I've already endorsed the petition to release The Lion King: The Complete Score as an official Disney product, and I hope visitors to the site still sign that one if they're as interested in seeing that as I am.

However, there's a new petition being circulated, one which encourages Disney to produce a fourth Lion King movie:

http://www.petitiononline.com/lionking/petition.html

There are already more signatures for this signature than the soundtrack petition ever accumulated. Clearly there is some interest in seeing Disney produce more movies in this series. And even though John Lasseter, Disney's new chief creative officer imported from Pixar, has instituted a policy of avoiding the cheaply made direct-to-video sequels that have tarnished Disney's reputation for quality in the past, I think that under the right circumstances the TLK universe could benefit from another installment.

This is not something I say lightly. I was never much of a fan of TLK 2: Simba's Pride; I thought it was poorly conceived and poorly executed, with lackluster animation and an unimaginative, tawdry story—but more importantly (and more subtly), I thought it detracted from the unity and epic timelessness of the original movie by being a mere "continuation". There's a scene in the Kathleen Turner/Michael Douglas movie Jewel of the Nile where Joan Wilders, a romance novel author, is talking with her publisher, who has to admonish her that she can't keep confusing real life with a romantic novel—when your characters ride off into the sunset, that's The End. There is no "next morning", when the sun comes up and the characters have to make breakfast and go to work and argue over paying bills. Joan keeps falling prey to the urge to imagine what comes next, but her publisher knows that doing so ruins the story she's just told. And I feel it's the same deal with TLK: it starts and ends with the big "BOOM" of the title splash and the "Circle of Life" song, and that really ought to have been The End. "Simba's Pride" just told us that it wasn't epic after all, and there was a "next day" and a next and a next, with more and more generations of cardboard lion royalty that argue and fight and sing songs about Upendi, which to me deflates all the magic and majesty of the original.

On the other hand, I actually loved TLK 1 1/2, because it was precisely the kind of "sequel" that I did think would work with TLK: more of a parody than a continuation, something that kept the original story intact but looked at it through a cockeyed, tongue-in-cheek, yet affectionate way. The very fact that it was imagined in such a silly manner just made the original's epic scale all the more apparent by the explicit comparison it invited. Plus it was just plain fun, and better animated than TLK 2 to boot. The silhouetted theater scene at the end with all the gathered Disney characters was like one giant cast-and-crew screening of Disney's greatest achievement, and the retrospective "Digga Tunnah Dance" song over the credits gave the whole thing a feel of being sort of a wrap party, a celebration of the original. Nothing like the workmanlike, linear inevitability of TLK 2, which just felt like a preview of ever more mundane and tedious sequels to come. Small wonder, to me, that TLK 1 1/2 never even acknowledged TLK 2's existence.

Now, a lot of whether another sequel would be a storytelling and financial success depends on how it's framed. For instance, a prequel showing the lives of Mufasa and Scar before the events of the original movie has potential. Prequels are tricky things to do—as the Star Wars films proved, it's very difficult to present an engaging and surprising story when you already know how it turns out. But on the other hand you're working with characters you already know, rather than having to invent new ones to get the audience interested in; and unlike with Star Wars, there's no implausibility in asserting that all these well-known characters knew each other way back when. After all, in the case of TLK, they did.

In short, if there's to be another sequel, I'd want it to feel necessary from a storytelling standpoint to create it, a key part of the story that deserves to be realized—not something they did just because they couldn't come up with any better ideas.

Finally, I should point out carefully that signing a petition does nothing to legally bind Disney to sink millions of dollars into the business investment that is a new movie project. We all must keep in mind that every movie Disney creates—whether a theatrical blockbuster or a direct-to-video cheapquel, whether 3D, 2D, or live-action—is a fresh business venture that has to be carefully studied and approved from within the company. You can be sure that the subject of doing another sequel to the biggest cash cow in Disney's modern history is something that comes up in board meetings every other week; this isn't some brilliant new idea that nobody has thought to suggest to management before. Disney is constantly brainstorming story ideas of which we have no idea, and for every one that gets green-lit, dozens lie on the boardroom floor. The fact that no TLK 4 in in the works tells us that Disney has evaluated the proposal—probably numerous times—and determined that the potential rewards wouldn't be worth the investment. What's more, there are legal issues surrounding any story ideas that Disney uses from outside its walls; it has enough sidelong scrutiny from fans of Osamu Tezuka's Kimba/Jungle Emperor Leo and Richard Williams' The Thief and the Cobbler without having to worry about what happens if they use a story idea suggested by some fans in public and then don't mention where they got the idea in the credits and pay the originators a hefty sum. That's why Disney's official policy is to return unopened any unsolicited script or screenplay sent to them: they can't legally afford to even look at it without compromising their plausible deniability.

Disney has to make the decision to produce another Lion King sequel on its own. A petition can give them a sense for how well it would do in the marketplace; but that's about it. We shouldn't get our hopes up. There is a lot of internal resistance to the idea of pillaging the TLK war chest once more—potentially reducing the impact and value of the original in the interest of the short-term gains to be had from another sequel—and the Disney management under Lasseter might be dead set against it, in which case we have to accept that reality.

Yet a fan petition got Family Guy reinstated, so who knows?

That URL again:

http://www.petitiononline.com/lionking/petition.html