(RNN) – Mufasa and Scar are not brothers in "The Lion King."
Seriously.
Rob Minkoff, director of the movie, and Don Hahn, a producer, gave an interview ahead of the Aug. 29 Blu-ray and DVD release of the Disney movie, which came out in 1994.
Hahn told HelloGiggles that family dynamics of lion prides don’t work that way, and that Scar and Mufasa would not have the same parents.
“We talked about the fact that it was very likely [Scar and Mufasa] would not have both the same parents,” Hahn said. “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, 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.”
So, how did Minkoff and Hahn work in that there are two male lions in the pride in The Lion King? It’s a major plot point that Scar (spoiler alert) is murderously jealous of Mufasa, his brother, and lays waste to the land where the pride lives in his quest for power. Scar is not the best leader of the pack.
“There was always this thing about well, how do you have these two [male] lions?” Hahn said in the interview. “Occasionally there are prides that do have two male lions, in an interesting dynamic because they’re not equals. 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.”
Mufasa only refers to Scar as his brother, Hahn said, because they’re part of the same pride. And because he is an inferior rank in the pride who is extremely bitter and entitled, this doesn’t hurt the Scar is the bad guy plot line in the movie.
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