Category Archives: the lion king

Hans Zimmer Almost Never Scored The Lion King — Until He Spoke To His Daughter

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I’m going to be honest – I didn’t even realise the legendary composer Hans Zimmer was behind The Lion King’s famous soundtrack until I heard him talk about it on Classic FM.

Not only did he work on the 1994 classic, but he actually won an Academy Award for Best Original Score (alongside two Grammies and a Golden Globe) for his contribution.

Still, he shared on Classic FM that he had been reluctant to take the role at first.

“I didn’t want to do Lion King, you know, cartoons – why am I doing cartoons?” he recalled.

Hans Zimmer
Hans Zimmer

via Associated Press

Until 1994, the composer’s work had appeared in live-action classics like Thelma & Louise, Rain Man, A World Apart and Driving Miss Daisy.

“And, oh my God, they might turn [the songs] into musicals. I don’t really like musicals,” the film legend said he thought at the time.

However, Zimmer changed his mind because his daughter, who was six at the time, had never been able to go with him to the premiere of any of the movies he’d worked on, because “all the movies with Ridley Scott are not necessarily child-friendly”.

So he agreed to make the film – but when he sat down to write, more family matters came up for Zimmer.

“My dad died when I was six years old, and here I am sitting in front of this cartoon, and it’s about the death of a father – with fart jokes, admittedly,” he revealed.

“And I realise… it’s a complete lie that children get over this stuff. They don’t get over it, they just find out really clever ways of hiding this stuff.”

The composer shared he couldn’t “hide” his feelings anymore, and “I basically wrote a requiem for my dad, and it became a really serious piece.”

That made it “deeper than your normal cartoon,” both for him and The Lion King’s viewers.

Zimmer has since been credited in mutliple other Disney titles (including Pirates Of The Caribbean, and, perhaps even more surprisingly still, Muppet Treasure Island).

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Nathan Lane Reveals How ‘Lion King’s’ Pumbaa Became First Disney Character Who Farts

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Nathan Lane still remembers giving his Lion King character some oomph.

The stage actor revealed in an interview with Entertainment Weekly that he and his co-star Ernie Sabella were exhausted from nightly Broadway performances while recording the voices for Timon and Pumbaa — and gave the warthog his flatulence.

“So, we would record in the mornings sometimes, and we’d be a little sleepy,” Lane told the outlet. “And Ernie, to entertain me during the recording, would make flatulent noises. While he was doing his dialogue, he would make fart sounds to make me laugh.”

“And they eventually incorporated that into the character and the song,” he continued.

Pumbaa and his wiry meerkat companion arguably became the most memorable characters of the 1994 film, which is a loosely retold version of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet from the perspective of a young lion whose father is slain at the paws of his uncle. The film is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year.

It’d soon become an Oscar-winning classic, but the then-titled King of the Jungle was still an uncertain gamble when Disney approached Lane and Sabella. While the duo was performing Guys and Dolls on Broadway at the time, they took the job.

“So, we get there, and we’re pretty beat up from five shows, and to get the ball rolling, I just started making these sounds as he was reading his lines,” Sabella told EW. “He kept laughing, going, ‘Don’t do that, don’t do that.’ I said, ‘I’ll stop.’ And then kept doing it. That’s the story of how Pumbaa became the first and only Disney character with flatulence.”

Lane will perform several "Lion King" songs as Pumbaa at a 30th anniversary event this week.
Lane will perform several “Lion King” songs as Pumbaa at a 30th anniversary event this week.

Left: Richard Shotwell/Invision/Associated Press; Right: Disney Junior/Getty Images

Lane and Sabella initially weren’t even approached to voice Timon and Pumbaa specifically, as Disney only created those characters after their audition. The actors made history as the first duo to record their lines together for a Disney film, EW reports.

“Because we only got our pages, we didn’t know what the movie was about,” Sabella told EW. “We just knew that we were two funny guys and that warthogs and meerkats are small animals. I was doing a buddy movie.”

He explained: “I said, ’Alright, you’ll be Robert Redford, and I’ll be Paul Newman.”

The pair appear in Disney’s The Lion King 30th Anniversary — A Live-to-Film Concert Event at the Hollywood Bowl on the 24th and 25th of May, during which Lane and Sabella sing renditions of Hakuna Matata and Can You Feel The Love Tonight?

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