Voiced with delicious, black sardonic wit by the amazing Jeremy Irons, Scar is the closest that a Disney Villain has got to Shakespeare in nearly eighty years of producing animated feature films. Hes kind of both Iago from Othello and Claudius from Hamlet rolled into one malignant bastard: his signature song, Be Prepared, is all about his scheming and plotting, complete with fascist imagery, the hyenas goosestepping like Nazi storm troopers. True to type, he engineers the downfall of his brother, Mufasa, sending him to certain doom trying to save his son Simba, and so removing both the obstacles to his taking the throne. The ridiculous thing is that, after all that waiting, all that twisted scheming, all that overweening pride Scar isnt even a competent king. He lets the pride and his hyena henchmen hunt Pride Rock and the surrounding area clean of all possible food, and when everyone begins to starve, the tyrant has no ideas for a sustainable future, or even where to go to find more game. When Simba returns, all grown up and the spitting image of dear departed daddy, Scar freaks out but still almost manages to convince everyone that Simba killed Mufasa. Its only his insistence on gloating at the moment of triumph that causes his downfall well, that and the fact that he betrays a bunch of hyenas, who arent exactly famous for being the sweethearts of the Serengeti. A fool who thinks hes clever is far more dangerous than a fool alone. But thats Scar in a nutshell: a malicious, poisonous con man with no heart and less common sense, who killed his brother for his crown, railroaded his nephew to keep it, and nearly wiped out his own subjects because, despite years of planning to usurp the throne, he doesnt know how to be king.
Professional writer, punk werewolf and nesting place for starfish. Obsessed with squid, spirals and story. I publish short weird fiction online at desincarne.com, and tweet nonsense under the name Jack The Bodiless. You can follow me all you like, just don't touch my stuff.
