Will this Lion King truth change how we feel about the Disney classic?
Disney movies have become the symbol of the 90s kid nostalgia, mainly thanks to films like The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast. Both movies brought about a renaissance for the Disney franchise and helped to introduce traditional animation to the masses.
Now, the 90s favourite is about to be re-released and one of its producers spilled some massive tee with Hellogiggles about Scar and Mufasa's relationship, the villain (Scar) who murders his heroic brother (Mufasa). Apparently, Scar had more reason to not want to live in Mufasa's shadow than we thought, they were never biological brothers - I know, mind-blowing information.
Speaking to HelloGiggles, Rob Minkoff, the director, and Don Hahn, the producer, had this say about the familial relationship:
“[While making the movie] we talked about the fact that it was very likely [Scar and Mufasa] would not have both the same parents...The way lions operate in the wild…when the male lion gets old, another rogue lion comes and kills the head of the pride. What that does is it causes the female lions to go into heat [to reproduce], and then the new younger lion kills the king and then he kills all the babies. Now he’s the new lion that’s running the pride.”
It turns out that the signs the pair are unrelated were always in the movie, we just never noticed when we sang along to 'Hakuna Matata':
“There was always this thing about well, how do you have these two [male] lions?...Occasionally there are prides that do have two male lions, in an interesting dynamic because they’re not equals [since they don’t have the same parents]. One lion will always kind of be off in the shadows. We were trying to use those animal truths to underpin the story so we sort of figured Scar and Mufasa couldn’t really be from the same gene pool. In fact, that’s what [Scar] says. There’s a line, he goes, ‘I’m from the shallow end of the gene pool.’ When he’s talking to Mufasa, when Mufasa gets mad at him for not coming up to the coronation of Simba.
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The Lion King will be re-released on BluRay and DVD on the 29th of August. Return to the pride lands with this HD trailer. We know what we'll be watching this weekend:
