Which is why – at Rice’s suggestion – Schumacher & Schneider then reached out to Paul McCartney. He recently cameo-ed in “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales” as Captain Jack Sparrow’s long lost uncle. Paul McCartney did eventually wind up working for Disney. The only problem was that Elton’s management team – knowing how strict Disney’s attorneys would be when it came to copyright / who had ultimate ownership of any material that was created for this new animated feature – refused to even make John aware of this employment opportunity. Mind you, Rice was only looking to write the lyrics as well as help out with the story for “King of the Beasts / The Lion King.” Who Tim had in mind to handle the actual music on this movie was Sir Elton John. And Tim said ‘I made a musical out of the obscure dead wife of an Argentinian dictator. As Thomas recalled, ” … I asked him if our war between lions and baboons could be turned into a musical. With the hope that the addition of some music might then make this movie’s subject matter seem that much more palatable to Disney’s animators, Schumacher reached out to Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber’s longtime collaborator Tim Rice in the fall of 1990. The A-list animators all chose to work on Pocohantas.” Rafiki was a cheetah, and Scar was the leader of the baboons. Schumacher (who was the vice president in charge of development at Walt Disney Animation Studios prior to taking up the reins at Disney Theatrical Productions) remembers the initial iteration of this film (which – at that time, anyway – was called “King of the Beasts” being ” … kind of an animated National Geographic special about a war between lions and baboons, all set in this brown, dirty, earthy environment. Even though the stage version of “The Lion King” is now considered to be one of The Walt Disney Company’s all-time greatest success stories (Just yesterday, Forbes posted a piece which revealed that – over the course of this show’s now-more-than-20 year-long run on Broadway – the Mouse has made $8.1 billion off of this musical), Lassell points out how problematic this project’s birthing process was.Īnd that goes for the animated version of “The Lion King” as well. That’s half the fun of paging through this 224-page hardcover. Ironically enough, because the creative team had yet to prepare this show’s staged-in-front-of-a-curtain scene which was supposed to immediately follow “Be Prepared.” Which is why – prior to the start of “The Lion King” ‘s first preview – Thomas & Peter had to get up onstage at the Orpheum and basically warn that audience there’d be some hiccups along the way. There was only one tiny problem: Taymor’s artistic vision for this stage show was so innovative & ambitious that – even though the cast had been rehearsing this piece for weeks at that point – they had never actually gotten through an entire performance before, from beginning to end, without stopping. Just one year later, Disney’s stage version of “The Lion King” was at Minneapolis’ Orpheum Theatre getting ready for its very first preview. Which is why – as Michael Lassell recounts in his terrific new behind-the-scenes book, “The Lion King: Twenty Years on Broadway and Around the World” (Disney Editions, November 2017) - Eisner then reportedly turned to Schneider and said ” … You better get moving on ‘Aida,’ because you’re going to have to put something into the New Amsterdam Theatre next fall.’ “Ĭopyright Disney Enterprises, Inc. That the stage version of Disney’s acclaimed animated feature, “The Lion King,” which this trio had been developing at that time wasn’t even remotely ready for Broadway. This is what Michael Eisner – the then-Chairman and CEO of The Walt Disney Company – told Thomas Schumacher, Peter Schneider and Julie Taymor back in August of 1996.
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