sequences. Others argue The Aristocats. It was actually based on an original story and then kind of like adapted to The Aristocrats. But The Lion King came out in the middle of the Disney Renaissance, and it's most remembered, kind of, all of these films. But of course, Lizzie, does The Lion King feel particularly original?

• 11:04Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 11:06Lizzie Bassett?

  I mean, it includes lines from Hamlet.

• 11:10Chris Winterbauer?

  All right. That may, though, have been something that they stumbled into while writing the movie.

• 11:15Lizzie Bassett?

  I would buy that.

• 11:16Chris Winterbauer?

  As opposed to something that they sought out from the beginning. The Disney Renaissance, as we mentioned, was being built on kind of freshly rewrapped stories of old. We just discussed a couple of these.

• 11:26Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 11:26Chris Winterbauer?

  The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin. But the truth is, The Lion King was inspired by a very beloved story. Lizzie, it was actually inspired by another Disney movie. Does The Lion King remind you of another animal-based Disney movie? That follows an animal from its birth to its ascension as prince of the forest? You probably haven't seen it in a while, but it was Walt Disney's favorite, according to some of the animators, and that was Bambi.

• 11:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 11:58Chris Winterbauer?

  In the late 1980s, just before the Disney Renaissance truly took off, Charlie Fink, who was the head of story development at Disney Feature Animation, was sifting through old Disney movies, looking for formulas they could reference and rework.

• 12:10Lizzie Bassett?

  And he thought, how many parents can I kill?

• 12:12Chris Winterbauer?

  He came across Bambi.

• 12:14Lizzie Bassett?

  And he thought more.

• 12:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Thought a lot. I've watched Bambi recently with my daughter. I really like Bambi, actually, quite a bit. It's got actually a very beautiful pseudo-environmentalist angle that I think is very unique for its time. So it had been released in 1942, and it's the story of the prince of the forest growing from fawn to stag. And one of the early shots in the film shows Bambi's father, who's kind of revealed at the end of the film, on a bluff overlooking the forest where his son is born. And in the end, Bambi has become a father in his own right, has defeated another suitor, Rono, for his wife, you know, or mate failing. And he stands on the same bluff with his father, who then walks away back into the forest. And so power has been transferred from the father to Bambi. And all of a sudden, Fink had an idea.

• 13:01Chris Winterbauer?

  What if we made Bambi in Africa?

• 13:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Great.

• 13:04Chris Winterbauer?

  More specifically, with lions in Africa. I think this is a really good idea. It's just a new setting that's very fresh for a story, a kind of universal hero's journey that we're all familiar with.

• 13:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Also makes a bit more sense in terms of the animal itself, because lions do operate in packs. I know that they don't operate the way that they show them, you know, in this, in terms of the man being in charge, because I think they're not, right?

• 13:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, I think they are in the sense that, like, the man just, like, lazes around and the ladies hunt all the food.

• 13:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, the ladies do do everything. That's true.

• 13:36Chris Winterbauer?

  And then he impregnates them from time to time.

• 13:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 13:38Chris Winterbauer?

  So I agree with you. But what's interesting is when he took this idea to Jeffrey Katzenberg, Pete Schneider, and Roy Disney, who were the various heads of the animation division, nobody bit. Apparently Katzenberg actually made fun of Charlie Fink's pitch in other meetings. You know about Fink's movie where the king of the beasts eats all the other animals? So they didn't like the fact that it was a lion, because they thought, well, the reason people identify with Bambi, you know, I'm sure.

• 14:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, it's a predator.

• 14:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Lion's a predator. But Fink was undeterred. He kept pitching it. And so finally Katzenberg told him, figure out why Bambi eats the other animals, and you just might have a picture. This is gonna be very funny, because if you were to ask Jeffrey Katzenberg, the pitch started with him.

• 14:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Of course.

• 14:19Chris Winterbauer?

  So in Katzenberg's telling of the story, he claims he was on a flight to Europe to promote the European opening of either Oliver and Company or The Little Mermaid. He said that he was with Roy Disney and Pete Schneider, and they were talking about coming-of-age stories. Katzenberg starts to open up, and he reveals that when he was working on John Lindsay's 1972 presidential campaign, collecting cash donations, he inadvertently accepted a bribe. He was subpoenaed, but never charged of anything. And Lizzie's face is like, what does this have to do with The Lion King? And I thought the same thing. Let's see how he connects the dots.

• 14:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 14:51Chris Winterbauer?

  As the story goes, back on the plane, Katzenberg then pitched the idea of telling a similar loss-of-innocence story, where he was betrayed by some sort of mentor, but involving a child, losing a parent, and set in Africa with the animal kingdom as a metaphor.

• 15:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Jeffrey, sweet Jesus. Shut up. You did not come up with this. I'm sure he added a lot, as we'll get to. He is a smart man. But those dots are galaxies away from each other.

• 15:20Chris Winterbauer?

  In the interest of just presenting his case.

• 15:22Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 15:23Chris Winterbauer?

  He claims that he worked on a movie set in Kenya when he was in his early twenties, and he'd been interested in Africa ever since.

• 15:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm.

• 15:28Chris Winterbauer?

  I am personally inclined to go with Charlie Fink's story.

• 15:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, especially because it includes Jeffrey Katzenberg openly mocking him for this. I find that a lot more believable than Jeffrey Katzenberg offering that he accidentally took a bribe, and that somehow becomes The Lion King. No, it did not.

• 15:44Chris Winterbauer?

  There's also the fact that the first treatment for what would become The Lion King was, we believe, written about a year before that flight to Europe. So.

• 15:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, Jeffrey Katzenberg can time travel, Chris. It's not a problem. He's so small, you just throw him right through the wormhole. Goes right down.

• 15:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Rude. In the fall of 1988, Disney bit on Fink's pitch, and they hired a writer named Thomas Dish to write a treatment. Now Dish was a well-known science fiction writer, who would go on to win a Hugo Award for his nonfiction book, The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of. But in the 1980s, he was best known for a novella he'd written called The Brave Little Toaster.

• 16:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 16:20Chris Winterbauer?

  It was published in the 1980s. I've never read the book, but I loved the Disney film that it was made into, released in 1987. Lizzie, have you ever seen The Brave Little Toaster?

• 16:30Lizzie Bassett?

  A long time ago, when I was little.

• 16:32Chris Winterbauer?

  It was one of my favorites as a kid. I absolutely loved The Brave Little Toaster and the giant evil scrapyard magnet that they're all gonna get sucked up in at the end. I think there are definite influences on the Toy Story franchise, for example, if you guys are interested.

• 16:45Lizzie Bassett?

  For sure.

• 16:46Chris Winterbauer?

  All right. It's roughly a year after the release of that film, and Dish is sitting down for a meeting with Charlie Fink and Roy Disney about what is then called King of the Beasts. According to Dish's notes, Roy Disney told him to watch a documentary series called Okavango, The Jewel of the Kalahari. In Dish's notes, next to Disney's name, he also wrote down, rogue males, springbok, and impala, and elephants and lions are co-equals. Just flagging that here for future development turns.

• 17:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 17:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Now Charlie Fink's direction to Dish was to focus on real lion behavior. So when they made Bambi, they were really focused on real animal behavior. They weren't trying to anthropomorphize them in the way that they would for, you know, Robin Hood, for example.

• 17:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 17:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Right? Where they're walking on their hind legs. Now Dish also noted a photography book called Serengeti: Natural Order on the African Plain, which had been published in the United States in 1987 by Mitsuaki Iwago. And this book included a pack of hyenas attacking a lioness, for example. He also wrote some theories about lion behavior he'd observed, including males expelled from the age of two from their original pride are outsiders, who then have to take over the pride from weaker males. So there's some of the themes are starting to come through. One source suggests that he was also inspired by the Serengeti lion, a study of predator-prey relations by George B. Schaller. And it's just a couple of points on that book, because they do come into play. Schaller writes about a lion he found near death, following a fight with a lion from another pride,

• 18:13Chris Winterbauer?

  that Schaller refers to as Black Main, the lion that was near death. One of the prides Schaller watches and writes about is called the Simba Pride.

• 18:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 18:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Simba is the Swahili word for lion. And he references the Simba, and I believe it's kopjes or copies, distinct rock formations in Tanzania, which of course will influence the design of Pride Rock in the film. There's also a possible father-son relationship observed between two lions. And, most notably, they write that lions and hyenas seem to hate each other. And he again describes an attack by some 20-odd hyenas on two lionesses. So in November of 1988, Dish turns in a nine-page story treatment called King of the Kalahari. It's the first treatment for what will become The Lion King. And here's the general trajectory. King Bronn is the benevolent leader of his pride.

• 19:03Lizzie Bassett?

  I'll work on that.

• 19:03Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep. There's a strict rule that Bronn always eats. Bronn, James Bronn, always eats the prey that they catch first. One day, a young male orphan named Mruki challenges this rule. Mruki then lures King Bronn's son, Rigo, and Jor-rah Martin's like taking notes, Rigo, Rigo, okay, toward a group of hungry hyenas, then climbs a tree to watch him get attacked. So we have the betrayal by the other lion at the hands of the hyenas here, kind of like the elephant graveyard.

• 19:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 19:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Rigo is then rescued by Jumbo, king of the elephants. The lions set out on their annual migration. Mruki again breaks the rule, feasts on an antelope before King Bronn does. Mruki gets exiled. A year later, Mruki and Bronn cross paths, but Mruki's grown up. He's got a black mane. He challenges Bronn to a fight. He wins. He makes himself the king. Rigo's mother's like, Rigo, you gotta get out of here. So then Rigo leaves. He heads out with Bobo, who's a mandrill. That's what Rafiki is in the final film. They struggle to survive. They get hunted by hyenas, and then they find a female pride looking for a male. Rigo gets a love interest named Nanda. It gets very convoluted. Long story short.

• 20:09Lizzie Bassett?

  This is, yeah, basically Game of Thrones. This is too much.

• 20:12Chris Winterbauer?

  It's too much. So he returns to the pride after learning how to fight from his dad. There's like a fighting training montage. Turns out his dad's alive. He's like, Dad, where you been? He's like, I was just hanging out with my buds. He learns how to fight, challenges Mruki at the water hole, wins. Mruki gets exiled, gets sucked into the mud. He dies. Rigo's king of the Kalahari, and he has cubs with Nanda.

• 20:33Chris Winterbauer?

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• 21:04Lizzie Bassett?

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• 21:48Lizzie Bassett?

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• 22:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay, as you mentioned, it is way too convoluted for a Disney movie, right? Just there's too many twists and turns, you know, in this thing.

• 22:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I was confused and I'm 37.

• 22:23Chris Winterbauer?

  But I do think that the foundation, right? If you were to strip it way down, you've kind of got all of your foundational moments in this movie, more or less, the black main villain.

• 22:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 22:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Who takes out the leader, the son who's exiled, who has to return and ascend the throne. Now, Thomas Tish, as should be noted, is not credited on The Lion King, and he felt like he got the short end of the stick. He references parting with some of his old things. This was on his blog, and he wrote, "The dealer went off with at least as much, mostly books, but one real goodie, my proposal to Disney and contract with them for King of the Kalahari. Anyone reading will have no doubt that I am the true author of The Lion King, shafted by a Hollywood agent and by Disney working in cahoots, to have been robbed of millions of dollars and to have nothing to show for it but sour grapes. But at least there will now be a record of the crime in someone's archive somewhere."

• 23:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm.

• 23:14Chris Winterbauer?

  In 2008, one of Thomas's friends wrote, "Tom delivered to Disney as work for hire a clever adaptation of Shakespeare for the kids, and transported it to Africa, even giving it an ecological subplot. And without a credit or the slightest stake in its future, but for the grand sum of $5,000, this astoundingly literate, self-educated poet and non-businessman offered up to the world something called The Lion King." End quote.

• 23:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Sorry, so he just referenced Shakespeare in that. It doesn't seem super present in what you just read, so...

• 23:44Chris Winterbauer?

  I agree, we don't have contemporaneous quotes from like the delivery of treatments, for example.

• 23:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 23:52Chris Winterbauer?

  That Shakespeare was present. That doesn't necessarily mean it wasn't, or that they didn't consider it to be, but all references to Shakespeare, as we'll see, seem to come from later in the development process, when, in my opinion, patterns have been recognized.

• 24:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 24:06Chris Winterbauer?

  As opposed to patterns have been intentionally laid out. But I'll leave that for our audience to decide. Let's keep going. I mention this because Thomas Tish, unfortunately, he died by suicide in 2008, a few years after the death of his life partner, Charles Naylor, and he did have financial problems. So again, I have no idea how much Lion King may have tied onto that or not. But King of the Beast marched on. So sometime in early 1989, Disney hired writers Jenny Tripp, Tim Disney, Valerie West, and Miguel Tejada Flores. We can only find details from Tripp's treatment, which was now called King of the Jungle, and there's some important changes, Lizzie. So they start to make it funnier. This is where the humor really starts to come into the story. We now have Simba as the main character. He's introduced at birth, he's separated from his pride.

• 24:49Chris Winterbauer?

  He gets picked up by a bird of prey and dropped into a pond, and we start to get the inklings of the Pumba and Timon subplot that will come into play. He befriends a baboon named Kwashi and a mongoose named Mabu, who's described as a hyperactive clown. They bring him to the community of baboons, they try to teach him how to live as a baboon. It doesn't work, they raise him as a lion. In one version, he then faces off with a villain, which is a jackal, and he then wins and reunites with his pride. And in another draft, that jackal is his uncle. So again, we're starting to crystallize some of the elements that are going to be in the feature film. There's progress.

• 25:24Lizzie Bassett?

  Meaning his uncle was a jackal, or that the uncle was a lion in that version?

• 25:29Chris Winterbauer?

  I think in the first version, it's a jackal, not the uncle.

• 25:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Got it.

• 25:33Chris Winterbauer?

  In the later version, it's the uncle, not a jackal, meaning a lion.

• 25:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 25:38Chris Winterbauer?

  So there's some progress, but it's not quite there. So then writer J.T. Allen comes on board, reads a bunch of books about lions, goes to the L.A. Zoo with Charlie Fink, and by January 19th of 1990, we're back to calling it King of the Beast, but with a few other details. So Simba's parents, Mufasa and Sarabi. Nala is now introduced, she's not a love interest, they're just friends.

• 25:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Would have preferred that.

• 25:59Chris Winterbauer?

  We will talk about, can you feel the love tonight? Whoa. And we also get Timon Vandermeer, a meerkat, love the last name.

• 26:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 26:07Chris Winterbauer?

  The main bat is Banagi, a hyena, who teams up with a lion named Scar. But Scar is more the sort of scapegoat henchman. He's got a black man in a scar, he's crazy violent, he's not as calculated as Banagi. And Banagi is using Scar to kill Mufasa and then take over the pride. And in exchange, Scar lets Banagi and the hyenas live in the Pride Lands.

• 26:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 26:29Chris Winterbauer?

  So it's just a little bit of a reversal from the final film.

• 26:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 26:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Banagi orders the hyenas to chase Simba out of the pride into the desert. There's an exile, there's a return. Disney says, "I think we're getting closer, but we think we need somebody more experienced." So they bring in Ron Bass, who had just won an Oscar, Lizzie, for Rain Man.

• 26:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 26:49Chris Winterbauer?

  Apparently Bass didn't do much actual writing. He mostly oversaw Allen's next rewrite. This is actually relatively common. I actually had this experience one time when I did a rewrite on Moonshot. They brought in Dana Fox, a much more experienced writer, and she was just kind of like the mentor, like the screenwriting mentor on the movie. Basically just insurance.

• 27:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 27:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Like, if Chris fucks this up, you can come in. And she was lovely. So there's a new script a few months later with both of their names and more changes. It gets darker, it gets more serious. Scar is now closer to the finished version. He's smarter, he's not as manipulatable, you know, he's not as easily manipulated by Banagi. Zazu appears as a character, he gets exiled with Simba. Now, there's no adventure in exile, it's just about Simba trying to get back to his pride. Simba fights Scar at the same place where Mufasa was killed. By the way, wildebeests are not in the story yet, Lizzie. That traumatic scene has not been invented yet. Scar basically dies due to his pride, literal pride, not the pride of lions around him. The hyenas attack Simba, but then they agree to a truce. Simba and Nala definitely get it on, they have a little cub, and Disney says, "We're feeling pretty good about this."

• 27:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, did you add more banging? Great.

• 27:51Chris Winterbauer?

  I think we're gonna greenlight it, I think we're gonna start moving towards production. Animation, animatics, let's bring in a director, et cetera. It's mid 1990, and I'm wondering, Lizzie, a part of the desire to get things going is the fact that roughly six months earlier, The Little Mermaid absolutely rocked the box office.

• 28:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 28:09Chris Winterbauer?

  To the tune of $235 million, kicking off the Disney Renaissance. But what's interesting is that the real surprise, I think, or the first surprise, had come the year prior. So back in 1988, I get the sense that Disney was caught off guard by the success of Oliver and Company. Have you seen Oliver and Company?

• 28:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, when I was little.

• 28:28Chris Winterbauer?

  So it's an animated musical with a ton of anthropomorphized animals, cats and whatnot, cats and dogs. It's both inspired by Oliver Twist and Les Misérables, and it was met with kind of mixed critical reactions, but it did amazing at the box office. $120 million against its $30 million budget. Now, the last two animated films that Disney had done, The Great Mouse Detective, which was, you know, relatively successful, had only made $50 million to the box office, and The Black Cauldron before that had completely bombed.

• 28:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Right, never heard of it.

• 28:55Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, Oliver and Company was a hit, and it was directed by George Scribner. Then The Little Mermaid proved a trend, because it was a Broadway-style musical with songs by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken.

• 29:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 29:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Of Little Shop of Horrors, for example. And it blew Oliver and Company out of the water, as I mentioned. $235 million against a $40 million budget. So obviously Jeffrey Katzenberg and Michael Eisner see an opportunity. For the last few decades, animated features were released roughly on a four-year cadence. And they say, "These things are printing money, we want one every 12 to 18 months." So The Rescuers Down Under, the sequel to The Rescuers, was already in production, so they couldn't add musical numbers to it, it was too late. But Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin.

• 29:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 29:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Were gonna have songs. And goddamn it, King of the Jungle was two. This would cause a lot of tension. So they attached George Scribner to direct, he'd been involved in development, and producer Thomas Schumacher comes on board too. Now Scribner reportedly said that the Alan Bass script, the J.T. Allen and Ron Bass script, was quote, "beautiful, but would have been hard to translate into a film." So they bring in another writer, Linda Wolverton. Now, Lizzie, Linda Wolverton is at the time best known for writing the soon-to-be-released Beauty and the Beast.

• 30:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Which is great.

• 30:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Which is great, and she's currently writing Homeward Bound.

• 30:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, one of my faves.

• 30:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Katzenberg calls her up, says, "Hey, whatever you're doing, stop. You need to come do King of the Jungle."

• 30:19Lizzie Bassett?

  I had this idea about a guy who accidentally bribes someone in an election.

• 30:23Chris Winterbauer?

  I was taking bribes for John Lindsay in 1972, and it felt like I was a lion cub. It was just so absurd. He's like, "I really relate to Scar."

• 30:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I would believe that more.

• 30:33Chris Winterbauer?

  So apparently Wolverton at first didn't want to come. She was like, "I wanna write, I wanna finish Homeward Bound." And Katzenberg says, "No, you're, you need to come write King of the Beast." And she says, "What drew you to this idea?" And Katzenberg reiterates the Katzenberg version of the story. So quote, "According to Wolverton, he told a really interesting personal story about the betrayal by an avuncular figure in his life. That kicked me off to this particular telling, which is Scar betraying Simba, Simba's trust of Scar, and you know how the story goes from there." So what's interesting is that Katzenberg's maybe BS version of how the story came to life.

• 31:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Does end up spurring the actual story.

• 31:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Does end up spurring the actual story itself. Now, we couldn't find Wolverton's first draft, but we have some quotes from her and others involved in the project at the time. So this is where Hamlet starts to come in. She claims that she was told to analyze the story through the lens of the hero's journey. And she says that that led her to realize that the story really fit Hamlet structurally.

• 31:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 31:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Or at least thematically. I completely believe that, and that's my instinct, is that nobody had explicitly necessarily said it, but it's like there because it's in all of our subconscious, you know, and even Hamlet is dealing with the story structure, you know what I mean? That predates it by centuries, obviously.

• 31:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 31:45Chris Winterbauer?

  But I'm curious what you think, Lizzie.

• 31:46Lizzie Bassett?

  That makes the most sense to me too, just because if you were to sit down and try and actually adapt Hamlet into this world, sure, for a children's movie or whatever, but I think you would have made different choices had that been the way that you start with it. Just because there are very specific character dynamics in Hamlet that are not present here. But you have the obvious thing of the uncle being the one.

• 32:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes.

• 32:08Lizzie Bassett?

  That, you know, betrays, kills the father. And the sun having to come back and that is just always going to call to mind Hamlet because that's the most famous version of that, obviously with Claudius and Hamlet. And then, you know, I think, who knows if they retcon some of the other characters into kind of fitting.

• 32:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Rosenkrantz and Gildenstern, yeah.

• 32:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Rosenkrantz and Gildenstern, Art Timon and Pumba, I think Polonius is Zazu and then Rafiki is Horatio?

• 32:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, although Polonius dies, right? Hamlet kills him.

• 32:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Polonius gets stab stabbed in the closet. Yes, yeah. So that doesn't happen to Zazu, which is nice. Yes.

• 32:43Chris Winterbauer?

  So, less of that. It's closer again to, I think, like the original mythic tale that obviously, I mean, if you watch Robert Eggers' Northman, for example, that's exactly The Lion King, basically.

• 32:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 32:54Chris Winterbauer?

  He just goes, what if we did The Lion King, but then back to the original? And then they just go back and forth and back and forth. All right. Now, one thing that Wolverton does claim is that it was her idea to just stomp, stomp Mufasa out of the picture.

• 33:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Boy, does she stomp him.

• 33:07Chris Winterbauer?

  She said they couldn't figure out a way to kill him. She was like, Scar's the weaker lion. We can't just have him like shoot him with a gun or use a weapon, you know, for example. That's part of her quote.

• 33:16Lizzie Bassett?

  If Scar had just pulled a gun out with his lion paw.

• 33:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. So she said that she was looking through a research book and she saw this image of a wildebeest stampede. And there was a photo of a dead wildebeest lying next to a stream. And she said, that's it. That's how he has to die. And apparently the animation team said, we cannot draw that many wildebeests. And she said, well, what? Yes, you can, because you did that great ballroom scene with the computer in Beauty and the Beast.

• 33:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 33:38Chris Winterbauer?

  So they'd been experimenting with computer generated imagery within the traditional animated space. Now, to be fair, Scribner has also said that it was his idea to play up the wildebeest stampede and use it as a method for Mufasa's demise. So again, we can't be sure exactly where it started, but it started at this version of the script. He also said that Wolverton's version of Pumba was an elephant, but Scribner suggested a warthog. But perhaps the most important change was making Scar Simba's uncle, again, which hearkens back to some earlier treatments. But there were some problems with this version of the script, Lizzie. So apparently Simba wasn't exiled. Simba was in the pride and it was again closer to, I guess, not quite Hamlet. I'm trying to think of, you know, it's closer to Wormtongue, for example, in that Scar is actively corrupting Simba as he's ascending the throne.

• 34:23Chris Winterbauer?

  So then he can like do a coup.

• 34:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 34:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Once he's old enough, basically. And the problem, according to Chapman, was that Simba was unlikable as a result. Which like Simba's still like, kind of bland, but it's fine.

• 34:34Lizzie Bassett?

  I mean, if you look at Hamlet and listen, there's incredible productions of this. I think it depends on what you see. Just in terms of reading, it's never been one that I have enjoyed reading quite as much, just because. Yeah, he's a real dick to Ophelia, but his action is almost exclusively in action. And that's like the whole point of it until of course, the very end, when he just kills everybody. But he doesn't leave really, right? He does just kind of hang around and like wonder what he should do. So.

• 35:00Chris Winterbauer?

  It's a slow burn. It's a very interior sort of, you know, play as a result.

• 35:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Right. But there's a ghost.

• 35:06Chris Winterbauer?

  There is a ghost.

• 35:06Lizzie Bassett?

  A ghost father in the sky.

• 35:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 35:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Who says, remember.

• 35:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Mufasa in the sky with diamonds.

• 35:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Remember me.

• 35:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, it's possible that came from somewhere else. More on that in a moment.

• 35:17Lizzie Bassett?

  It's in Hamlet, though.

• 35:19Chris Winterbauer?

  I know. I'm just saying. Now, one of the big problems, Lizzie, you mentioned Hamlet and the interpretations of Hamlet. It seems like what they were struggling to figure out was how realistic the movie should be. Meaning how far were they going to go with animals being friends and having relationships while staying true to animal behavior?

• 35:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Right. Again, Jeffrey Katzenberg's point that the lions are going to eat everybody.

• 35:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Now, George Scribner kind of said, I want the lions to eat everybody. His biggest passion was, quote, "to make the story overall more grounded in actual behavior of lions," end quote. So he didn't really want the animal characters to sing. Instead, they would, quote, "treat the music as if it was an expression of what they were thinking." Producer Thomas Schumacher described his vision as like a National Geographic special that was animated, which interestingly sounds a lot more like Bambi. In fact, others compared Scribner's version to the True Life Adventures, which were these nature documentaries produced by Disney in the 1950s, which according to the Disney Family Museum, may have been inspired by Bambi. They brought animals into the studio for the artists to reference and draw from.

• 36:22Chris Winterbauer?

  And quote, "The story itself," meaning of Bambi, "revolved around the challenges animals dealt with in nature, rather than animals wearing clothes and piloting steamboats or singing songs." And so that becomes a really tricky question. Like where does The Lion King sit on this spectrum? If you remember our coverage on The Emperor's New Groove, which was originally called Kingdom of the Sun, and very much echoes this production process, they were dealing with the same thing. How close do we stick to Incan-Peruvian mythology? And how much are we making a David Spade vehicle at the end of the day? We know where they landed. I like that movie. Now Wolverton, meanwhile, it seems like was unlike Scribner, trying to write something closer to a Broadway musical,

• 37:01Chris Winterbauer?

  which is what Jeffrey Katzenberg wanted. Again, at least that's what Katzenberg has said ever since the movie came out. But let's get into it. So sometime in the spring or summer of 1991, producer Tom Schumacher goes out to lunch with famed lyricist and songwriter Tim Rice.

• 37:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Who had recently gone through a creative breakup.

• 37:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Right, with?

• 37:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Andrew Lloyd Webber.

• 37:21Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. And do you remember any of the titles that they co-wrote together?

• 37:25Lizzie Bassett?

  They did Evita, didn't they?

• 37:26Chris Winterbauer?

  They did. They did Evita, which I think is actually a great reference. I really like Evita.

• 37:30Lizzie Bassett?

  It's great. They did Evita, I think they did Joseph in the Technicolor Dreamcoat.

• 37:34Chris Winterbauer?

  They did.

• 37:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. But they did not do Cats, I'll tell you that.

• 37:37Chris Winterbauer?

  They did. Yeah, that's right. And they did Jesus Christ Super Shark.

• 37:41Lizzie Bassett?

  That's why Cats is Cats.

• 37:43Chris Winterbauer?

  And then Andrew Lloyd Webber said, hold my. Yeah. All right. So Schumacher claims he told Rice about King of the Jungle and said, you know, do you think this could be a musical? And according to Schumacher, Rice told him, well, anything can be a musical, which I think is true.

• 37:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Just not Cats.

• 37:58Chris Winterbauer?

  Except for that Cats thing that Andrew went and did. But Schumacher claims he had to then go convince Katzenberg that this was true. Again, other sources claim Katzenberg was the one pushing Wolverton to write the script in the style of a musical. Again, this could all be true. Perhaps Katzenberg got the idea from Schumacher. I doubt Katzenberg would be like pushing back hard against the idea of a musical, given the success of The Little Mermaid.

• 38:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that doesn't make sense.

• 38:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. But either way, Disney brings Rice on to write the songs for King of the Jungle in 1991. And they say, okay, you're going to do the lyrics. Like, we need somebody to write the music. But they said it can't be Alan Menken, because we've got him on Aladdin and we can't distract him.

• 38:34Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 38:35Chris Winterbauer?

  And I love the songs in Aladdin. Now, Menken had also done The Little Mermaid and Beauty of the Beast. Lizzie, this is one of the craziest runs. He won four Oscars across those two movies. He also did Little Shop of Horrors, as we mentioned, and he did Newsies.

• 38:49Lizzie Bassett?

  I didn't know he did Newsies.

• 38:51Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. Yeah. So Rice says, okay, I can have anyone, like anyone, anyone? And they say, yes, aside from Alan Menken, you can have anyone. We have shackled him to Aladdin. And he says, what about ABBA?

• 39:01Lizzie Bassett?

  They don't.

• 39:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Can you imagine ABBA Lion King?

• 39:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Wait. Oh, they're doing the music. Okay. I was like, they don't speak English that well.

• 39:08Chris Winterbauer?

  I mean, they wrote their songs.

• 39:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, that's true.

• 39:11Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, this is less out of left field than it may seem. They had actually worked together. So Rice had worked with Benny Anderson and Bjorn Olveas on Chess, which was his Broadway musical a few years earlier. And I gotta say, I feel like ABBA gets some heat sometimes for being like such a popular disco group. I love ABBA.

• 39:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, they're amazing.

• 39:28Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. And I think ABBA plus Hans Zimmer actually could. Look, Elton John's music's amazing, but I just, I don't know. I think ABBA could have been good too. Yeah. I really like ABBA. It's very rhythmic.

• 39:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 39:38Chris Winterbauer?

  It might match Zimmer's kind of repetitive rhythmic building style quite well.

• 39:42Lizzie Bassett?

  I wonder if it might have been more choral in some ways too, because there's so many of them.

• 39:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Totally.

• 39:46Lizzie Bassett?

  That could be interesting.

• 39:47Chris Winterbauer?

  Take a chance on me?

• 39:48Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 39:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Let's do it. I love, I love ABBA.

• 39:50Lizzie Bassett?

  They have so many bangers.

• 39:52Chris Winterbauer?

  I was watching something where they played Waterloo. It was Colin from Accounts and they did a Waterloo needle drop. That was so good.

• 39:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Nice.

• 39:58Chris Winterbauer?

  I love ABBA. I love Colin from Accounts. Love Australia. All right. It's unclear if ABBA was formally approached. Some say they were and that they declined due to other projects. Either way, Rice had a second choice. He said, I want Elton John. Now, it had been two decades since Elton John had written music for a movie. In fact, he'd never done an animated movie before. And Lizzie, he'd actually never worked on a musical before.

• 40:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 40:22Chris Winterbauer?

  So this would be a first for Elton John. But he had worked with Tim Rice. They'd co-written the song Legal Boys for John's 1982 album, Jump Up. Now, at this point in the early 90s, Elton John was recording his 24th studio album, The One.

• 40:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh my God.

• 40:37Chris Winterbauer?

  I know. He's the Stephen King of incredible music and he was newly sober. Pretty much as soon as Rice recommended him, Rice said, you know what? Forget it. You'll never get Elton John to agree to do this. And apparently Tom Schumacher said, watch me. And then he flew over to London to pitch Elton John. But apparently Schumacher actually was completely out of his element and terrified. Lucky for him, Elton John actually didn't need much convincing. He apparently was looking for a challenge and something new. And again, according to Disney War, Katzenberg was the one who needed convincing. And David Geffen was happy to oblige. So the newly minted richest man in Hollywood, he had just sold Geffen Records, Lizzie, to MCA for $540 million in stock,

• 41:18Chris Winterbauer?

  which then when MCA sold to Matsushita was worth $710 million.

• 41:23Lizzie Bassett?

  All right. So he's got a couple of dollars.

• 41:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Calls up Katzenberg and he says, be a good boy and hire Elton John and we'll go make DreamWorks in a few years. Just, just do me the solid. So Katzenberg says, okay, Elton, come on. And immediately Elton regrets it because Katzenberg decides to blitz him with press and marketing requests. Because you know Katzenberg's thinking, we got Elton John. We gotta milk this for everything we've got. So he's a household name.

• 41:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 41:47Chris Winterbauer?

  And eventually Tom Schumacher has to call Katzenberg and say, you cannot allow people to call Elton John anymore. And Katzenberg says, no problem. We'll limit the calls to just you and me. And there's a beat and then Schumacher says, he'd rather you not call.

• 42:02Chris Winterbauer?

  And Katzenberg says, oh, you mean just you? And he goes, yeah, me and Denise Greenwald, the press person in charge of the film. So Jeffrey Katzenberg got banned from calling Elton John.

• 42:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 42:13Chris Winterbauer?

  Like Elton John is powerful enough to say Katzenberg, you cannot call me on this movie.

• 42:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Good for him.

• 42:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Good for him. Now Katzenberg came around to Elton John, or maybe he didn't put up much resistance to begin with. But one person we know who just could not square Elton John with his vision of the film was director George Scribner. He was like, I don't understand why, Elton, we are trying to make a movie from Africa. And he felt that there were some terrific African musicians who were coming out of South Africa and Ethiopia and Kenya and Nairobi. For example, the South African singing group Lady Smith Black Mombazo, who had been featured on, do you remember which songwriter's album, Graceland? It's Paul Simon.

• 42:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, of course. Yes. Also name dropped in Mean Girls, but yes.

• 42:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Scribner apparently was fighting for his vision very intensely when Disney decided to bring on a co-director. Now, it's not unusual, as we've discussed on animated films, for there to be a co-director. These movies are huge. You are covering so many elements and the animatics and story reels are often divided. You know what I mean? Between two directors. We talked about this on Shrek, on Emperor's New Groove, et cetera.

• 43:18Lizzie Bassett?

  It seems like it's usually multiple directors.

• 43:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, I think more often than not. So Roger Allers comes on to co-direct in the fall of 91. He has story by credits on Oliver and Company, The Little Mermaid, The Upcoming Aladdin. He was the story supervisor on Beauty and the Beast, so he's got great experience on all of these Renaissance films. But this is going to be his first directing job and he's diving in headfirst. So the morning after the screening of the final cut of Beauty and the Beast, Disney flew the King of the Jungle brain trust to Hell's Gate National Park in Kenya for a two-week research trip. So this is Scribner, Allers, production designer Chris Sanders, animator Lisa Keane, and story supervisor Brenda Chapman. They said there's a lot of drinking, there's a lot of fun, they have a few epiphanies. They're going to use the Cinemascope aspect ratio for the wide vistas they saw. They see this crazy looking bird. They're like, oh, that's what Zazu should look like.

• 44:04Chris Winterbauer?

  But the problem is it didn't resolve the two competing visions for the movie.

• 44:11Lizzie Bassett?

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• 44:55Lizzie Bassett?

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• 45:17Chris Winterbauer?

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• 46:00Chris Winterbauer?

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• 46:42Chris Winterbauer?

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• 47:32Chris Winterbauer?

  So Roger Allers and Scribner got along really well, but it seems like Allers was like, this is a musical. Let's make it a musical. And Scribner said, no, this is a grounded movie about animals. And so it comes to a head in early 1992 and Scribner is removed from the project. As he put it in a later interview, hard cut, it's time for you to go away. Thank you very much. We're going to go in a different direction, end quote. He's probably been involved in some capacity for basically three years at this point.

• 48:01Lizzie Bassett?

  That would be so hard.

• 48:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Three years of your life, three years of work. My guess, again, these musicals have continued to do bonkers banana money.

• 48:09Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 48:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Katzenberg thinks, I've got Elton John, there's no way I'm letting him go.

• 48:13Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 48:13Chris Winterbauer?

  And so Scribner is the collateral damage as a result.

• 48:16Lizzie Bassett?

  I mean, I think that's the right move, unfortunately, but that would be really hard.

• 48:21Chris Winterbauer?

  There's no way fully to know, but it is the move I, with all of the available information, would have made as well.

• 48:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 48:28Chris Winterbauer?

  So Lizzie, which future husband of a Beverly Hills housewife did Katzenberg bring in?

• 48:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Rob Minkoff.

• 48:35Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. Animator Rob Minkoff was brought on to replace Scribner. Now, Minkoff had never directed before. He came to Disney as an animation intern in 1982 under Eric Larson, who was one of the original nine old men, the original nine animators that Walt Disney brought together when he started the company and started making movies. He'd worked as an animator on The Great Mouse Detective, I love The Great Mouse Detective, and The Little Mermaid, but he really wanted to direct. So he pitched Disney a sequel to The Rescuers. They didn't go with his take. They offered him the chance to co-direct The Rescuers Down Under, but he said, pass. I need complete control. And then Disney said, well, do you want a chance to direct Beauty and the Beast? But he said, seems like lyricist Howard Ashman's really got control of that one.

• 49:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Pass. I need complete control. Okay, so they said, do you want to direct the sequel to Who Framed Roger Rabbit? And he says, yes. And they say, great. Unfortunately, they eventually canceled the project. So King of the Jungle comes around and even though he's co-directing a movie that's pretty far into development, he said, this is the right amount of control.

• 49:40Lizzie Bassett?

  It's time to say yes.

• 49:41Chris Winterbauer?

  Where do I sign up? So Minkoff, like Allers, as I mentioned, had never directed an animated feature film. He joins the project and reviews the roughly 20 minutes of story reel that they've produced. So we've talked about story reels before, guys, but these are, you know, still images, still frames, every few seconds of story, maybe a little longer, that are strung together with music and temp dialogue. To give you a sense of the pacing of the movie, is this working? Is it going to be worth it for us to animate this sequence? Or should we go back to re-scripting some of this? It's a very common process across animation and then Pixar obviously has made famous the use of story reels since Toy Story. So Minkoff says, how much of this do we need to keep? And they're like, basically none of it. And so Allers and Minkoff say, great, let's go re-break the story.

• 50:25Chris Winterbauer?

  So they go, we need more mythic depth. At the same time, we want to lighten the mood a little bit. After all, Lizzie, Minkoff was famous for designing Ursula

• 50:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 50:35Chris Winterbauer?

  in the image of Divine from the John Waters films.

• 50:39Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, absolutely. Her eyeshadow alone.

• 50:42Chris Winterbauer?

  And Roger Allers had storyboarded Poor Unfortunate Souls.

• 50:45Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, great.

• 50:46Chris Winterbauer?

  So these guys, I think, are a really nice team. And they're thinking, okay, can we make something both funny and emotionally resonant? So producer Don Hahn raps Beauty and the Beast. He then joins King of the Jungle. He brings with him Beauty and the Beast directors Kirk Wise and Gary Trousdale for two days of brainstorming sessions with Allers and Minkoff. This is really cool. You've got the directors of a very successful movie that they've just come off of, coming in for two days of brainstorming on your movie. What an invaluable resource. So they re-break the story and they go back to just old stories like Moses, for example, where a character is born into royalty, exiled, and then it has to come back and reclaim their kingdom. So they bring in the exile storyline that had been cut with Wolverton's draft.

• 51:29Chris Winterbauer?

  They introduce the idea that Mufasa's ghost is going to return to guide Simba. They also started working in a more traditional Disney method, developing the story via storyboards. Again, these guys are coming from the animation side.

• 51:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Right.

• 51:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Some researchers actually have framed this as a mini rebellion against Katzenberg, who at the time was pushing for a more script-based process for developing stories. Minkoff claims they then pitched this revised outline to Eisner, Katzenberg, Pete Schneider, and Tom Schumacher. And it was at this meeting, according to Minkoff, that somebody pointed out the similarities to Hamlet. Again, who knows? To me, though, it all just echoes the same idea that Hamlet was more found than sought out at the beginning.

• 52:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, again, I think that makes complete sense, but then do I think that they went and leaned into it as much as possible? Yes, I do. There's visual references to it. There are lines that are references to it, but yeah.

• 52:17Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, when he stabs Zazu in the closet.

• 52:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Although Zazu does end up in that little bone cage, which is pretty funny as well.

• 52:23Lizzie Bassett?

  I love, I know we'll get into casting.

• 52:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Rowan Atkinson.

• 52:25Lizzie Bassett?

  I love Rowan Atkinson so much and he is so great as Zazu.

• 52:29Chris Winterbauer?

  He's great.

• 52:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Out of service? Out of Africa? They shouldn't count me out.

• 52:33Chris Winterbauer?

  It's very good. The voice cast is incredible.

• 52:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 52:36Chris Winterbauer?

  The team had their direction. They bring in another writer to take a crack at this script. So they're going to turn this outline into a script, and this is Irene Metchie. And then they bring in another writer, Jonathan Roberts, later in 1992. And the movie, Lizzie, kept changing, which was not making life easy for the animators. So amidst the animators at Disney, King of the Jungle didn't have a great reputation. In fact, at this particular point of time, animating at Disney maybe didn't have a great reputation. So animator Andreas Deha is credited as the supervising animator of Scar. He'd also done Jafar and Gaston, one of my favorite villains.

• 53:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Great, yes.

• 53:15Chris Winterbauer?

  He remembers around the time that Aladdin was coming to an end, a group of animators huddled up in the hallway at Disney. Now, at the time, Lizzie, Disney was structured around one animation team. This one team had done The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin back to back to back.

• 53:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 53:33Chris Winterbauer?

  12 months to do the animation on each. Imagine, in contrast to Disney's prior four-year cadence between films.

• 53:40Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm-hmm.

• 53:41Chris Winterbauer?

  They were exhausted. There's a company retreat on the Queen Mary down in Long Beach.

• 53:45Lizzie Bassett?

  The haunted boat.

• 53:46Chris Winterbauer?

  The haunted boat. Have you ever been on the Queen Mary?

• 53:48Lizzie Bassett?

  No, I never got to do it.

• 53:49Chris Winterbauer?

  No, it's fun. It's an ocean liner turned hotel slash turned spooky scary Halloween time, fun time, town town.

• 53:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 53:55Chris Winterbauer?

  It's, they do like a haunted night sort of ghost ship thing in October that you can go to. It's fun. They have a talk with management about this unsustainable workload, and management, to their credit, actually listened. The results: this one animation team is going to be split into two. Each unit is going to be supplemented with new hires, and the animators will now get 18 months to finish each feature as opposed to 12 months. So it's going to be increased by 50%. Now, the next two movies going into production almost simultaneously are King of the Jungle and You Know What Movie is being made almost at the same time.

• 54:28Lizzie Bassett?

  No. Can I get a clue?

• 54:29Chris Winterbauer?

  It is female-led, and it takes place in America.

• 54:33Lizzie Bassett?

  I have no idea.

• 54:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Pocahontas.

• 54:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, okay.

• 54:38Chris Winterbauer?

  So what's interesting is that Pocahontas was considered the A project, and King of the Jungle was considered the B project.

• 54:46Lizzie Bassett?

  I gotta tell you, have you watched Pocahontas in recent years?

• 54:49Chris Winterbauer?

  I have.

• 54:50Lizzie Bassett?

  It's got a couple good songs in it.

• 54:53Chris Winterbauer?

  It's got a couple good songs, Colors of the Wind.

• 54:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Visually beautiful.

• 54:56Chris Winterbauer?

  The animation is stunning, but the story is not.

• 54:59Lizzie Bassett?

  No, it's kind of a snoozer.

• 55:01Chris Winterbauer?

  It is, although Christian Bale, you know, early Christian Bale role.

• 55:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Who then comes back to play John Rolfe, right, in The New World by Terrence Malick, which I actually really liked. Yeah.

• 55:10Chris Winterbauer?

  I liked The New World as well, especially the director's cut.

• 55:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Also, we should mention incredibly historically inaccurate and insensitive, but that's, you know, that's just what they do, not The New World. The New World actually is more accurate.

• 55:19Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, we'll save our comments on Pocahontas, but suffice to say, at the time, Pocahontas was much more in line with The Little Mermaid, for example, and Beauty and the Beast. Just if you think of strong female lead, rebelling against the customs, you know, of the town or of the culture that she's raised in, a sort of Romeo and Juliet-style romance, I can understand in development why this movie seems like the more obvious hit internally.

• 55:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, and also, to be fair, they haven't really had an animal movie like The Lion King before in terms of the way that the animals operate and sing and stuff, right?

• 55:56Chris Winterbauer?

  No, it's not Bambi exactly.

• 55:58Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 55:58Chris Winterbauer?

  But it's also not Oliver and Company. It's somewhere in between. It's new. It's entirely new. And it also sounds like Pocahontas was just further along conceptually at this point as well, Lizzie.

• 56:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, they have an existing story to rip to shreds, so that's, you know.

• 56:11Chris Winterbauer?

  That's true. So for example, according to Deha, Disney apparently threw these wine and cheese parties. They did two of them to showcase the pre-production work from both projects. As Deha said, Pocahontas has, quote, "gorgeous vis dev illustrations by Mike Gabriel telling the story of Pocahontas and her unusual love interest. In essence, this was Romeo and Juliet. Everyone understood it and loved it." On the other hand, King of the Jungle had a few atmosphere pastel sketches showing African wildlife, end quote.

• 56:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Also good.

• 56:38Chris Winterbauer?

  What's interesting is Andreas Deha actually chose to work on King of the Jungle, which a lot of people chose to work on Pocahontas. But Andreas Deha said he loved the Jungle Book and drawing animals, and this was a unique opportunity to do an all-animal cast with animals that mostly moved like animals. So like with Shrek, which would come later, and we talked about a couple of years ago, there were a lot of relatively young and inexperienced animators who saw an opportunity to jump up into roles that hadn't been available to them before, like leading a character. Alarson Minkoff has actually said that they had to go around and beg animators to work on their project. But there were some cool perks, like, Lizzie, they brought in real lions. You can see behind-the-scenes footage of the animators observing and sketching real lions in the studio.

• 57:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Cool.

• 57:19Chris Winterbauer?

  And even bigger than the big cats, Lizzie, was the big cast.

• 57:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 57:24Chris Winterbauer?

  Switch the S around. All right. This was very much in the early days of hiring famous live-action actors for animated movies. Now, some sources have traced this trend to what motor-mouthed comedian who had just been in Aladdin?

• 57:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, Robin Williams.

• 57:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Robin Williams as the genie.

• 57:40Lizzie Bassett?

  That is kind of the first. If you're looking back at like Beauty and the Beast and Little Mermaid, there's no recognizable, what we would think of as now recognizable names in those. Well, that's not true. Beauty and the Beast, there's a couple. I'm wrong about that.

• 57:52Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. Angela Lansbury, for example.

• 57:54Lizzie Bassett?

  And Jerry Orbach are both in Beauty and the Beast.

• 57:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, but again, they're not big names. You know, Jesse pulled Bette Midler in Oliver and Company.

• 58:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 58:02Chris Winterbauer?

  Kurt Russell in The Fox and the Hound.

• 58:05Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 58:05Chris Winterbauer?

  But in terms of Q rating, Robin Williams is at a whole different level in the early 90s.

• 58:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Especially because what he did in that, which we see very much again in The Lion King, I would argue, both with James Earl Jones, but particularly with Jeremy Irons, is that Robin Williams appears as himself, essentially.

• 58:23Chris Winterbauer?

  They designed the character around both his mannerisms and his look. Also, it's very clear. He said, "Oh, script? What script?" And he lit it on fire and just riffed, and it's amazing.

• 58:32Lizzie Bassett?

  And he's wonderful, yeah.

• 58:33Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. All right, so let's talk about how The Lion King was going to be different and that it was going to have an entire roster of live-action stars. So a few fun facts, Lizzie. What not-so-feminist actor was considered for Mufasa before the studio decided to go with James Earl Jones?

• 58:49Lizzie Bassett?

  Did they want to give him Simba a little smack?

• 58:52Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. Sean Connery was considered.

• 58:55Lizzie Bassett?

  He wouldn't have died. He would have just gotten back up and slapped Scar across the face.

• 59:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Keep animating. I'm here. I'm still here. Losers try their best.

• 59:04Lizzie Bassett?

  I punched him in the face.

• 59:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, they did, of course, go with James Earl Jones.

• 59:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Thank God.

• 59:10Chris Winterbauer?

  By the way, I don't think it was offered to Connery. He was just considered, and apparently they knew they nailed it from the moment James Earl Jones came in to record. Alar said, quote, "He proceeded to clear his throat before his first lines. The strength and resonance of his harumphs practically blew us off our chairs in the recording booth."

• 59:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 59:25Chris Winterbauer?

  But Jones may have been upstaged in terms of Q rating by his on-screen son. Lizzie Jonathan Taylor Thomas, only 10 or 11 at the time, was hugely famous for his role on what show?

• 59:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Home Improvement.

• 59:36Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. Also, he did Indian in the Cupboard. He would later do Wild America.

• 59:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I mean, he was a massive child star.

• 59:43Chris Winterbauer?

  Massive child star. And of course, Matthew Broderick, coming in to play adult Simba, was only a few years removed from his most enduring role, Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

• 59:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Mm-hmm.

• 59:52Chris Winterbauer?

  So, you know, at the time that they're casting this, it's roughly five or six years after that movie.

• 59:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Maybe you'll get into this, but I've always wondered why it's not Matthew Broderick doing the singing in this, because he can sing.

• 1:00:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Not really, apparently.

• 1:00:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Really?

• 1:00:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah, he apparently, we can talk about it right now. Apparently, Broderick, who's, according to the directors, very uncomfortable with the singing.

• 1:00:12Lizzie Bassett?

  Huh.

• 1:00:12Chris Winterbauer?

  They tried recording him singing, and they just said it wasn't his comfort zone, and so they do have another actor, I'll get to his name in a moment, who is doing much, if not all, of the singing for Broderick.

• 1:00:21Lizzie Bassett?

  I mean, he sings in The Producers. I guess it is, it's not as strong as you maybe need it to be in this.

• 1:00:26Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:27Lizzie Bassett?

  But he does, I mean, he can sing.

• 1:00:28Chris Winterbauer?

  I think he can. I just think it's more in a Ryan Gosling in La La Land sort of way as opposed to, you know, like Nathan Lane.

• 1:00:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Is it more of a Rex Harrison in?

• 1:00:38Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes. Well, I don't want to be that mean. Come on.

• 1:00:41Lizzie Bassett?

  When you're talking to the animals.

• 1:00:44Chris Winterbauer?

  Animals. Yeah. Now, apparently, Lizzie, Broderick was actually a little confused when he read the script, as he later said, quote, "I thought he meant Kimba, who was a white lion in a cartoon when I was a little kid," end quote.

• 1:00:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm.

• 1:00:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Keep that name in mind. We will come back to it.

• 1:00:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Okay.

• 1:01:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, as you mentioned, the venerable Jeremy Irons came in to voice Scar. He was very new to animated voiceover, shows up to his first session. Apparently, he would smoke through a lot of the sessions as well.

• 1:01:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, obviously.

• 1:01:12Chris Winterbauer?

  He said he was very surprised to find himself in a big room, as opposed to like an ADR booth, with walls covered with storyboards, several people operating video cameras, and animators sitting and sketching him in real time. So, Lizzie, as you mentioned, the genie in Aladdin, they were actually designing Scar around watching Jeremy Irons perform the vocal patterns.

• 1:01:34Lizzie Bassett?

  I mean, the way it moves, the languidity, yeah, it's incredible.

• 1:01:37Chris Winterbauer?

  It's awesome. He actually had assumed that he was going to come in to match his dialogue to existing animation like ADR, which is, that's how I always thought it was done when I was young, but it's the opposite. They're animating Scar, designed on him based on his performance. They're finding the character with the actor. And Jeremy Irons didn't love what they found. In a later interview, he said he was pretty upset when he saw the final design of Scar, quote, "Because, you know, James Earl Jones, muscular, wonderful, fantastic mane and rippling muscle with gloriousness, and I was a scraggy, sort of mangy-looking lion, you know, thin and terrible tail, terrible mane, and I thought, is this what they saw when they were drawing me?"

• 1:02:17Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, it's, I mean, worth mentioning, he would have been coming right off of Reversal of Fortune in this, right? Which he won an Oscar for, I think.

• 1:02:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:25Lizzie Bassett?

  And he played Klaus von Buylow, who, if you've never seen this movie, he looks very seedy and creepy and mangy in that.

• 1:02:32Chris Winterbauer?

  But he'd done a lot of creepy, like, he'd done Dead Ringers by now. I feel like he'd done a lot of kind of pseudo villainous creepy slippery stuff by this point.

• 1:02:40Lizzie Bassett?

  For sure, for sure. There is an actual line from Reversal of Fortune in The Lion King, which I've always appreciated.

• 1:02:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Which line is it?

• 1:02:46Lizzie Bassett?

  He says, uh, he says, "You're weird," and he says, "You have no idea."

• 1:02:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:02:51Lizzie Bassett?

  In Reversal of Fortune, it's, "You're a strange man," and he says, "You have no idea," as he rolls up the window.

• 1:02:56Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, that's great. I actually really like the way they animate Scar, but there was some criticism of it that we can talk about at the end.

• 1:03:01Lizzie Bassett?

  Hmm, interesting. I love it. I love Jeremy Irons. I know he is a, he said some crazy shit.

• 1:03:09Lizzie Bassett?

  God damn it, I do love him. He's got an incredible voice.

• 1:03:12Chris Winterbauer?

  I love him except for when he's writing his own dialogue, so to speak.

• 1:03:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Don't let him do that, yeah.

• 1:03:16Chris Winterbauer?

  All right, so Robert Guillaume, they could not figure out Rafiki. Apparently, they would just keep calling him back to redo Rafiki scenes, until finally, apparently, Allers and Minkoff told him, quote, "We finally figured out who Rafiki is. He's insane."

• 1:03:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:30Chris Winterbauer?

  End quote, which is great.

• 1:03:31Lizzie Bassett?

  I love Rafiki.

• 1:03:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Rafiki's character.

• 1:03:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Rowan Atkinson, AKA Mr. Bean, came on as Zazu. I mean, again, he may have been one of those recognizable people in the world, you know what I mean, at this point in time. He'd done Blackadder.

• 1:03:44Lizzie Bassett?

  But interestingly, not for his voice.

• 1:03:46Chris Winterbauer?

  I know, because he was more known for the silent performance of Mr. Bean. But he has such a great distinctive voice, which is so interesting about why, you know, I love how incongruous his voice can seem with his character too, because he's so erudite and refined when he speaks, but his character is like such a wide-eyed, bumbling knave. It's so, he's so good at it.

• 1:04:04Lizzie Bassett?

  And the noises he makes in Mr. Bean also are kind of like low and guttural a lot of the time, so, yeah. It definitely can be a surprise when you actually hear Rowan Atkinson, because he is so like,

• 1:04:15Chris Winterbauer?

  I know.

• 1:04:15Lizzie Bassett?

  You know, RP, high-level accent.

• 1:04:17Chris Winterbauer?

  I was floored the first time I heard him.

• 1:04:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Madge Sinclair, of roots in Coming to America, joined to voice Sarabi. And the original plan was to have Shenzi and Banzi, the two main hyenas, to be voiced by Cheech and?

• 1:04:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Chong.

• 1:04:30Chris Winterbauer?

  But they were estranged. Now, they got Cheech Marin as Banzi. He'd also voiced Tito and Oliver and Company. And then they got word that Whoopi Goldberg wanted to be in the movie.

• 1:04:38Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 1:04:38Chris Winterbauer?

  So according to Minkoff, she'd been getting lunch with Elton John. She heard they're making the movie, that it's set in Africa, and she's like, "I want in," and they said, "Do you want to be a hyena with Cheech Marin?" And she said, "Not only do I want to be a hyena with Cheech Marin, I am gonna come in and we have to record it together so we can improvise and play off of each other."

• 1:04:54Lizzie Bassett?

  Nice.

• 1:04:55Chris Winterbauer?

  And I think their dynamic is great.

• 1:04:56Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:04:56Chris Winterbauer?

  In the movie. I think they do a really good job. Veteran voice actor Jim Cummings. I think we've talked about Jim Cummings, because, Lizzie, he did Mogwai on Gremlins.

• 1:05:03Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:05:03Chris Winterbauer?

  He's uncredited. Mogwai, Mogwai?

• 1:05:05Lizzie Bassett?

  He's come up at least once, maybe more than once.

• 1:05:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, he came up on our Cady vs. Acme review, because he does the Tasmanian Devil, he did Winnie the Pooh, and he got the third hyena role, Ed, after actor Frank Welker dropped out. Now, there was no script for Ed. Rob Minkoff would apparently just start throwing out emotions.

• 1:05:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I don't know what you would write.

• 1:05:24Chris Winterbauer?

  So basically, he just had to laugh. Every reaction is a laugh, but he had to do different emotions for those laughs. So he had to do betrayal, fear, anger, hunger, happiness, et cetera, all as laughs. And apparently, he said, "I just went down the list. I'm telling you, it was like 45 minutes, I think, and we were done." So I think that was the fastest recording in the whole movie. Welker, who did not end up doing Ed, did do a lot of the lion roars, or some of the lion roars in the film. And, Lizzie, you may have seen these clips on YouTube, where he's roaring into an empty metal trash can. And if you haven't, they're really cool. We can post them on Patreon. Let's talk about who are arguably the two most memorable characters.

• 1:05:58Lizzie Bassett?

  Timon and Pumba.

• 1:05:59Chris Winterbauer?

  Amen. Now, they were apparently not meant to be played by Nathan Lane and Ernie Sibella. So at the time, both of these actors were acting in a Broadway revival of Guys and Dolls. And they basically run into each other at the auditions for Lion King. According to one source, Lane had come in for Zazu, which I think makes a lot of sense. And Sibella came in for one of the hyenas, which I also think makes sense.

• 1:06:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Sure.

• 1:06:21Chris Winterbauer?

  They see each other, they decide to go in and audition together as hyenas. Roger Allers said they made him laugh so hard, he cried.

• 1:06:29Lizzie Bassett?

  I bet.

• 1:06:30Chris Winterbauer?

  Sibella actually remembers it differently. He says they did an extended read with a lot of improv, and they look up from the booth, quote, "Roger Allers' mouth was open, and we sort of slipped out of the booth and said, 'Okay, thank you,' and, you know, they were just like, 'Good thing we've got day jobs on Broadway.'" They heard nothing, assumed that they bombed it, and a month or two later, they got a call saying they were playing Timon and Pumba. And they said, "Who's that?" And then Sibella said, quote, "Jeffrey Katzenberg told us, 'Well, we wrote these two characters after your audition, and we need them at this point in our movie. We need some levity. We just killed Dad, you know,' end quote.

• 1:07:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:07:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, we've seen versions of Timon and Pumba earlier in treatments. I don't know if they were omitted, and then they were brought back because of Sibella, you know what I mean, and Lane's performance, or if they were just changed.

• 1:07:11Lizzie Bassett?

  I will say, the Timon and Pumba section in Exile is way shorter than I remembered. I remembered that being a large portion of the movie. It's like five minutes.

• 1:07:22Chris Winterbauer?

  Ten minutes, yeah.

• 1:07:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Tops. And then they come back. So I could see that having been added. It wouldn't be that hard to drop them in.

• 1:07:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Absolutely. What we do know is they definitely influenced the characters. Lizzie, you mentioned the farts.

• 1:07:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep.

• 1:07:35Chris Winterbauer?

  So apparently, there was no gas written in to the character. But then, they came in on a Monday morning, after a five-show weekend on Broadway. Sibella is hopped up on cappuccino and pastries.

• 1:07:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:07:46Chris Winterbauer?

  Nathan Lane is exhausted, so he's just kind of mumbling through everything. And Sibella decides to add a fake fart after his next line. So he says his line, and he's like, and it made Nathan Lane laugh. And he's like, "Stop it, knock it off." Sibella says, "Of course, I'm sorry," and then he does his next line, he goes, right after it again. And he just kept doing it, and the director said, "Keep going." And he passed, he like gassed up the entire scene, and they decided to keep it as a big character trait.

• 1:08:11Lizzie Bassett?

  So funny. But he says, "Not in front of the kids. They won't let him fart in front of the kids."

• 1:08:15Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. Now, Lizzie, there's a very funny scene where they have to distract

• 1:08:19Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:08:20Chris Winterbauer?

  the hyenas. They have to create a diversion.

• 1:08:22Lizzie Bassett?

  Dress and drag and do the hula?

• 1:08:24Chris Winterbauer?

  So, apparently, that is something that Nathan Lane pitched.

• 1:08:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, of course. I'm not surprised.

• 1:08:30Chris Winterbauer?

  And according to Sibella, Roger Allers said, like, "I don't think we can do that. Can we do that?" And Ernie Sibella said, "Why not?" And so they wrote this song for Sibella and Lane, and they bring Sibella in, and they're like, "We just need you to go, 'Yup, yup, yup,' every time."

• 1:08:44Lizzie Bassett?

  Yup, yup, yup.

• 1:08:45Chris Winterbauer?

  They animated, they, you know, I'm sure they didn't fully animate it, but they get through the, you know, story reels or whatever, and then the studio decides they want to cut it.

• 1:08:51Lizzie Bassett?

  No.

• 1:08:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Slash, swap in Stayin' Alive.

• 1:08:55Lizzie Bassett?

  No, what they did is so funny.

• 1:08:57Chris Winterbauer?

  So the studio wanted to do Stayin' Alive instead of the hula, and Minkoff and the team freaked out. Quote, "Something like a made-up Hawaiian war chant can be timeless and classic and funny. It's not so rooted in one cultural moment that it's remembered for. You hear Stayin' Alive, and you're automatically going to think of John Travolta and Saturday Night Fever, and it's exactly the right point." Apparently, Don Hahn and Minkoff had to sell it to the Disney execs by performing the number in front of them. They finally relented, but they weren't the only ones acting things out. So I do want to shout out Tony Bancroft and Mike Suri, who were the lead animators for Timon and Pumba. They were good friends. They apparently shared a room. They lived the Hakuna Matata lifestyle while working on the film.

• 1:09:38Chris Winterbauer?

  And they would do it in a way where Bancroft would animate Pumba to like create a physical stage for Timon, who would always be on different parts of his body, you know?

• 1:09:47Lizzie Bassett?

  Nice.

• 1:09:47Chris Winterbauer?

  And they had this approach, "Let's make these guys the best we can make them." Like, they're just comedic, you know, relief at this point, but let's make them as good as possible. The thing was, Lizzie, internally, the best that they could make them, the best that Lion King could be, was probably not that great. A couple of months into production, Katzenberg calls a breakfast meeting for the two animation groups, Pocahontas and The Lion King. And according to Minkoff, Katzenberg basically announces, "Pocahontas is a home run. It's West Side Story. It's Romeo and Juliet with Native Americans. It's a hit. Lion King, on the other hand, is kind of an experiment. We don't really know if anybody's gonna want to see it," end quote. According to Tom Schumacher, Katzenberg once said, "If the movie did more than $50 million, he'd get on his hands and knees," end quote.

• 1:10:29Lizzie Bassett?

  I hope you groveled.

• 1:10:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Part of the issue seems to have been the continued changes to the script and the story. So it wasn't until early '93 that the screenplay was really finalized, and the title changed from King of the Jungle to The Lion King. Again, we think probably to avoid confusion with the Jungle Book.

• 1:10:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:46Chris Winterbauer?

  All through '92, those animators are struggling to keep up with the story changes. There's also technical challenges, as we mentioned. You know, because it's more realistic in its animation style, the characters, aside from Rafiki, can't really carry props. And they're pushing, you know, the boundaries of hand-drawn animation. For example, they did use computer animation for the wildebeest stampede, because they couldn't do that many wildebeests.

• 1:11:06Lizzie Bassett?

  You would have to, yeah.

• 1:11:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Apparently, it just reached the point where On the Day I Stay Ha said, you know, like, "One day I ran away. I said, 'I can't deal with this.'" Like, "Figure out what you want, and then come back to me." But what's interesting is I also read, when I was looking at Pocahontas, that there are at least a couple of people from Pocahontas that were getting so frustrated with the indecision on that movie, that they came over to The Lion King. And so Pocahontas seemed to be having a troubled time too.

• 1:11:28Lizzie Bassett?

  It makes sense for the time period this is at Disney. And also, when you think about what the Pocahontas animation looks like, I think there's some similarities to The Lion King in the animals that are in Pocahontas, and also in the way some of the nature is portrayed. I mean, the rains going across, you know, is it the Serengeti in The Lion King?

• 1:11:45Chris Winterbauer?

  I would imagine so.

• 1:11:46Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, I mean, it's beautiful. It's very beautiful.

• 1:11:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Now, at the same time, Tim Rice has been working on the music this whole time, three years. And in the end, the movie would feature five songs. It was a lot of work. Elton John had his doubts, quote, "I was sitting there at the piano thinking, 'I'm writing a song about a wart hog. This is the end of my career.'"

• 1:12:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Nope.

• 1:12:02Chris Winterbauer?

  And I burst out laughing. And Disney was unsure about the music, so when Rob Minkoff joined the team in '92, Rice and Elton John had recorded some demo songs, and according to Minkoff, nobody really liked them. They weren't African. They were just Elton John at a piano, recording into a cassette player. So, of course, they're gonna sound more like Elton than like Africa. And the tricky thing is that it's tough to communicate the need for changes to Elton, because Tim Rice was really the only person on the production that was in touch with him, and he's not in Los Angeles. It also doesn't help that the first song that Rice and Elton wrote was one the team couldn't figure out how to fit into the movie. But this song did make the final cut. Lizzie, which song do you think was the most contentious

• 1:12:45Chris Winterbauer?

  in terms of whether or not to include it in the final cut, that did end up in the movie?

• 1:12:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Is it Hakuna Matata?

• 1:12:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Nope.

• 1:12:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Just Can't Wait to Be King?

• 1:12:54Chris Winterbauer?

  Can You Feel the Love Tonight?

• 1:12:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, that makes sense. Okay.

• 1:12:57Chris Winterbauer?

  They couldn't figure out how to make it work. Here's what Rice said, quote, "They tried it in an outline with the two lions swimming and diving and running through the forest, and then it was tried as an argument almost, and then it was tried with a heavenly chorus singing offstage while the lions did whatever they did." And then it was cut.

• 1:13:10Lizzie Bassett?

  You know what they did.

• 1:13:11Chris Winterbauer?

  And then it was expanded.

• 1:13:12Lizzie Bassett?

  I hate that part of this movie.

• 1:13:14Chris Winterbauer?

  And then we tried it with the warthog and the meerkat singing a parody song. It was like a slow ballad that didn't advance the plot. And they said, "What if Nala gives him the most aggressive bedroom eyes that have ever been put on film?"

• 1:13:25Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:25Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, boy. I think Jesse said it's like one of those memes that works without the context.

• 1:13:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:30Chris Winterbauer?

  It's like you see it in context and is not made any more appropriate.

• 1:13:33Lizzie Bassett?

  No, I actually just wish they hadn't done that. That was one thing that stood out to me this time where I was like, you know, it was nice when they were just kind of like being cats and loving on each other. I didn't need to see that, to quote the comeback. I don't need to see that.

• 1:13:46Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm fine with it. Young Chris liked it. All right.

• 1:13:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Today's episode is sponsored by Mars. You might not realize it, but Mars is behind so many of your favorite Halloween treats, and I'm not just talking about your candy bowl. Yes, Mars makes iconic candies like M&M's, Snickers, Starburst, my personal favorite, and Skittles, but they also have salty snacks, easy to make meal options, and even treats for your pets. There's something for everyone to enjoy this spooky season. David and I are too old to trick or treat, so we've been getting creative with our Halloween movie night spreads for our friends. I put together a char bootery board with some classic sweets like Rice Krispy treats and peanut butter M&M's, and because I'm a salty girl, I added some Pringles and my all time favorite snack, Cheez-It crackers. Scary delicious. For Halloween night, I'm making a spooky seven-layer dip using Ben's original ready rice because there is nothing that my kid loves more than a rice and bean dip. And don't think I forgot about our dog Q.

• 1:14:35Lizzie Bassett?

  Mars knows he needs a celebration too, so I put together a special Halloween treat jar packed with Greenie's Original Pumpkin Spice dental chews and Pedigree Tasty Biscuits. He's agreed to share with the neighbors because he's a very good boy. Find Mars products in a retailer near you or on Instagram at Mars Global, M-A-R-S-G-L-O-B-A-L, where you can shop everyday favorites and limited time Halloween offerings.

• 1:15:01Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, you mentioned this, Lizzie, not all of the actors eventually sang in the film. So Atkinson, Lane, Sibella, and Irons all took a crack at their songs, but Jim Cummings apparently had to finish be prepared for like the final big notes because Jeremy Irons' voice gave out, he's too many cigarettes, and it just kind of fell apart at the very end.

• 1:15:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, and he's also not like, I love this, he's not really singing.

• 1:15:23Chris Winterbauer?

  He's sing talking.

• 1:15:24Lizzie Bassett?

  If anybody's doing the Rex Harrison, it's Jeremy Irons.

• 1:15:26Chris Winterbauer?

  He's the closest to the Rex Harrison. He's Dwayne The Rock Johnson in Moana.

• 1:15:30Lizzie Bassett?

  He's better, he's better for sure. Like, he can actually carry a tune, but it is, you know, there's some holes in the bucket.

• 1:15:36Chris Winterbauer?

  They're limiting his range.

• 1:15:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:15:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's, like, we got seven notes to work with, let's keep it pretty here. Now, Broderick was, as you mentioned, supposed to do some singing, but he's just apparently was not in his comfort zone. So that's Joseph Williams, who's John Williams' son.

• 1:15:50Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 1:15:50Chris Winterbauer?

  Singing for adult Simba.

• 1:15:52Lizzie Bassett?

  I didn't know that's his son.

• 1:15:53Chris Winterbauer?

  Who also was the lead singer of Toto.

• 1:15:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Did not know that. That's his son?

• 1:15:57Chris Winterbauer?

  Apparently. And that's Jason Weaver singing for young Simba, who had just played Michael Jackson in The Jackson's and American Dream. And there's a bunch of other examples, like Sally Dorsky and Laura Williams also sang for adult and young Nala, respectively. All right, let's talk about Hakuna Matata. So, Lizzie, originally the song was called He's Got It All Worked Out. It's about Timon singing how Pumba has mastered the idea of taking it easy. Some people called it The Warthog Rhapsody, whatever it was called. Apparently, it was a bummer. Minkoff said, "None of us loved the song. We had to storyboard it unhappily." And then to add insult to injury, while they're working on it, they go to a screening of the finished Prince Ali sequence in Aladdin.

• 1:16:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, dear.

• 1:16:34Chris Winterbauer?

  And they're like, "Oh, fuck, this is so good."

• 1:16:37Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:37Chris Winterbauer?

  And they go back to their storyboards and they're like, "What the fuck is this warthog song? What is this movie? We're on this B movie? It's terrible." And they take it to Katzenberg, and he goes, "This is terrible." And Minkoff and Allers are like, "Well, let's make it funny. Like, let's make the whole song about eating bugs." And Elton John says, "Absolutely not." And so Minkoff and Allers sit down with Tim Rice, and he's like, "We need something like Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo for Cinderella, right?" And that's when Allers remembers an expression he'd learned on their research trip to Kenya. Hakuna Matata.

• 1:17:06Lizzie Bassett?

  Hakuna Matata.

• 1:17:08Chris Winterbauer?

  Hakuna Matata. And I love how it just becomes the song in real time as they're doing it.

• 1:17:11Lizzie Bassett?

  What a wonderful phrase.

• 1:17:13Chris Winterbauer?

  What a wonderful phrase. And Rice writes the lyrics, Elton makes a new demo, and Hakuna Matata is born and saves the sequence. And then, of course, things really come together with The Circle of Life.

• 1:17:23Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes.

• 1:17:23Chris Winterbauer?

  So the first versions are very different. John starts reworking it. Apparently, it just started very lightweight, doesn't have the gravitas that it needs. And then they finally decide to bring in some African-style music because they hire Lizzie, who?

• 1:17:36Lizzie Bassett?

  Hans Zimmer.

• 1:17:37Chris Winterbauer?

  Hans Zimmer, fresh off of a movie about politics in South Africa called The Power of One, which features a lot of African-inspired music and African artists performing the numbers. So he'd worked with a number of African singers, perhaps most notably, Lev O'M. So Zimmer then tapped composer Mark Manchina to join the production. Manchina would go on, of course, to do, you know, Tarzan, Twister, Speed, Bad Boys, Moana, et cetera, a huge composer. He also brought in Trevor Raybourn, a South African guitarist he'd just toured with. And Manchina says, basically, they were handing them songs, like they handed him I Just Can't Wait to Be King, and said, "Turn this into something that can be African."

• 1:18:11Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:12Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, the good news is Lev O'M is the voice you hear chanting at the top of The Circle of Life, so they did bring in African artists. Actress and singer Carmen Twilley is the female voice that sings the lead in that song. The song turned out so well, Lizzie, that they cut all the dialogue at the beginning of the movie.

• 1:18:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, you don't need it.

• 1:18:28Chris Winterbauer?

  And they just said, "We'll just do it as an artistic musical number." They paired it with the animation, and all of a sudden, it hit them. Like, this is good. This is really good. It was actually so good, they used that as the trailer, six months before the movie came out. The trailer was just the opening number, The Circle of Life.

• 1:18:46Lizzie Bassett?

  I mean, it's insane.

• 1:18:48Chris Winterbauer?

  It was actually too good. Don Han said, "The response from the audience was, 'This is the best thing I've ever seen. Is the rest of the movie like this?' And we said, 'Yes, but the truth is, the rest of the movie was not as good. It scared us and pushed us to make sure the movie raised the bar.'" And then, Lizzie, they nearly ruined the movie, according to Elton John. So they did a test screening in Atlanta, and Elton John was in the audience, and they forgot to tell him that they'd made a change. They'd cut a song. Which song did they cut, Lizzie, based on our conversation?

• 1:19:18Lizzie Bassett?

  Can You Feel the Love Tonight?

• 1:19:20Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep. Now, Rob Minkoff says the song wasn't cut, it was just a version performed by Timon and Pumba. Either way, the credits roll, the lights come up, Elton turns to the directors and says very calmly, "Look, I think you've ruined the movie." And then he goes outside and apparently called Jeffrey Katzenberg, and was not nearly as calm. According to Katzenberg, he was driving across the Golden Gate Bridge when Elton John called him on his cellphone and started screaming at him, "You don't know what you've done! The song is brilliant!"

• 1:19:44Lizzie Bassett?

  It is a great song.

• 1:19:45Chris Winterbauer?

  So they put it back in the movie. They're wrapping up production, expectations are rising, the Disney Renaissance is building, Aladdin has come out and grossed over $500 million against its $28 million budget. The Lion King is gonna go first before Pocahontas. Alan Menken wins another two Oscars for Aladdin. They decide they're gonna pour more than $100 million into marketing The Lion King. A rep for the studio says this will be the single largest set of promotional tie-ins in Disney's motion picture history. And they threw some wild events. Two on-the-lot gatherings with wild animals and clips from the movies, and it featured Jeffrey Katzenberg singing alongside Nathan Lane and Ernie Sibella with the animators introduced as the Katzenberg harlots.

• 1:20:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 1:20:29Chris Winterbauer?

  They had a 650-pound lion, a giraffe, a zebra, a baboon, and diapers.

• 1:20:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, you gotta put diapers on that baboon.

• 1:20:35Chris Winterbauer?

  Oh, yeah. You gotta put a diaper on Jeffrey Katzenberg. Katzenberg answered press questions with a four-week-old lion cub on his lap.

• 1:20:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, that's adorable. And now you know where BuzzFeed got their ideas.

• 1:20:45Chris Winterbauer?

  That's right. Five months before The Lion King was released, the Northridge earthquake struck California, so they had to finish the animation, in part, working from home. A lot of the animators couldn't get to the office, so they'd work from home. But then a lot of the other animators were living out of the office because they didn't have water and power at home. But they got it done, and roughly 18 months after Aladdin set a new bar for the Disney Renaissance, The Lion King premiered. Lizzie, to somewhat mixed reviews.

• 1:21:11Lizzie Bassett?

  How?

• 1:21:12Chris Winterbauer?

  At least by the standards set by its immediate predecessors. So let me give you some examples. Roger Ebert said it wasn't in the same class as Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, or Aladdin, and called the villain the most memorable character in the movie. Siskel said that Simba was as dull as Aladdin himself, and only a couple of the songs are memorable. The New York Times wrote-

• 1:21:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, they're always wrong.

• 1:21:33Chris Winterbauer?

  "The Lion King is as visually enchanting as its pedigree suggests, but it also departs from the spontaneity of its predecessors and reveals more calculation. More so than the exuberant movie miracles that came before it, this latest animated juggernaut has the feeling of a clever, predictable product." They said that Can You Feel the Love Tonight felt shoehorned in.

• 1:21:51Lizzie Bassett?

  Uh-oh.

• 1:21:52Chris Winterbauer?

  And that Tim Rice's lyrics were fastidious but remarkably joyless.

• 1:21:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:21:58Chris Winterbauer?

  There was also quite a bit of criticism about perceived racism, sexism, and homophobia. As The Washington Post, published in July of 1994, "The female lions depend on the males for salvation. Simba's mane is gloriously red. Scar's is, of course, black." And a Harvard psychologist wrote an op-ed complaining that the movie is full of stereotypes. "The good-for-nothing hyenas are urban blacks, the arch-villain's gestures are effeminate, and he speaks in supposed gay cliches." And, Lizzie, there were some parents who felt fooled by the G-rating. To your point, they felt the death of Mufasa, a very explicit sex scene. Or somewhat adult for a G rating. I would actually agree. I think this should be PG.

• 1:22:40Lizzie Bassett?

  I kind of agree because of how upsetting the Mufasa death is. It is really, it's pretty shocking.

• 1:22:45Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, regardless with whether or not you agree with those interpretations.

• 1:22:49Lizzie Bassett?

  I don't. I will just come right out and say I don't, but that's fine.

• 1:22:52Chris Winterbauer?

  Totally fair. It seems like this seems like the vast majority of people don't. I see the criticism. I don't necessarily agree with it. I don't think that was the intent with many of these characters, especially if you look at some of the castings.

• 1:23:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:02Chris Winterbauer?

  For example, like I think they're latching on to Whoopi Goldberg as a hyena, which is interesting because it was supposed to be Cheech and Chong from the beginning.

• 1:23:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Well, yeah.

• 1:23:09Chris Winterbauer?

  I also think that's just Jeremy Irons that they're animating, for example.

• 1:23:12Lizzie Bassett?

  They're animating his mannerisms very clearly. You also have James Earl Jones playing Mufasa, who of course is the ultimate good, essentially a kind of a god in this. I think they're missing the forest for the trees there a little bit.

• 1:23:24Chris Winterbauer?

  I do too, but that was the reception from a number of these points at the time. And on the more objective side, there were many who pointed out a lot of similarities between The Lion King and a Japanese manga called The Jungle Emperor, or Jungle Emperor Leo in Japan. It follows a young lion named Leo. It was turned into a TV series, which was eventually dubbed in English and called Kimba, the White Lion, the show Broderick remembered from his childhood. According to The Hollywood Reporter, similarities include, both are coming of age stories where a lion cub is the main character and their father is murdered in the first act.

• 1:24:00Chris Winterbauer?

  The villain in Lion King is Scar with a black mane and a scar over the left eye with three hyena henchmen versus the villain is Claw with a black mane and a scar over his missing left eye and who has two hyena henchmen.

• 1:24:14Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh dear.

• 1:24:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Simba has a wise bird friend named Zazu, a hornbill versus Kimba has a wise bird friend named Polly, a parrot. There are several similar story beats, including perhaps most importantly, the dead fathers appear to Kimba and Simba as ghosts in the clouds in the film.

• 1:24:32Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh.

• 1:24:34Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, the creator behind Kimba is Osamu Tezuka, considered by some to be Japan's Walt Disney. Lizzie, he also created Astro Boy, which may be a franchise you're familiar with, at least you are aware of it. And interestingly, he was a huge Disney fan. And according to The Washington Post, he claimed to have watched Bambi at least 100 times. And he said Bambi influenced his manga Jungle Emperor Leo. So what's interesting is like he was influenced by Bambi and then it seems like they were influenced by Bambi. And it seems like maybe at least somebody on the production may have seen Kimba and pulled some things from there. He reportedly met Walt Disney at the 1964 World's Fair in New York and Disney said to Tezuka that he was a big fan of Astro Boy. So there was mutual admiration.

• 1:25:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Now Disney denied any influence. Rob Minkoff went as far as to say he'd never heard of Kimba and that had never been discussed. But I don't know if I fully buy that. I think this was pretty well known and to be in the animation world and not know of it seems kind of unlikely to me, but who knows? A spokesperson later acknowledged that the production did know of the series. I think it doesn't pass the sniff test to say that nobody knew about it. And an anonymous source said that it had even been mentioned during production. One animator wrote an open letter to Disney in 1984, asking them to at least acknowledge the influence at the beginning of the movie, but it didn't go anywhere. And Tezuka's family and production company never pursued litigation. In 2019, the director of Tezuka Productions, this was after he had died, Osamu Tezuka had died,

• 1:25:59Chris Winterbauer?

  said in a translated statement that many of their employees did think The Lion King resembled Jungle Emperor Leo, but that those similarities were based on the facts of nature. And under Japanese copyright law, factual elements and ideas are not protected. If Disney took hints from The Jungle Emperor, he said, our founder, the late Osamu Tezuka would be very pleased of it, end quote.

• 1:26:18Lizzie Bassett?

  I wonder if this is part of why they lean so hard into the Hamlet of it, potentially in the like, maybe not, maybe I'm reading too much into it, but.

• 1:26:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Who knows?

• 1:26:28Lizzie Bassett?

  Because it doesn't, you know, the thing that I always, always heard is like, oh, The Lion King is Hamlet. And to your point, like, yes, it is basically, there's obviously some similarities in terms of characters, lines, all the things we talked about. Scar has a skull at one point he's talking to, but to your points, it doesn't line up exactly to the point where I agree with your assumption that it more developed later. But if there is this story that is incredibly similar, arguably in some ways maybe more similar than it is to Hamlet, it would be pretty convenient to lean back on, you know, public domain Shakespeare as being the source versus that.

• 1:27:07Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Can I show you a couple of the art pieces, Lizzie?

• 1:27:10Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:10Chris Winterbauer?

  Cause I think it's worth showing and we can post this on our Patreon. So you can see here the cloud.

• 1:27:15Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:16Chris Winterbauer?

  Kind of the design of the characters. And then I'll show you, the biggest thing is Claw from Kimba.

• 1:27:21Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, that one's pretty similar. The other ones are sort of.

• 1:27:25Chris Winterbauer?

  It's more about the story, I think, for the other ones personally.

• 1:27:27Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah. Hmm. That's interesting.

• 1:27:29Chris Winterbauer?

  Yeah. Well, Lizzie, audiences were unperturbed by all of this. The Lion King opened to $41 million domestically. To put that in context, Aladdin, which had just made a record $500 million at the worldwide box office, opened to $19 million domestically. During its theatrical run, The Lion King pulled in a record $312 million domestically and $458 million internationally.

• 1:28:00Lizzie Bassett?

  Wow.

• 1:28:00Chris Winterbauer?

  That's over three quarters of a billion dollars worldwide against a $45 million budget. That is nothing to say for, I am sure, the incredibly lucrative merchandising, video game tie-in, et cetera, that they were also running. Now Pocahontas took a page from The Lion King playbook. They used Colors of the Wind as a standalone trailer during screenings for The Lion King. The Lion King did continue the run of musical Oscars, snagging best original song for.

• 1:28:31Lizzie Bassett?

  Elton John and Tim Rice.

• 1:28:32Chris Winterbauer?

  Yes, but three songs were nominated. Lizzie, Circle of Life, Hakuna Matata, and Can You Feel the Love Tonight? Do you know which one won?

• 1:28:39Lizzie Bassett?

  It's Can You Feel the Love Tonight?

• 1:28:40Chris Winterbauer?

  It's the one they were gonna cut!

• 1:28:42Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:42Chris Winterbauer?

  I love it. It's so funny, but it should have been Circle of Life.

• 1:28:45Lizzie Bassett?

  It absolutely should have been Circle of Life.

• 1:28:47Chris Winterbauer?

  I like Can You Feel the Love Tonight, but I just think it's hilarious.

• 1:28:49Lizzie Bassett?

  It's not as good.

• 1:28:50Chris Winterbauer?

  It also just goes to show you, you never know.

• 1:28:52Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:52Chris Winterbauer?

  You know, it's so subjective. Hans Zimmer won his first Oscar for Best Original Score.

• 1:28:57Lizzie Bassett?

  Deserved. It's gorgeous.

• 1:28:59Chris Winterbauer?

  But what's interesting is that The Lion King marked not a continued rise, but instead of an inflection point for the Disney Renaissance. Pocahontas was released the next year to very mixed reviews, the worst reviews of arguably any film in the Disney Renaissance.

• 1:29:13Lizzie Bassett?

  It's not the best, yes.

• 1:29:15Chris Winterbauer?

  It brought in a comparatively small $346 million at the box office. Again, it was still very profitable, but half of what The Lion King made. The Hunchback of Notre Dame had a record-setting $100-plus million budget. It's beautifully animated.

• 1:29:31Lizzie Bassett?

  It is.

• 1:29:31Chris Winterbauer?

  But it was not rewarded by audiences despite being better reviewed than Pocahontas. It brought in $20 million less than Pocahontas. Hercules made that a trend, bringing in only $252 million worldwide. Mulan and Tarzan did a little bit of an uptick. Tarzan was a bit more of a high point at the end of the decade, but again, I think Tarzan brought in 450 some odd million dollars.

• 1:29:53Lizzie Bassett?

  I do love Mulan, but yes.

• 1:29:55Chris Winterbauer?

  I do too. Nora was just watching it. Let's get down to business.

• 1:29:59Lizzie Bassett?

  We just put it on for Eve also and she really enjoyed it.

• 1:30:01Chris Winterbauer?

  It's really fun.

• 1:30:02Lizzie Bassett?

  Mostly because she likes the evil bird and she just goes, "Caw!" over and over again.

• 1:30:06Chris Winterbauer?

  Nora likes Mushu.

• 1:30:08Lizzie Bassett?

  Yes, of course.

• 1:30:09Chris Winterbauer?

  Now, what's interesting is the Disney Renaissance ends. People have kind of said it, you could say it ends with Treasure Planet. You could say it ends with The Emperor's New Groove. You could say Tarzan was the last gasp. Lion King endures almost more, as you mentioned, than any other of these productions in part because it was adapted into a massively popular musical, which opened on Broadway in 1997.

• 1:30:33Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah, Julie Taymor.

• 1:30:33Chris Winterbauer?

  And it kind of remained in the zeitgeist. They also had a spinoff TV show, The Lion King's Timon and Pumbaa, ran for 85 episodes. They had some direct to video films.

• 1:30:41Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:41Chris Winterbauer?

  And of course they had the photorealistically animated remake, unnecessarily by Jon Favreau, beautiful animation, nothing against the animation in 2019. But Lizzie, I think for me, I love The Lion King. I think it's great. But in taking the step that they kind of take towards a little bit more irreverent humor, towards a world where the rules can kind of be broken in a fourth wall sort of way, if you were to think of the Hula track, you know what I mean? For example? It moves away from, I think, the kind of beautiful fidelity of something like, let's say, Beauty and the Beast, for example, and the more classical feel of it.

• 1:31:15Lizzie Bassett?

  It's true.

• 1:31:15Chris Winterbauer?

  And I feel like that ushers in things like, and I would argue more like Hercules and then The Emperor's New Groove, et cetera, where it feels like there's a slip in tone that I think works in The Lion King. But when they push it and they lose some of the heart, the movies do start to fall apart a little bit, in my opinion, again, by simply the gold standard that some of the priors had set, which is why I would personally argue, for me, The Lion King is like the lesser of the first five years of the Disney Renaissance, or the greater of the back five years of the Disney Renaissance. I know I'm probably on an island with that, but that's my ultimate take on this film.

• 1:31:51Lizzie Bassett?

  I still love it because I think it is the perfect marriage of what you're talking about in terms of the movies that you mentioned that came before this, I think, rely much more heavily on the idea of wonder. And I think that they are more geared towards children, which is in many ways a good thing. The movies that come after this, it's like they all of a sudden realized, oh, the kids' parents are the ones paying for the tickets. Let's like lean in harder to, you know, the things that are gonna make the adults laugh. And while that is fun and I enjoy that, and like you, I enjoyed The Emperor's New Groove. I enjoyed Hercules as a kid and a lot of these things, but I don't think that they managed to endure the same way that something like The Lion King does, which does have those moments. And yet it boils down to something very simple.

• 1:32:34Lizzie Bassett?

  And beautiful and physically beautiful that a child can understand really no matter how old they are.

• 1:32:40Chris Winterbauer?

  Completely fair. I think so many people would agree with you. All I would say is for me, the first 40 minutes of The Lion King are some of the best Disney filmmaking ever. And I think that unfortunately, the rest of the movie can't quite live up to that because the first 40 minutes are so, everything until Mufasa dies and he is exiled is just so good. But that's just me.

• 1:33:00Lizzie Bassett?

  I think you have it out for the third acts of movies, or the second halves of them.

• 1:33:05Chris Winterbauer?

  Well, maybe. For me, it's more of an act two. I think the third act of The Lion King is actually fantastic. It's more the, even though Hakuna Matata is very fun, the second act of this movie features a completely reactionary and non-active protagonist, and I think is a little bit, I think it's fun for kids. It's less interesting for me as an adult.

• 1:33:20Lizzie Bassett?

  Totally.

• 1:33:21Chris Winterbauer?

  Okay, that's enough of that. Lizzie, that brings us to the end of The Lion King, a great movie no matter how you slice it. Lizzie, what went right?

• 1:33:28Lizzie Bassett?

  A lot of things went right. I'm gonna give it to Hans Zimmer. I think that, you know, everybody remembers that Elton John and Tim Rice, you know, did the music for this movie. And obviously, they did these songs, like we said, every single one is a banger. I love them. However, the score of this movie is gorgeous. And when you finally bring in the actual elements of African performers and singers and instruments, a lot of which is Hans Zimmer coming in and adding those components, that is when the movie really becomes something magical. That's why The Circle of Life is so incredible. I think this is like maybe the best score he's ever written. So I will give it to Hans Zimmer and to the musicians that came in and really rounded out this score and these songs, because it's

• 1:34:13Lizzie Bassett?

  great. It is gorgeous.

• 1:34:14Chris Winterbauer?

  Great call, Lizzie. I will give mine, hmm, Jeffrey Katzenberg. I want to give mine to the animation team as a whole. I think they found such a great balance in terms of how much to anthropomorphize the animals.

• 1:34:29Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:30Chris Winterbauer?

  And I think the vistas are beautifully painted. And there were some, actually, just really nice cinematographic techniques. There's some great rack focus moments. I love, for example, you have the ants marching in one direction at the beginning, and they rack focus to the zebras underneath them. And it's just like a beautifully composed shot. I think there's some great cinematography in this movie. We don't think about cinematography with animated movies, I think, very often. But it is very much an art. Framing is an art. And so I'll give it to the entire animation team. I just think it's beautifully done.

• 1:34:55Lizzie Bassett?

  It is. With a special shout out, I would say, to the two directors, because it sounds like they worked very, very well together.

• 1:35:00Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep.

• 1:35:00Lizzie Bassett?

  And worked well with everyone else and just did a great job.

• 1:35:04Chris Winterbauer?

  Yep.

• 1:35:04Lizzie Bassett?

  Coming in at, you know, to a troubled production.

• 1:35:06Chris Winterbauer?

  At the 11th hour, yeah.

• 1:35:07Lizzie Bassett?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:08Chris Winterbauer?

  If you are interested in hearing kind of an echo of this production, listen to our coverage of The Emperor's New Groove, in which Roger Allers kind of becomes the George Scribner character on that movie and wants to do the more realistic version. And it doesn't quite work out. All right, Lizzie, if folks are enjoying this podcast, how can they support it?

• 1:35:25Lizzie Bassett?

  You can tell a friend or family member to listen to What Went Wrong. They just covered The Lion King. You might enjoy learning more about that. You can leave us a rating or review on whatever podcatcher you are listening to this on. You can subscribe on Apple or Spotify. And if you do that, you will get at least one bonus episode every month. Realistically, it's more like two. Sometimes it's more like four or five that has happened. And this month, we are doing Box Office Book Club, where if you join on Apple and Spotify, you can listen to one episode every week where we cover an upcoming adaptation of a book that's hitting theaters. We just did Verity, Other Mommy. We still have Sense and Sensibility and Wildwood coming up. And if you join on Patreon, for $5 a month, you get everything I just mentioned. You also get an ad-free feed, which you get

• 1:36:10Lizzie Bassett?

  with Apple and Spotify as well. But on Patreon, you get to be part of the community. You get to actually listen to these episodes, the Box Office Book Club episodes, being recorded live the Sunday before they are going to air. So if you want to hear that, you still have time to join and be a part of those conversations. And if you want to take it to the next level for 50 bucks, you can hear the unreleased song that Elton John originally wrote for the Can You Feel the Love Tonight scene that the studio refused to approve.

• 1:36:49Chris Winterbauer?

  I'm a man without a bride. I've been alone since my father died. And I've been waiting, waiting on a sign. What's Nala doing here? I haven't seen her in a thousand years. Now I've got worries, anxieties and fears. So Mufasa, what do you do?

• 1:37:19Chris Winterbauer?

  When a lioness comes up to you?

• 1:37:26Chris Winterbauer?

  And she gives you the look. Yeah, she gives you the look. I don't know what it means, but it makes me feel things that I don't think are good. Oh, she gave me the look. And I ran like a buck. If the buck were a picture and the picture were a picture of her giving me the look. All right, this podcast couldn't be made without the dedication, the full stop commitment, the commitment rivaled only by the artist that gave Nala those bedroom eyes. I'm talking about our full stop patrons. Julio and Archie Gonzalez, The Disgusting Brothers, Mike and Clemmie Burbage, Anthony Thomas, Mandy Rarlinson, Pete Reed Peterson, never, ever do an Australian

• 1:38:10Chris Winterbauer?

  accent again, please, John D. Wiltshire, Nate Full Stop Ashley, the cast and crew of Win a Trip to Brown Town, Mark Bertha, Alex Barrett, Frankenstein, Angelina Renee Cook, Evan Downey, Amy Ogishlager McCoy, Johan George Gunnarsson, Jory Hillpiper, Felicia G, Datem3, Karina Kanaba, James McAvoy, Cameron Smith, Suzanne Johnson, Ben Schindelman, The Provost Family, where the O's sound like O's, Galen and Miguel, The Broken Glass Kids, Film It Yourself, M. Zodiac, C. Grace B., Blaze Ambrose, Rural Jur, Nate the Knife, Lena, LJ, Half Grey Hound, Brittany Morris, Darren and Dale Conkling, Matthew Jacobson,

• 1:38:52Chris Winterbauer?

  JJ Rapido, Lousy Susan, Sadie, Just Sadie, Brian Donahue, Adrian Pang Korea, Chris Leal, Brooke, Steve Winterbauer, Rosemary Southward, Jason Frankel, Somon Chianani, Michael McGrath, and Lydia Howes. We could not make this show without you, and we are forever in your debt. Oh, Father, where are you now? Can you teach me in the clouds? What comes after the look? What comes after the look? I already asked Timon, but he swears he doesn't know. And Pumba's looking pretty

• 1:39:31Chris Winterbauer?

  shook. Oh, and she gives me the eyes, and it lights me up inside. Seems like you skipped a decent chunk on the day we were discussing the circle of life.

• 1:39:48Chris Winterbauer?

  Thank you, guys, so much for tuning in. We will be back next week with the obvious follow-up to The Lion King.

• 1:39:55Lizzie Bassett?

  Yep, it flows naturally.

• 1:39:57Chris Winterbauer?

  The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

• 1:39:59Lizzie Bassett?

  Oh, boy.

• 1:40:01Chris Winterbauer?

  And then we're just gonna hard right turn to Space Jam. It's gonna be a wild ride. Very excited. And so we will see you, guys, next week.

• 1:40:10Lizzie Bassett?

  And thank you again to Mars for sponsoring this episode. Shop Mars brands at your local retailers. Visit at Mars Global on Instagram and mars.com to learn more about Mars brands. And as Chris said, we will see you, listeners, back next week for the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Bye.

• 1:40:27Chris Winterbauer?

  Bye.

• 1:40:35Speaker 00

  What Went Wrong is a Sad Boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Post-production and music by David Bowman. This episode was researched by Jesse Winterbauer and edited by Karen Krebsaw.

• 1:40:58Speaker 03

  I've got big news. I switched to Verizon and got the new iPhone 18 Pro. Shh. I can keep my old phone, and I also get the latest iPhone every year. Shh, anything else? Verizon let me choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on them. Everybody, listen up. Shh. Switch to Verizon and get the new iPhone 18 Pro now. No trade in needed. And the latest iPhone every year with Simplicity Plan. Plus, choose Apple Watch Series 12 or iPad on us. Simplicity Plan with Simplicity Pro required. Plan and device payment purchase are separate agreements with separate terms. Service plan for watch or iPad required. Additional terms apply for all offers.