After he screws up while on watch for hyenas (and Whoopi Goldberg and Cheech Marin are back in their roles), Timon decides to leave for a quieter life. Timon is a total oddball among his own kind and they barely tolerate him. It starts out telling the story of meerkat Timon (voice of Nathan Lane), who at the time is living with a clan of other meerkats, including his mother (voice of Julie Kavner, who doesn't disguise her Marge Simpson voice at all) and cranky Uncle Max (voice of Jerry Stiller). Just think, today's pre-teens will look back at full screen VHS movies the way some of you look back at vinyl records and floppy disks. Even better, there is no full screen version, it's widescreen only. A VHS release is coming but it won't have the second disc of extras. The other very good portent is that this is a DVD-only release, at least initially. Since Jonathan Taylor Thomas is now in his 20s, he's not suitable to play young Simba any more, so they got a Disney "veteran" (for a fourteen-year-old) Shaun Flemming, who also works on the Lilo & Stitch TV series. As in The Lion King 2: Simba's Pride, Rowan Atkinson didn't come back to voice Zazu, but he's in this movie for all of 10 seconds. For starters, except for Zazu and young Simba, they got all of the original cast back, even Robert Guillaume (who suffered a stroke a few years ago and has had his speech diminished somewhat) as Rafiki. There's some good news to be had with the DVD. Like MST3K, all we see is them in black outline. It's actually shown MST3K-style, with occasional pausing of the movie to let Timon and Pumbaa, sitting in a theater, have a brief exchange. By the second half of the movie, many of the events on screen are the same events as in the first film, but from different angles. The Movie The Lion King 1 1/2 takes place before the events of The Lion King, eventually merging into the timeline of the original film. As you can imagine, if they are focusing on these two, the level of story is squarely designed for kids. Instead of focusing on Simba and family, the emphasis is on sidekicks Timon and Pumbaa. Now comes the sort-of prequel, The Lion King 1 1/2.
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