Film Theory: Did Scar EAT Mufasa? (The Lion King)

wait so

mufasa

dies right but what happens to his body hyenas don't usually eat

lion

s and there are no other animals that eat them except other

lion

s so watch this scene one more time is you don't think what the fuck that means tick tock Did you check it? Speak, I already did it. Hello Internet. Welcome to Film Theory, the show that can't wait for you to hit the subscribe button to help us surpass the 10 million subscriber mark. You know that Disney's original Lion King is one of the best cartoons. movies ever made, hell, it's probably one of the best movies ever made, animated or not, and one of the reasons it's so great is that the story it tells is extremely simple and direct, there is a

king

dom, there is a good

king

, a son in line to succeed. him a guy who would like to succeed him a murder plot a lot of guilt and a lot of growth to restore the balance it's tragic but triumphant epic but intimate and there's not much else no stupid plots b no extraneous characters no clumsily shoehorned into merchandising opportunities or construction cameos Of universes, there's just not a lot of fat in this one, which leaves pretty little room for theorizing, since the bones get cleaned up in the end, but speaking of bones a new

theory

recently surfaced on the internet, which specifically suspects that The Lion King might be keeping a dark secret in plain sight and no, it's not the leaves in the wind spelling out some secret message.

Wait, what do they say? Pause the video. Matt Pat is the king. Wow, who knew a 1994 Disney classic would get so much respect? For me, no friends nowadays, online theorists ask the question that no one thought they needed an answer for what happened to Mufasa's body after he died, i.e. did he eat the

scar

to his dead brother? Ladies and gentlemen, bring those teeth and ambitions because it's time for Morty to leave his theories in the comments below I will choose my favorites in the next episode of Morty. I'm really glad we're trying to make this a thing now, okay, so here's the breakdown in January of this year, the tick tockers with king class zero and no.

Alexis lol presented an incredibly compelling

theory

that really got the internet's brains working. This is what they noticed in the movie. Mufasa dies after falling off a cliff during a wildebeest stampede. Simba discovers his father's dead body without realizing that evil Uncle Scar was the one who caused the whole situation. Scar convinces him that he will be blamed for the quote-unquote accident and that he should run away, then sends his three main henchmen. hyenas to chase him, which they fail to do because no one is good at their damn jobs, not even in the animal kingdom come back editors come back I didn't mean you guys are great you are great the last time we saw the

scar

on Mufasa's physical body is standing still Next to her as Simba and the hyenas flee, Scar returns to tell the rest of Pride Rock that Mufasa and Simba are dead, which they apparently accept without a doubt even though Scars sounds like the most obviously evil guy ever. times, why tremble with fear now?

Scar, don't look at me that way, anyway, fast forward through some things coming up. business of age eating bugs blah blah blah, I never really liked the rudder and pumba section to be honest, forget about akuna matata, nine year old matpat, it had to do with political intrigue anyway, approx. 48 minutes into the

film

, we get our first cut. Pride lands so we can see how bad things are under Scar's rule. I feel like most people probably remember this scene from this part. Sing something with some small bumps. It's a small world after all. Oh no, nothing more than that because Disney is acting alone. -The parody at the time was new compared to something they do in literally every movie now, but what these tackers call in their little mini theory is a scar picking its teeth with some bones and playing with a big skull that , as they imply.

Through Google image search it looks a lot like a lion's skull. Add to that the fact that hyenas apparently don't tend to eat lions, but other lions do, and suddenly you get the connection that suggests something much more sinister: they think the skull. It is actually Mufasa's own and is evidence that Scar not only killed his brother but cannibalized the evidence and kept his bones as a trophy. That's unpleasant, but is it true? Well, we asked the world's leading experts on online behavior, but those people are really expensive. so we looked it up on the internet, which is free and probably just as good, so let's start by looking beyond the headlines presented to us in this tick tock, forgive me if I'm a little bit skeptical that the evidence here is unique.

Summary of lines from the Google result of an article on mental thread, the theory here really depends on three main details: one, that hyenas do not eat lions, two, that lions eat lions and three, that this is in fact a skull of lion, so first, hyenas eat lions well. Even though Classy King's text says that hyenas generally don't eat lions, the article in the background doesn't say that at all, in fact the entire article says nothing about whether or not a hyena will eat a lion in place of what is. The highlight in his tic tac talks about hyenas eating leftovers from lions, that is, if the hyenas follow the lions to eat the remains of their meals, which is curious, but it is not as common as the media would have you believe.

Yes, hyenas are scavengers, but they also feed. The vast majority of their food is hunted by themselves and that's why you don't believe in Disney movies or tick-tocks, but that's okay, it still doesn't address the question: would hyenas eat a dead lion? and the answer is yes, yes, they absolutely would. to them meat is meat is meat, according to all my research, spotted hyenas, which is the species we see in the lion king, are not picky eaters, they are willing and eager to eat everything from zebras to birds, reptiles and insects. They are even able to eat rotten meat without getting sick.

Hyenas are basically garbage disposals with legs, since a fresh lion carcass would be the equivalent of a meat dinner for them, so there's already a good chance that, given the opportunity, hyenas have absolutely eaten

mufasa

. but here's the twist if they had you wouldn't know you see hyenas practice osteophagy they eat bones animals do this to supplement their diet with calcium and phosphorus that their bodies might be lacking and for hyenas they don't leave any of their food wasted with strong jaws that bite and highly acidic stomachs that are able to break down bones efficiently. A pack of hyenas can completely devour a 400-pound, 180-kilogram zebra in less than 25 minutes, leaving nothing good behind, nothing but red stains on the ground, so while yes.

They would have eaten Mufasa with pleasure. The fact that their bones are still there implies that maybe they didn't do it, which brings us to question number two. Would a lion eat another lion? In tic tac we see kings with class. Google what animals lions eat. What's hidden behind those search results drop-down menus are the real results and I'm here to show them to you. The top search result comes from what eats.com, where we see the following quote right there in the evidence box, the lions have almost no quote. predators, however, old and sick lions are sometimes attacked, killed and eaten by hyenas, which goes directly against the previous observation in the tick tac about hyenas, man and people try to accuse me of bias the facts to fit my theories, tick tock.

Anyway, it's shameless, while the evidence of a mufasa hyena feast continues to accumulate, when you dig deeper into the facts, you see that no lion, in fact, tends to eat other lions except in the most extreme circumstances. In fact, this question was asked to Derek and Beverly Zhu. wildlife documentary bear who studies lions on the fresh air podcast, but if a lion kills a lion, will the lion eat? No, the lion won't eat another lion and in fact often lions won't even eat other predators, so if they kill a hyena, they won't eat it either unless they are in absolutely desperate times, you know, maybe at death's door, lions don't really have to eat other predators, but I mean, if they're already dead, they won't eat them yet, no.

Don't do it and you know you can trust them. They have a British accent. The reason is that it simply does not produce a food reward to effort ratio that makes hunting each other worthwhile. Lions are violent creatures that are difficult to kill. Why put yourself? you run the risk of trying to eat one when you can try to chase another defenseless zebra, as far as I know, cannibalism in lions is very, very rare, it only occurs in cases of desperate hunger and almost never with an adult male consuming another male adult more frequently. Sometimes they are lions that kill and eat a rival's cubs, which doesn't help us much either.

In the case of Mufasa's missing body, the most famous case of lion cannibalism occurred with the Mapago brothers, a group of six male lions who over the course of 16 years simply wandered around a huge South African national park declaring their dominance by killing whole packs were like the apex predator biker gang if these were the walking dead they would be like the savior gang the six members of the Mapago brothers even had names there was the leader makulu rasta pretty boy curly tail mr t who He took pity on the fool and you wouldn't know it but scar no less, but despite our theory today it was mr t who was the cannibal of the group who ate young puppies. of rival prides but again it's a super rare case and not an adult male eating another adult male too just to include this here as a side note, a later scene on the tik tok theory shows the quote from that perverted tale that finally He was one of the six Mapago. killed and devoured by a rival tribe of lions.

I looked at that blog post about the writer and the death of a perverted tale that is part of a larger documentary about that exact pride of lions and there is actually no evidence that the lion was eaten, not even the author of the blog he backs off his language in a comment on the post itself, so I'd take it with a big grain of salt, but who knows, maybe he'll mark the lion from the movie and not the South African lion bully, he's just as vengeful as he wants . submerging his real dead brother by submerging his brother's body in stomach acid, which leaves us with our third and final question is that even the skull of a lion in the scene doesn't count for three in this tic toc theory, as See, lion classification is quite simple in the fact that there is only one species of lion, the panthera leo, and from there historically there have only been two subspecies of African lions and Asiatic lions, which recently got a bit of a shake-up, but still So it broke down pretty simple and because of that, all lion skulls tend to look the same relatively short snout large nasal cavities large orbital holes for the eyes I admit that the skull in the movie at first glance looks like the Google image results for the lion skull, but we're also talking about a second or two images of a tic tac, anything could look similar in that amount of time, look closer and you'll see that the snout of the skull in the

film

is much longer than Mufasa's snout, but that's splitting hairs or splitting lion noses, I guess the real trick. here are the teeth lions have three types of teeth: incisors, small teeth at the front of the mouth for ripping and tearing, large canine teeth, those long, sharp teeth used as weapons to capture and kill prey and a third type of tooth called large carnassial.

Modified molar teeth found at the back of the mouth that function like scissors to cut large pieces of meat into smaller pieces. Actually, it's a lesson I taught Oliver the other day. Carnivores tend to have sharp teeth because they need to rip and tear meat. The herbivores. I have flat teeth for grinding plants and what do we see on the skull that holds that scar? Sure there's a large canine there, but everything else is a lot of small, flat teeth with two oversized incisors at the front of the mouth. Note that there are no secondary teeth.

It has no fangs, a prominent lower jaw, and, most notably, none of those oddly shaped carnassial teeth on the back for cutting meat. Now compare that skull to the skull of a primate, like say a baboon. Notice the oversized front incisors, the smaller flat molars towards the back of the mouth, the overall longer snout giving the entire skull a more elongated shape, I don't know about you but it seems like a much closer match whatWe are looking at biologically, in short, our ticking theory was based on three main points and not a single one of them turned out, no hyena will eat dead lions, lions will attack and chew, but they tend not to eat other adult lions, even when They are in territorial disputes and the skull we are looking at is probably not even a lion's skull in any way. break it down, this theory is over and even if we ignore all that and assume Scar tried to eat Mufasa he wouldn't have been able to do it all at once, even the largest male lions will typically only eat about 16 pounds of food in a day, in reality, prides of lions sometimes stay near a prey for a decent amount of time to defend themselves from scavengers until they have finished it completely;

In other words, Scar couldn't have sat down and devoured his older brother in the dl before flying to Pride Rock to become the new king, he would have had to have done it over the course of several days, but our latest evidence against this theory does not come from science but from history. Here's why I can even do something like this for a 20+ year old Disney cartoon about talking lions and not for many other talking animal movies. What do you want? I want you to go out and kill, kill, kill. The headset was much darker than I remember. is that the lion king actually has a philosophical core to what happens in the movie, everything you see exists together in a delicate balance when we die, our bodies turn into grass and the antelope eats the grass and that's how we all are. connected in the great circle of life which is just 20 seconds of dialogue from the great James Earl Jones and is a bit heavy for a children's movie, but Mufasa doesn't just hang a lampshade in general, yes, we totally ate like half of those guys. in the front row of that baptism after the Elton John song, but he's also establishing the transcendental naturalism of this film's story, the philosophy that we have to accept death as part of life because it's part of the overall natural cycle. of life, he is describing nature. as a cyclical food chain that positions proper death for super predators like him and Simba as becoming the grass, which so we're on the same page here actually means that they become fertilizer for the grass after their bodies are eaten by vultures, insects, worms and well, anything else that wants to attack him or you know his corpse is just rotting under the hot sun of the African Serengeti, think about that for your childhood hero, in other words, the vision of Mufasa about how the circle of life is supposed to work would be Not only could it be that his death is natural, but the fact that he is eaten after he dies is also natural, maybe not ideally because of his asshole brother, but because of something;

However, the entire plot of the second and third acts of The Lion King depends heavily on the implication that his murder is such. a fundamental violation of the proper order of the pride lands that actually puts nature and the world itself out of balance symbolically that balance begins to be restored not when Simba defeats Scar but when Scar himself is devoured he returns and watches the end again . The first thing you need to do is not only put out the dramatic fire of the final battle, but also restore life after a drought technically doesn't return when Simba wins, it only happens after the hyenas eat Scar.

Oh wait, there's a lion being devoured. a hyena forgot to put that moment in your tik-tok theory, huh, again, this is magical realism in action, so it's not exactly proof of anything, but if we extrapolate a specific mechanic to all of this, we could infer that it not only healed. He didn't eat Mufasa but maybe no one did get him killed far from where his body could be part of that symbolic natural cycle of life he literally broke the chain on the circle of life itself and it isn't fully restored until the scar takes its place. place literally and figuratively in the stomachs of their own hyena foot soldiers or maybe we're just overthinking it.

The point is that either way until Sunday we will call this theory debunked. There's just no real evidence here in the movie text, the strange metatext. or the actual signs that support the idea that Scar ate Mufasa and all we had to do to prove it was remind you to check everything you see on the tick and two that everyone else in this beloved classic family movie eventually does. they will do in a horrible way. devour each other in one way or another happy ending but well that's just a theory a cinematic theory and it cuts you