Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dryuppi 902 days ago
I understand you are ’reworking’ a reductive history of Pixar’s canon meme except for one thing you added: “talking African animals”.

Which is a reference to the Lion King, one of the mouse’s 2d classics, which is also one of their most egregious derivative works.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kimba_the_White_Lion

3 comments

The Lion King is more Hamlet than Kimba, I think. Royal family, brother of king kills king to get throne, queen not happy about this turn of events, the kid is elsewhere, ghost of king tells kid to sort it out, kid returns to royal court and after a fight ends up offing the usurper.

But in Hamlet Shakespeare kills everyone; while in The Lion King, Walt disnae.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5B1mIfQuo4

Here's a nearly 3 hour video from someone whose Special Interest is The Lion King where he researches the claims that it's ripping off Kimba.

If you don't want to watch it, the original kimba series was 52 episodes and only bears a superficial resemblance to The Lion King.

_MANY_ of the most egregious examples are actually from the 1997 Kimba movie released as Jungle Emperor Leo which came out after The Lion King.

I enjoyed this comparison https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5B1mIfQuo4 more than Kimba or Lion King (longer than both of them too!)

lion king 1 1/2 was fantastic tho

Fair point. I even remember that video releasing and here I am 3 years later spreading misinformation like exactly what it is ranting about.

I think the visual/contextual similarities with the original manga/anime run do in fact point more plainly to the reality of the mouses' relationship with their public domain reworks.

That is, what they did exactly exemplifies excellent use of the public domain. They did more than just updated reproductions of the original works. They used the public domain as a starting point, an inspiration, but told their own stories; often wildly different from their source, like, where I mention elsewhere, The Little Mermaid.

The problem focused on should be that while they benefited from having access to these works in the public domain they have spent time and resources to ensure others are unable to do the same with work they have financial control over that should have long been included in the public domain.