Lyin-King-Club
Welcome to the Lyin-King-Club. This is a group for fans of Kimba the White Lion, and people who think that Disney plagiarised the manga/anime, with their film 'The Lion King'.

Did you know that Lion King is (allegedly) an uncredited copy of Kimba the White Lion? Kimba has been a popular Manga/Anime/Film in Japan since the 1950s, made Osamu Tezuka, the man also responsible for Astro Boy, AKA Tetsuwan Atom. It was originally broadcast on American television, with English dubbing, in 1966, on NBC. The show was quite succesful, and many people, if they were around then, might remember watching it on TV. Even today the character of 'Kimba', there called 'Leo', is popular in Japan.
When Disney made statements impling that it planned to remake Kimba as a full-length film, as it had done with so many other tales, many Kimba fans were excited at the prospect. Disney never actually flat out said that it was making Kimba, but there are many suspicious instances. Roy Disney was heard refering to the main character in their new movie as 'Kimba' rather than 'Simba'; Matthew Broderick, voice of Simba, had thought that he had been cast to play "the white lion in a cartoon when I was a kid".
During the planning and designing of the film, in some of the concept art, Simba is drawn as a white lion, and sometimes the supervisors of the animation even did side-by-side comparisons with stills from Kimba.
There is nothing wrong with making a remake or an homage to a great piece of animation... what's wrong is what happened next. People began to draw attention to the obvious similarties between the two works, citing the plot similarities, characters, and most blatant, the Simba/Kimba naming differences. Disney denied everything, denied that it had anything to do with Kimba, denied that they had even heard of Kimba. That seems to be taking it a bit too far. Michael Eisner was the head of children's programming at CBS during the run of the Kimba TV series. He had to watch just about every kid's show on TV. In other words, there is no way that he would have never even heard of a show as popular as Kimba. Also, Disney regularly sent it's animators to Japanese anime conventions, to study their work. And, in fact, many of the animators working on TLK were Kimba fans. And still they denied that anyone working on the film had ever heard of it?
This is not to say that we at this club hate the Lion King. Some of us like it quite a lot, but we do resent Disney's behaviour. As of now, they are still denying everything, and the estate of Osamu Tezuka has yet to recieve any sort of compensation, or even a simple apology. It is especially sad as Tezuka, who died in 1989, was a huge fan of the original Walt Disney, and was himself considered the 'Walt Disney of Japan'.
For more resources, visit [link], and click on "Lion King?".

Rules:
1. Must either be a fan of Kimba the White Lion, or think that Disney ripped-off Kimba the White Lion, with its film The Lion King.
2. Must add us to your watch list.
3. Must add our icon to your journal
3. Please comment and Favourite on the original artist's page. Comments have been disabled here to prevent anyone from fave'ing here.

To join:
Please note the club, with the subject 'Join'
Wait for a reply note, for confirmation, and then add us to your watch list.
Add our icon to your journal.

To Submit:
Note the club with a link to what you want submitted, and we will add it to our gallery. Please do not submit other's work. If there is something of someone else's that you would like to see added, note us, and we will add it to our favourites gallery.

Art Requirements:
All art must either be Kimba fan-art, or art examining the 'similarities' between Kimba and TLK, i.e. cartoons, parody, and other things about how Disney ripped-off Kimba.

Members:



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