10 Disney Movies You Didn’t Know Were Shameless Rip-Offs

By Stephen Higham / March 29, 2013

3. The Lion King

Being perhaps the most well known of the Disney animated classics everyone knows that The Lion King was inspired by William Shakespeare€™s Hamlet but the journey to everyone€™s favorite films about little lions coming of age wasn€™t quite as simple as that. The original treatment for the film (worryingly written by €˜Brave Little Toaster€™ scribe Thomas Disch) featured a battle between lions and baboons, starring a Scar as the leader of the baboons and one Rafiki as a helpful cheetah. After years of production, original pitcher Jeffry Katzenberg and his team including Thomas Schumacher, director of €˜The Rescuers Down Under€™ had hammered the film into quite a different shape drawing further inspirations from biblical stories of Moses and Joseph.