If you have any will left in your soul to care about the general universe and our society’s place in it, get ready for a big blow. The Lion King producer and director just revealed the bombshell news that Scar and Mufasa are not, in fact, brothers.
The Lion King is set to be released in Blu-ray and DVD later this month, and so Rob Minkoff, the movie’s director, and Don Hahn, the producer, have gone on a small press tour. In an interview with Hello Giggles, they casually revealed that Scar and Mufasa aren’t related because a real lion pride would never include two related males.
“[While making the movie] 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 [to reproduce], 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.”
"There was always this thing about well, how do you have these two [male] lions?” he continued. “Occasionally there are prides that do have two male lions, in an interesting dynamic because they’re not equals [since they don’t have the same parents]. 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."
It doesn't sound too far-fetched, especially since the whole "shadows" thing is pretty spot on for Scar, and his whole M.O was trying to kill Mufasa, but still. Way to kick us while we’re down. At this point in this garbage fire that we are choosing to call 2017, learning that everyone’s assumptions about one of the best animated Disney movies of all time is dead wrong is really just on par for the course. I mean, in the movie, Scar refers to Mufasa as his “brother” and Zazou implies that the two lions are part of the same family, so can we really be blamed for assuming? Maybe it’s not correct in the animal world, but it is correct in our hearts.
