Originally published at: The Lion King: Did Scar eat his brother? | Boing Boing
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in my experience, most things on Tiktok are bullshit.
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Mufasa died in a wildebeest stampede: I highly doubt his skull survived intact. That doesn’t mean Scar didn’t eat the remains, but the on-screen evidence for such a fratricidal feast is non-existent.
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I feel unreasonably triggered by that frame blending.
It’s like the NSFL game over screens from the Lion King 5 bootleg game on the NES. Your life will be better if you never see them.
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The evil Scar? Look, if we’re going to use zoological points, then Scar did nothing wrong by trying to take over the pride or kill his rival’s child afterward. So he’s a bad guy because he…tried making peace with the hyenas, and didn’t anticipate that would somehow bring about a major drought?
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The real scandal no one wants to talk about is how Simba ultimately hooked up with his half-sister and took over a harem that included his mom.
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Again, if we go by zoological points, I’m not sure that’s a scandal. Lions prefer to mate with non-related females but it looks like they will make exceptions if there aren’t any other options, and Simba wandered a long time without seeing any other lions.
I think the closest thing to a kid’s story that comes reasonably near to actual biology is Watership Down, and it’s not coincidental that it’s a good way to traumatize a kid.
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It’s not exactly a typical Disney plot point though. They also kind of glossed over the bit where Simba would have started his reign by killing any cubs fathered by Scar to induce his new harem to enter estrus.
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It’s only as dumb as all of the Lion King = Hamlet blabbering that happened online 20 years or so ago and still pop up from time to time.
If the Lion King was Hamlet, Sarabi and Scar would have been gettin’ it on, Nala would have lost her mind and died, Scar would have killed Sarabi, and Simba would be hyena food by the end too.
The two stories just aren’t the same, any more than Little Mermaid is Julius Caesar or Cars is Titus Andronicus.
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Oh, you sweet, sweet summer children.
Uh, nobody ever said The Lion King was a straight production of Hamlet, rather that it was a loose adaptation of Hamlet by way of Kimba the White Lion. Which it very clearly was.
That’s like saying
"Disney’s The Little Mermaid is clearly not an adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen story because Ariel isn’t in constant agony while using her legs and marries the prince instead of dissolving into foam!"
or
"Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame is clearly not an adaptation of Victor Hugo’s novel because Esmerelda was never executed and Quasimodo didn’t leave humanity behind to seek out her corpse in a mass grave!"
Turning tragedies into happy endings is kind of Disney’s thing.
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Scar was FRAMED!!!
Of course regular lions are naturally suspicious of the intellectual lion with his talk of inter-species cooperation and his rejection of the status quo Circle of Life bullshit which perpetuates all manner of suffering on the savanna.
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The talk about the Lion King and Hamlet comes from the creators of the movie citing Hamlet as an inspiration. Directly. Along with multiple biblical stories.
Not even that. I don’t think anyone even cited it as any kind of adaptation. Just that it takes influence from there. So be people went and unpacked that influence.
Even the Kimba the White Lion issue us usually misrepresented. Plot wise they aren’t similar at all. The accusations there are in terms of design and animation. Very similar character designs, similar animals used in similar rolls. And some animation sequences that are down right identical.
Watching the two side by side it’s impossible to buy there wasn’t straight up plagiarism going on. But you can’t say that Lion King is a rip-off or redo of Kimba cause they’re almost completely different narratives.
I’d argue that the narrative of The Lion King is at least as close to Shakespeare’s Hamlet as the narrative of O Brother, Where Art Thou is to Homer’s Odyssey, and the latter movie was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
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Yeah but the lion king is just as similar to the biblical story of Moses. Which is the other big literary thing the writers and directors cite as an inspiration.
Where as Oh Brother Where Art though is a deliberate remapping of the beats, structure, themes and narrative of the Odyssey onto different context. Down to the point where they included a cyclops, syrens, and a blind oracle.
I think we’ll have to agree to disagree there. I mean the story beats lifted from Hamlet are pretty darn direct:
- A King is secretly murdered by his evil brother, who usurps the throne and takes the king’s mate(s) as his own.
- The sullen Prince is visited by the ghost of his dead father who prompts him into action.
- The Prince spends a very large portion of the screen time debating whether or not to step up and challenge his evil uncle for the throne.
- In the final climax, the Prince exposes his uncle’s evil deed and engages him in a fight to the death.
- The Prince’s two bumbling childhood friends eventually get their own comic spinoff movie telling the main story from their perspective.
The story beats lifted from the Book of Exodus are… less direct than that.
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There are two royal “brothers” one betrays the other.
Simba/Moses literally gets washed down a river.
A man in the sky appears and tells him what to do.
He returns to liberate his people from a cruel king.
The land is plagued.
It doesn’t neccisarily ceanly map to either. Simba spends most of the movie away. Nala does not commit suicide. It is not court intrigue that reveals the crime. Claudius does not hang out with Whoopi Goldberg. And Simba does not accidentally murder anyone.
A lot of core Hamlet shit isn’t there. Plenty of core Moses stuff isn’t either. But there are big reference points for both. Structurally to doesn’t match either very well.
Cause it’s not an adaptation.
