King of the Jungle’s first assigned director was George Scribner, fresh off Oliver & Company. So, is there a debt owed by Disney to the Bard? Yet dynastic struggles of this kind are hardly rare in fiction. Significant narrative parallels are more evident there: a king betrayed by a wicked brother a young prince visited by the ghost of his father a violent confrontation of truth, vengeance, and succession in the finale. But a more oft-discussed, less accusatory claim is that The Lion King is an adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. There’s the still lingering charge that it stole from Osamu Tezuka’s Kimba the White Lion, a subject for another day for now, suffice to say while similarities exist, so do massive differences, particularly in the plot. The Lion King has no stories so life-threatening attached to it, but it has attracted its share of rumors and urban myths since 1994. There’s no hanging man in the background of The Wizard of Oz, no one died in the chariot race of Ben-Hur, but Apocalypse Nowreally was plagued with typhoon-ravaging sets, Martin Sheen’s heart attack, and Marlon Brando’s mercurial attitude. Big movies – really big movies, cultural phenomena that serve as markers for entire decades – can attract legends around them, with varying degrees of truth.
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