2/20/2008 - Complete Soundtrack Petition 
Ravi K. mails to let me know of a petition being circulated to ask Walt Disney Records to release
The Lion King: The Complete Score as an official licensed product.
http://www.petitiononline.com/LIONKING/petition.html
This score has been available on the Internet for some time now as a bootleg, with some audio flaws and without the legal backing of Disney; fans of the movie and Hans Zimmer's masterwork have been forced to resort to using less-than-legal methods to obtain the tracks.
Online petitions are certainly no foolproof solution, not being legally binding and not addressing the business concerns that a publicly traded, profit-motivated corporation like Disney must weigh when deciding which products to sell and market; but adding your voice to the chorus might yet make a difference if Disney's team is listening to its fans and judges them to be representative of the market as a whole.
So: if you'd like to see the complete score of
The Lion King emerge as a special-edition soundtrack with dozens of tracks of never-before-generally-available material, please feel free to sign!
1/15/2008 - Blu-Ray Release Speculation
IGN has an
article outlining Disney's plan for movie releases on Blu-Ray format in 2008.
For the first time ever, Disney will begin releasing its animated classics on Platinum Edition Blu-ray Disc beginning with Sleeping Beauty in the fall of 2008. The classic animated tale has been revitalized to include exceptional high-definition picture and sound quality and compelling interactive content such as virtual games, full motion picture-in-picture and online shopping capabilities via BD-Live broadband connection. The transfer will also feature an all-new enhanced home theater mix in 7.1 surround sound.
There is no explicit word on when
The Lion King or its sequels will appear in Blu-Ray, but if the DVD rollout plan of several years ago is any indication, it won't be the second in line. However, we
can be pretty well assured that Disney will be taking full advantage of all that space available on the new format to throw in all kinds of new special features, to a level that will put to shame the DVD release and even the legendary old Deluxe Laserdisc Edition.
Fingers crossed...!
Via Ryan R.
11/9/2007 - Empire State Building Lit to Honor Ten Years of TLKoB
According to
Disney, a year of citywide celebrations will begin on November 9, 2007 to honor the tenth anniversary of the opening of
The Lion King Broadway show.
The first such display, kicking off the string of festivities, is a special lighting scheme for the Empire State Building.
12/11/2006 - TLK on Blu-Ray Sooner than Later?
Ryan R. reports that on the new Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest DVD, there's a preview of upcoming Blu-Ray releases of Disney classics such as Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, National Treasure, and (third on the list) The Lion King.
This is interesting news for early adopters, particularly those who have gone the HD-DVD route rather than Blu-Ray; evidently Disney has thrown in its lot with the Sony/Samsung consortium and decided to back the technically superior but (possibly) less well-supported Blu-Ray. We shall see how it plays out, but Sony's track record with storage media formats is not good...
5/29/2006 - The Sad Case of Il Re Leone
Italian reader "giagia" has alerted me to an issue with the Italian version of
The Lion King and its voice recording tracks. In the interest of spreading awareness of this matter throughout the
Lion King fan community and the Italian fan base in particular, I'm posting the message here in full.
As Disney fans will know "The Lion King" was the first (Disney) movie to have the voices of the charaters recorded on different tracks. If we go back to 1994 we see that "The Lion King"'s italian dubbing, made by the sons of Disney Legend Roberto De Leonardis, had a preliminary version that was refused by Disney Character voices. Then a new dubbing was made and the movie was released with the second one (this time approved by Disney Character Voices). A VHS was made in 1995, with the ufficial dubbing that went in cinemas. But a track of the first dubbing remained in London and it was labeled "Timon & Pumbaa Italy". When the new DTS track was made for 2003 cinema release (the movie went in just three cinemas here), the wrong track was used and nobody noticed it. Then the DVD was released and the audio used in it had the wrong voices of Timon and Pumbaa. When the DVD went in Buena Vista Italy from London, none saw it and the DVD was copied and sent in all the country. The funny thing is that in the end titles report the names of the dubbers of T&P was the original dubbing and was different from the voices you heard on the DVD. The wrong dubbing was used for "The Lion King Trilogy" too. The only items to have a correct version of the movie are the VHS and the soundtrack (that didn't need the new DTS track.) I protested very much in Buena Vista forum, but BVI closed it.
I hope that you publish this thing in your site to prevent any further error (you know, with your visibility it would help very much)and allow us to have the original film enriched by its original uffcial dubbing.
Let's hope Disney can be convinced to correct this error in a future DVD release.
5/17/2006 - Recent downtime
My apologies for the ten days' downtime suffered by lionking.org during the first half of May. This was the result of the hosting company undergoing a physical move from one end of the country to the other, and the process ran far longer than the 24-48 hours originally estimated.
All services have been restored as of today, though there will likely be additional periods of downtime during the next few days as hardware is swapped and network adjustments are made.
Thank you for your patience and understanding.
5/4/2006 - fanart.lionking.org temporarily offline
The Lion King Fan-Art Archive is currently being migrated to a new network at the hosting company. The ETA I've been given for restored service is midnight tonight, but we all know these things often take longer than anticipated.
Thanks for your patience.
4/5/2006 - Wikipedia page on Kingdom Hearts II
Bernardo C. points us at the comprehensive page for
Kingdom Hearts II at
Wikipedia. Along with lots of information on the game's plot and world details, there's a complete voice cast list, which includes the following pieces of information (filtered by Bernardo):
Quinton Flynn as Timon
Cam Clarke as Simba
Ernie Sabella as Pumbaa
James Earl Jones as Mufasa (not listed as being recycled. And Mufasa does sound a bit different in KH2, IMO)
Jonathan Taylor Thomas as Simba (recycled from the movie)
Robert Guillaume as Rafiki
Cheech Marin as Banzai
Jim Cummings as Ed
Tress MacNeille as Shenzi
There is no English voice actor listed for Nala or for Scar. Because Wikipedia is a collaborative documentation effort, the listing is subject to change, and will become more accurate as people make changes to incorrect information.
Meanwhile, another cast listing is available at
GameFAQs, though it lists Jim Cummings as the voice of Scar, and Nathan Lane as Timon, suggesting that this listing is less accurate than the Wikipedia one. However, it does have a name for Nala's voice: Vanessa Marshall.
4/2/2006 - Welcome to the Lion King Generation
Daniel Weisfield in the
Yale Daily News gives a name to the people entering college right about now:
Our generation needs a name. The slacker generation got their X. Our parents got their Boom. We've been preceded by the Silent Generation, the Beat Generation and somewhere deeper down those marble halls, the Greatest Generation.
I've got a proposal for the narrow sample of kids currently attending Yale College. If you were born between 1983 and 1987, welcome to the "Lion King" Generation.
Hakuna matata.
Lots more nostalgia that people from that era will remember, as well as those from the
first TLK generation (those people who were entering college and writing the first Web pages in 1994, when the movie came out—hey, that's me.)
The guy gets a few things wrong (
Anastasia was not a Disney movie), but it's a good read nonetheless.
3/31/2006 - Kingdom Hearts II Voice Actors Listed
Bernardo C. sends
this link, a comprehensive list of voice actors in
Kingdom Hearts II.
The
Lion King characters are voiced as follows:
Cheech Marin as Banzai
Jim Cummings as Scar (possibly Ed too)
Cam Clarke as Simba
James Earl Jones as Mufasa
Jonathan Taylor Thomas as Young Simba
Ernie Sabella as Pumbaa
So they couldn't get Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick, Jeremy Irons, or Whoopi Goldberg, and I'm unsure how Jonathan Taylor Thomas fits into the picture (surely he's too old to voice Simba convincingly anymore—after all, they got someone else for the "Morning Report" song). But they did get James Earl Jones, apparently...
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