The Lion King is a classic. It’s got all the trimmings of a good movie: comedy, tragedy, romance, ~impressive~ 1990s animation.
The kind of stuff you just can’t replicate (the live-action remake is gonna suck, IMO).
The Lion King might be all song and dance on screen but the real life African Serengeti is much more…unpolished, shall we say.
I mean, they are animals after all. And as cuddly and kind as they may look on screen (with the exception of Scar who will forever remind me of a crazy uncle) they’re slobby, messy horny bastards in real life.
And these animal kingdom facts will prove it.
WARNING: reading on may cause severe distress, nightmares, distrust toward your mother/father/parents and serious cynicism regarding all Disney films in future.
Let’s start with something on the gentler side of things: real-life lions sleep for 20 hours a day which means, if The Lion King was accurate, literally nothing would get done.
Imagine only having four hours to murder your brother, exile his son and steal his throne.
Tell that to Mufasa.
Fact number two (still warming you up): the closest animal relative to the hyena is a meerkat. Which means that Timone was probably related to Shenzi, Banzai, and Ed.
If you squint you can kinda see the resemblance.
Also, Mufasa was a fake king.
Don’t get me wrong, he was a great dude with a great voice courtesy of James Earl Jones, but he ain’t no king in the real world.
Lion society is actually matriarchal. The females do the hunting, establish hierarchy, look after cubs and basically run the show.
Speaking of male-female relations, here’s an extra special fact for you: there’s only one adult lion in each pride. Which means that one male gets all of the sexy time. Which means that with Scar gone Simba would have had to sex all of the female lions.
ALL of them.
That’s some serious mother-son bonding right there.
I’ll never watch this scene in the same away again.
The above fact also means that Simba and Nala are siblings.
I don’t condone sibling relations but the pride isn’t exactly full of options- Nala and Simba are the only cubs. Their romance is a product of their situation and makes practical sense.
Romantically it presents a whole bunch of issues, but I’m just gonna ignore those.
YUCK.
But there’s a reason that Nala and Simba are the only children in the pride.
Brace yourselves.
When a lion is killed or exiled (à la Mufasa) the new leader and his pride don’t want to bring up children that aren’t their own. They want to be able to breed their own family with the lionesses.
So what do they do? Commit casual infanticide.
Yep, Scar would have killed all the younglings in the pride after Mufasa’s death to establish power and throw all the lionesses back into heat.
The worst bit is Mufasa before him would have done the same thing. Which means that Mufasa is not the great guy we all thought he was.
Tbh, that is the worst reality-check of them all. Why Mufasa? WHY?
Me finding out the truth about Mufasa.