Potentially fun, but a far cry from any tormented Danish royalty. The initial concept would have lions warring against baboons, with the leonine princely hero tempted to a life of sloth by the villain to better facilitate his overthrow.

This led them to consider a coming-of-age tale with lions, and development began on a project then called King of the Jungle. The topic of Africa came up, as did Katzenberg’s recollections of a rough time in his early life in politics. The film’s origins come from, of all things, a plane ride conversation between executives Jeffrey Katzenberg, Peter Schneider, and Roy E. At the time of release, The Lion King was unique in that it was Disney’s first full-length animated feature that wasn’t an adaptation of any specific source material. That is to say, it wasn’t conceived as an adaptation of Shakespeare. The Lion King wasn’t Disney’s answer to the likes of West Side Story or Throne of Blood. RELATED: From 'Romeo + Juliet' to 'West Side Story': Comparing Classic vs. The answer is yes, but not so large a debt as some would have you believe. 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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