The Lion King Ramble

Fuck me, another month wooshing on by, and more last minute content.

Alright, so I’ll admit I haven’t brought out my A-Game on this post or the last one, but perfect is the enemy of good, right? Hopefully, this will prove at least a little entertaining to read until I come up with something better.

 So, let’s talk about The Lion King. Given how everyone’s already talked about the obvious monarchist and racist/classist (race-as-classist?) themes that the film espouses (and its godawful remake magnifies), we’ll take those as a given rather than the premise.

“What is the premise?!” I hear you ask. Well, it starts by looking at the film’s world through a purely Watsonian lens.

The more I thought about TLK's obvious exploitation of prey inherent to the monarchy, the more I wondered why the prey animals honored it at all; what do they have to lose by not doing so? They're being hunted and killed on the regular by the lions either way, so fear of that obviously isn't the motivator.

Then, I thought about the hyenas being inexplicably banished to their boneyard ghetto, and I realized: that isn't some weird, random policy they royals implemented as part of their regime. It’s the whole point of the regime.

The Flight of Dragons Cartoon, Part 1

The Flight of Dragons cartoon is a fascinating hot mess.

Now, to be perfectly clear, I’m going to spoil the entire plot. This essay assumes you’ve seen the film in question, and if you haven’t, go give it a watch! It’s far from perfect, but it’s an interesting enough film that I had to write down my thoughts on it.

To give all this some context, I’ll briefly recap the history of this strange film.

Peter Dickinson had been on a train, looking at the cover of the Earthsea Trilogy, when he wondered how the hell something so big could fly, especially with such little wings. He came up with the same answer then and there that nature had come up with for us millions of years ago back on VolRei: dragons fly using lighter-than-air gas (or just burning said gas, in our case), necessitating our enormous size.

Not quite chubby enough to fly, but what would I know?

Well, he let that idea ferment a little, and came up with a theory for how the dragons presented in folklore might have really existed on Earth. His agent saw the end result, and sent it to a publisher. A few publisher-mandated extra pages later, and we got the speculative evolutionary text known as The Flight of Dragons.