Just like before with Aladdin (currently on hold for the time being), I have decided to work on a novelization of all three Lion King movies. And this means that like with Aladdin, it will be in chronological order, so all of the events from 1.5 will be occurring during the events of the first film. So without further ado:
Prologue: Timon and Pumbaa are not Dead
It was a glorious sight! Old Rafiki could hardly believe his eyes: all the animals on the move, coming together from the Four Winds; who could forget a day like that? Everybody came to celebrate the birth of Simba, Mufasa's young cub. You see it was the Circle of Life… What's that you say? You've heard of this before? You think you know this story?! You don't know the half of it!
Pride Rock. So majestic. So powerful. So... bizarrely named. Our story does not start here. Rather it starts several hundred football fields away from the majestic rock spire over the Pridelands. Our story really begins in what the locals called "the Pit of Shame." A meerkat colony where the locals were so low on the food chain, they were underground. I'll just let them do the talking as one by one they popped out of their holes, like a game of Whack-a-Mole.
"Digga tunnah,
Dig, digga tunnah
When you're done ya dig a bigga tunnah
Digga tunnah,
Dig, dig a tunnah
Quick, before the hyena come!
DIG!
Digga tunnah,
Dig, digga tunnah
You can dig and never get dunnah
Digga tunnah, (Dig a little faster)
Dig, digga tunnah
What was that?!
Quick, before the hyena come!
DIG!
Digga tunnah is what we do
Life's a tunnah we're diggin' through
Digga tunnah is what we sing
Digga tunnah is everything!
Mud and clay is a meerkat's friend
Always more around every bend
And when you get to your tunnah's end
Hallelujah! Let's dig again!
DIG!
Digga tunnah,
Dig, digga tunnah (Digga tunnah)
When you're done ya dig a bigga tunnah.
Digga tunnah, (Dig a little faster)
dig dig a tunnah.
What was that?!
Quick, before the hyena come!
DIG!"
One meerkat, a rather portly female with red hair on the top of her head, was searching for someone. "Timon! Excuse me. Have you seen my son? Has he been through here? Timon!" She crept behind a distracted middle-aged meerkat with an army-cut and gray hair, her brother-in-law Max. Her presence made him jump, breaking him out of his out-of-key mantra, but only before she reassured him that she was looking for their only remaining blood-relation. "No, I haven't—and what a day it's been! No fractures, no lacerations, no concussions, contusions or injuries of any sort. As a matter of fact, there's no sign of Tee-mon's handiwork anywhere!"
Max spoke too soon as the ceiling collapsed on them, erasing all tunnels that they had just dug and covering them all with the topsoil. Max was not happy about this: There was only one meerkat capable of such a feat: "That would be… TEE-MON!!!"
A couple feet away and within earshot was the meerkat in question, a slender male with red hair, similar to the female talking to Max. This was Timon, turning around and looking sheepishly at the entire colony, all just as ticked as Max. "Hehe… Hey, everybody!" he said in an embarrassed tone. Even the prankster cousin Fred wasn't too happy, and he had been keeping count of how many times this happened. "Four in a week—a new record!" Timon tried to pass off this incident as a side-effect of building a thing to benefit the colony: a shoddily made skylight. It crumbled into dust, but then the female, Timon's ma, came up to give him some condolences. "Wow! Isn't that creative. A skylight! I'll go talk to him…" Timon and his ma left the scene of the collapse and to a meadow where years before, Timon had a conversation about dignity with his father, a meerkat that the colony nicknamed "Fearless Buzz" because of his willingness to fight off hyena packs, only to be struck down in his moment of glory when three named Shenzi, Banzai, and Ed ambushed him.
"I... I was just trying to shed a little light on our pathetic existence."
"Timon, this can't go on. Just this month, you've pulled down four walls and collapsed two tunnel exits. We have to look after each other. Our survival depends on it."
"What's the point? All we do is dig so we can hide, and hide so we can dig. I wanna be where we don't have to dig tunnels and live with our heads stuck in the sand. What's so bad about dreaming of a better home?"
His ma pushed some grass aside. "I wanna show you something. Look, Timon. Go on, look. Look out to the horizon, past the trees, over the grasslands. Everything the light touches... belongs to someone else!" Timon's grinning face began to shrink back to a scowl. This was the same conversation that Pa had with him while he was still alive. "Funny. I thought you were going a whole different direction with this." " What can I say? It's nature's design." Max popped out of some grass, "She's right! We're food for other animals—a moveable feast. Feared by no one and eaten by all!" "But when they die, they become the grass. And we eat the grass... right?" "Not exactly; we can't digest grass. We have carnivorous stomachs." He began to walk away, his presence not helping, but he gave one final warning: "Meerkat... it's what's for dinner!"
Timon made a circle motion with one of his fingers next to his head, but his ma said otherwise. "Oh, I just know there's a way for you to fit in here." That's when she heard it: Max was calling for sentries. "That's it! That's it—My son on sentry duty! Timon the sentry!"
"Tee-mon the sentry!? Why don't you save the hyenas the trouble and kill me now!? Just kill me now!"
Ma turned to Timon and told him how simple it was: "All you have to do is watch for hyenas and yell if you see one. Look at Iron Joe." She pointed to a skittish meerkat in a leafy straightjacket. "Don'tcloseyoureyes! Don'tlookaway! Somebody'sgottaguardus! Somebody'sgottaprotectus!"
"Well… now I'm convinced…" Timon thought. Listen—it's outside, up in the breeze, under the wide open sky—isn't that what you want? Or maybe you would rather have him go back on the digging crew?" Max shouted in protest, backed up with Timon and the rest of the colony. "Good... then we all agree. Timon, listen to Uncle Max. He'll teach you everything you need to know. And honey, try to make this one work."
Max drilled into his nephew's head a simple mantra for his new position as sentry: Scurry, sniff, flinch. "Good. Now... what do we do if we see a hyena?"
"Scream 'Mommy'?"
"That's right, mister! Because the world out there is fraught with danger. Fraught, I tell you! Even all bloodthirsty hyenas are waiting to rip us limb from limb!"
"Bra-vo, Uncle Max. Way to sell it to the cheap seats."
"Applaud now, sonny boy. But try clapping when you don't have any hands!"
Timon took position as soon as Max left. Fred was taking sentry on another end of the colony. Sure, Timon wanted to be out in the open air, but it was so… dull. The mantra started to replay in his head, but now he realized that he can make a dance out of it. "Huh... I like the sound of that. Scurry, sniff, flinch!
There's more to life than panic
And bein' some other guy's snack
I may be delicious, organic
But this little entree's fightin' back!
I'm gonna put diggin' tunnels behind me
And live at a new altitude
I'm gonna reach for the stars to remind me
That meerkats are not merely food!
For once I'll be...
Lookin' out for me...
I'll tell you what I want
This cat is movin' on
He's a bon vivant
Who's missin' out on bon
I'd be a bigger cheese
Far from the desert scene
A little cooling breeze
A little patch of green!
And I'll be snoozin' in my hammock by a rippling stream
Many miles from any tunnel and the digging team
Looking after number one will be my only creed
That's all I need
I've got it all worked out
That's all I need
I've got it all worked out
I've always been good at runnin' away
Well, now I'm gonna run the show-ow
I've always been seen as the ultimate prey
But now my status ain't so quo!
A dream sublime...
It's hyena tiiime... Oh!"
Timon stopped singing. All around him were the three hyenas that had devoured Pa. Shenzi, a female and the largest of three, Banzai, a male with bushy eyebrows, and Ed, another male with a derpish look in his eyes and a lolling tongue. "Oh, look it's dinner and a show!" "And I thought beans were the only musical food." Ed cackled in agreement.
"Hy... Hy... Hy..."
"Well, hi to you too!" Shenzi swiped Timon with her paw, knocking the sentry down the hill. Timon ended up rolling into Max. " This is no time for horseplay, Tee-mon. You're supposed to be up there lookin' out for..." That's when he saw them, "HYENAS!"
The whole colony went into a frenzy. Banzai commented on the actions their prey made. "Whoa, look at 'em scramble. That's just how I like 'em: Scrambled, and a little runny!"
The hyenas began chasing the meerkats, but they missed Timon. His ma managed to pull him down in the nick of time, with the rest of the colony with her. "What are you, a meshugginah?" She made a role-call. "Oh, what a relief. Everybody's... Where's Uncle Max?!" Max was still running from the trio of carnivores as fast as he could. He tripped and got scraped up. He thankfully fell into one of Timon's holes that he made from earlier that day. "I flinched when I should've scurried. "
If Timon wasn't in trouble for collapsing the ceiling, he was now: Everyone was glaring at him. "I, uh... I guess I owe everyone an apology. All right, so I made a teensy mistake. Like we all haven't broken into song on sentry duty before. Ha ha ha... come on. Let me have a show of hands. Okay. ...Maybe it's a little too soon, but I'm sure we're all gonna laugh about this someday. Trust me."
"I did trust you. I trusted you to be sentry and you let the hyenas sneak up!"
Timon was all alone sitting on the rock where he broke out into an Elton John musical number. That was where Ma found him. "I'm never gonna fit in here. Nobody even likes me, besides you, Ma. I have to find my place; but it isn't here. My place is out there, Ma. Oh, I may not know exactly where or how far, but I gotta go!" "Well, I hope you find what you're looking for, honey."
Timon said his farewells and was given one last hug from his mother. Timon turned away, then began striding purposefully away into the sunset. "Be careful," "I will!" "Don't talk to strangers!" "I know, ma!" "Remember, wash behind your ears!" "Ma! I'm not a kid anymore!" "Never go swimming without a buddy!" "Got it!" "Send us a message sometime!" Timon couldn't hear what his mother just said. "Oy… WHAT?!" "I said, send us a message sometime!" WHAT?!" "I said, send us a--" "Good-bye, ma!"
And so, with high spirits he boldly ventured off where no meerkat had dared to go before. He put his past behind him, and never looked back…
"I want my mommy!"
Timon anticlimactically broke down in tears in front of ancient baobab tree that the Pridelanders called "The Tree of Life" The sound of the tears flowing from the meerkat's eyes alerted the tree's ancient inhabitant, a mandrill named Rafiki.
"What am I doing? Which way should I go?"
"That depends on what you seek."
Enter Rafiki, upside down, startling Timon. "Hey, where'd you come from?"
"Oh, the better question is, where are you going?"
"Oh, someplace wonderful, mister, where... where —You didn't happen to catch the song I sang a few minutes ago, did ya?"
"I didn't have the pleasure."
"To recap: I want to live in some beautiful place, outside... a carefree place where I don't have to hide or worry."
Rafiki chuckled before sitting next to Timon, holding an ornate staff with gourds on its head. "Life without worry. You seek Hakuna Matata."
"Harpoon a tomahto?"
"Hakuna Matata, it means 'no worries'."
Timon asked if Rafiki would draw him a map with his staff, but received a bonk to the head with it. The mandrill had already gone into a zen-phase. "To find it, you must look beyond what you see." Timon asked what it meant, and Rafiki said that it was a literal piece of advice. Timon looked as far as his eye could see, saying that Rafiki was getting existential on him. In his head, while his eyes focused further and further into the horizon, a musical swell began to play. "It's kinda hard to think with all this music! Beyond... what I see..." Then… "Oh, wait a second. It's comin' to me. It's either that slug I ate or I'm having an epiphany!" An angelic choir sang in his head. "I'm going to the big pointy rock!" He turned to thank the ancient mandrill but he was already gone.
"Dream home, here I come" The sun was beginning to show the earliest signs of rising, when Timon heard hoof beats following him. He crashed headfirst into a large warthog's snout. And then the unexpected happened as Timon got down on his knees and begged for mercy.
"Easy, easy there, little guy. I'm not gonna eat you."
"Then why were you stalking me!?"
"Well, gee, I saw you go by and I figured a little fella like you shouldn't be out here all alone."
"What about you? You are all alone, aren't you?" Timon was making sure the pig was alone. "Yeah, most animals give me a wide berth." "Even the predators?" "People see me comin' and they run for cover. They can't get out of the way fast enough." Timon began to deduce what it was, until the pig mentioned that it had more to do with their appetite, backing up slowly and occasionally checking his hind. Timon was happy about this and told the pig was hired and his job was to help him get to the big pointy rock. They shook "hands"
"Put 'er there, acquaintance. I'm Timon!"
"Pumbaa!"
"No, really!" Pumbaa, the warthog, grinned sincerely. "Let's hit the road. "So clear up one thing for me. If you weren't gonna eat me, what kind of a wacky wild pig are you?" "I'm an insectivore!" "Oh ho! A bug-eater! Me too, I just never had a name for them myself. I'm partial to the crunchy critters myself!"
"I prefer the slimy ones!"
"Pumbaa, this could be the start of a beautiful... acquaintanceship."
Prologue: Timon and Pumbaa are not Dead
It was a glorious sight! Old Rafiki could hardly believe his eyes: all the animals on the move, coming together from the Four Winds; who could forget a day like that? Everybody came to celebrate the birth of Simba, Mufasa's young cub. You see it was the Circle of Life… What's that you say? You've heard of this before? You think you know this story?! You don't know the half of it!
Pride Rock. So majestic. So powerful. So... bizarrely named. Our story does not start here. Rather it starts several hundred football fields away from the majestic rock spire over the Pridelands. Our story really begins in what the locals called "the Pit of Shame." A meerkat colony where the locals were so low on the food chain, they were underground. I'll just let them do the talking as one by one they popped out of their holes, like a game of Whack-a-Mole.
"What was that?!
What was what?! Shh!
What was that?!
What was that?!
Where? What?
Where? Where? Shh!
What was that?! Shh!
Quick, before the hyena come!"
A guard looked left and right before calling out: "CLEAR!"What was what?! Shh!
What was that?!
What was that?!
Where? What?
Where? Where? Shh!
What was that?! Shh!
Quick, before the hyena come!"
"Digga tunnah,
Dig, digga tunnah
When you're done ya dig a bigga tunnah
Digga tunnah,
Dig, dig a tunnah
Quick, before the hyena come!
DIG!
Digga tunnah,
Dig, digga tunnah
You can dig and never get dunnah
Digga tunnah, (Dig a little faster)
Dig, digga tunnah
What was that?!
Quick, before the hyena come!
DIG!
Digga tunnah is what we do
Life's a tunnah we're diggin' through
Digga tunnah is what we sing
Digga tunnah is everything!
Mud and clay is a meerkat's friend
Always more around every bend
And when you get to your tunnah's end
Hallelujah! Let's dig again!
DIG!
Digga tunnah,
Dig, digga tunnah (Digga tunnah)
When you're done ya dig a bigga tunnah.
Digga tunnah, (Dig a little faster)
dig dig a tunnah.
What was that?!
Quick, before the hyena come!
DIG!"
Max spoke too soon as the ceiling collapsed on them, erasing all tunnels that they had just dug and covering them all with the topsoil. Max was not happy about this: There was only one meerkat capable of such a feat: "That would be… TEE-MON!!!"
A couple feet away and within earshot was the meerkat in question, a slender male with red hair, similar to the female talking to Max. This was Timon, turning around and looking sheepishly at the entire colony, all just as ticked as Max. "Hehe… Hey, everybody!" he said in an embarrassed tone. Even the prankster cousin Fred wasn't too happy, and he had been keeping count of how many times this happened. "Four in a week—a new record!" Timon tried to pass off this incident as a side-effect of building a thing to benefit the colony: a shoddily made skylight. It crumbled into dust, but then the female, Timon's ma, came up to give him some condolences. "Wow! Isn't that creative. A skylight! I'll go talk to him…" Timon and his ma left the scene of the collapse and to a meadow where years before, Timon had a conversation about dignity with his father, a meerkat that the colony nicknamed "Fearless Buzz" because of his willingness to fight off hyena packs, only to be struck down in his moment of glory when three named Shenzi, Banzai, and Ed ambushed him.
"I... I was just trying to shed a little light on our pathetic existence."
"Timon, this can't go on. Just this month, you've pulled down four walls and collapsed two tunnel exits. We have to look after each other. Our survival depends on it."
"What's the point? All we do is dig so we can hide, and hide so we can dig. I wanna be where we don't have to dig tunnels and live with our heads stuck in the sand. What's so bad about dreaming of a better home?"
His ma pushed some grass aside. "I wanna show you something. Look, Timon. Go on, look. Look out to the horizon, past the trees, over the grasslands. Everything the light touches... belongs to someone else!" Timon's grinning face began to shrink back to a scowl. This was the same conversation that Pa had with him while he was still alive. "Funny. I thought you were going a whole different direction with this." " What can I say? It's nature's design." Max popped out of some grass, "She's right! We're food for other animals—a moveable feast. Feared by no one and eaten by all!" "But when they die, they become the grass. And we eat the grass... right?" "Not exactly; we can't digest grass. We have carnivorous stomachs." He began to walk away, his presence not helping, but he gave one final warning: "Meerkat... it's what's for dinner!"
Timon made a circle motion with one of his fingers next to his head, but his ma said otherwise. "Oh, I just know there's a way for you to fit in here." That's when she heard it: Max was calling for sentries. "That's it! That's it—My son on sentry duty! Timon the sentry!"
"Tee-mon the sentry!? Why don't you save the hyenas the trouble and kill me now!? Just kill me now!"
Ma turned to Timon and told him how simple it was: "All you have to do is watch for hyenas and yell if you see one. Look at Iron Joe." She pointed to a skittish meerkat in a leafy straightjacket. "Don'tcloseyoureyes! Don'tlookaway! Somebody'sgottaguardus! Somebody'sgottaprotectus!"
"Well… now I'm convinced…" Timon thought. Listen—it's outside, up in the breeze, under the wide open sky—isn't that what you want? Or maybe you would rather have him go back on the digging crew?" Max shouted in protest, backed up with Timon and the rest of the colony. "Good... then we all agree. Timon, listen to Uncle Max. He'll teach you everything you need to know. And honey, try to make this one work."
Max drilled into his nephew's head a simple mantra for his new position as sentry: Scurry, sniff, flinch. "Good. Now... what do we do if we see a hyena?"
"Scream 'Mommy'?"
"That's right, mister! Because the world out there is fraught with danger. Fraught, I tell you! Even all bloodthirsty hyenas are waiting to rip us limb from limb!"
"Bra-vo, Uncle Max. Way to sell it to the cheap seats."
"Applaud now, sonny boy. But try clapping when you don't have any hands!"
Timon took position as soon as Max left. Fred was taking sentry on another end of the colony. Sure, Timon wanted to be out in the open air, but it was so… dull. The mantra started to replay in his head, but now he realized that he can make a dance out of it. "Huh... I like the sound of that. Scurry, sniff, flinch!
There's more to life than panic
And bein' some other guy's snack
I may be delicious, organic
But this little entree's fightin' back!
I'm gonna put diggin' tunnels behind me
And live at a new altitude
I'm gonna reach for the stars to remind me
That meerkats are not merely food!
For once I'll be...
Lookin' out for me...
I'll tell you what I want
This cat is movin' on
He's a bon vivant
Who's missin' out on bon
I'd be a bigger cheese
Far from the desert scene
A little cooling breeze
A little patch of green!
And I'll be snoozin' in my hammock by a rippling stream
Many miles from any tunnel and the digging team
Looking after number one will be my only creed
That's all I need
I've got it all worked out
That's all I need
I've got it all worked out
I've always been good at runnin' away
Well, now I'm gonna run the show-ow
I've always been seen as the ultimate prey
But now my status ain't so quo!
A dream sublime...
It's hyena tiiime... Oh!"
"Hy... Hy... Hy..."
"Well, hi to you too!" Shenzi swiped Timon with her paw, knocking the sentry down the hill. Timon ended up rolling into Max. " This is no time for horseplay, Tee-mon. You're supposed to be up there lookin' out for..." That's when he saw them, "HYENAS!"
The whole colony went into a frenzy. Banzai commented on the actions their prey made. "Whoa, look at 'em scramble. That's just how I like 'em: Scrambled, and a little runny!"
The hyenas began chasing the meerkats, but they missed Timon. His ma managed to pull him down in the nick of time, with the rest of the colony with her. "What are you, a meshugginah?" She made a role-call. "Oh, what a relief. Everybody's... Where's Uncle Max?!" Max was still running from the trio of carnivores as fast as he could. He tripped and got scraped up. He thankfully fell into one of Timon's holes that he made from earlier that day. "I flinched when I should've scurried. "
If Timon wasn't in trouble for collapsing the ceiling, he was now: Everyone was glaring at him. "I, uh... I guess I owe everyone an apology. All right, so I made a teensy mistake. Like we all haven't broken into song on sentry duty before. Ha ha ha... come on. Let me have a show of hands. Okay. ...Maybe it's a little too soon, but I'm sure we're all gonna laugh about this someday. Trust me."
"I did trust you. I trusted you to be sentry and you let the hyenas sneak up!"
Timon was all alone sitting on the rock where he broke out into an Elton John musical number. That was where Ma found him. "I'm never gonna fit in here. Nobody even likes me, besides you, Ma. I have to find my place; but it isn't here. My place is out there, Ma. Oh, I may not know exactly where or how far, but I gotta go!" "Well, I hope you find what you're looking for, honey."
Timon said his farewells and was given one last hug from his mother. Timon turned away, then began striding purposefully away into the sunset. "Be careful," "I will!" "Don't talk to strangers!" "I know, ma!" "Remember, wash behind your ears!" "Ma! I'm not a kid anymore!" "Never go swimming without a buddy!" "Got it!" "Send us a message sometime!" Timon couldn't hear what his mother just said. "Oy… WHAT?!" "I said, send us a message sometime!" WHAT?!" "I said, send us a--" "Good-bye, ma!"
And so, with high spirits he boldly ventured off where no meerkat had dared to go before. He put his past behind him, and never looked back…
"I want my mommy!"
Timon anticlimactically broke down in tears in front of ancient baobab tree that the Pridelanders called "The Tree of Life" The sound of the tears flowing from the meerkat's eyes alerted the tree's ancient inhabitant, a mandrill named Rafiki.
"What am I doing? Which way should I go?"
"That depends on what you seek."
Enter Rafiki, upside down, startling Timon. "Hey, where'd you come from?"
"Oh, the better question is, where are you going?"
"Oh, someplace wonderful, mister, where... where —You didn't happen to catch the song I sang a few minutes ago, did ya?"
"I didn't have the pleasure."
"To recap: I want to live in some beautiful place, outside... a carefree place where I don't have to hide or worry."
Rafiki chuckled before sitting next to Timon, holding an ornate staff with gourds on its head. "Life without worry. You seek Hakuna Matata."
"Harpoon a tomahto?"
"Hakuna Matata, it means 'no worries'."
Timon asked if Rafiki would draw him a map with his staff, but received a bonk to the head with it. The mandrill had already gone into a zen-phase. "To find it, you must look beyond what you see." Timon asked what it meant, and Rafiki said that it was a literal piece of advice. Timon looked as far as his eye could see, saying that Rafiki was getting existential on him. In his head, while his eyes focused further and further into the horizon, a musical swell began to play. "It's kinda hard to think with all this music! Beyond... what I see..." Then… "Oh, wait a second. It's comin' to me. It's either that slug I ate or I'm having an epiphany!" An angelic choir sang in his head. "I'm going to the big pointy rock!" He turned to thank the ancient mandrill but he was already gone.
"Dream home, here I come" The sun was beginning to show the earliest signs of rising, when Timon heard hoof beats following him. He crashed headfirst into a large warthog's snout. And then the unexpected happened as Timon got down on his knees and begged for mercy.
"Easy, easy there, little guy. I'm not gonna eat you."
"Then why were you stalking me!?"
"Well, gee, I saw you go by and I figured a little fella like you shouldn't be out here all alone."
"What about you? You are all alone, aren't you?" Timon was making sure the pig was alone. "Yeah, most animals give me a wide berth." "Even the predators?" "People see me comin' and they run for cover. They can't get out of the way fast enough." Timon began to deduce what it was, until the pig mentioned that it had more to do with their appetite, backing up slowly and occasionally checking his hind. Timon was happy about this and told the pig was hired and his job was to help him get to the big pointy rock. They shook "hands"
"Put 'er there, acquaintance. I'm Timon!"
"Pumbaa!"
"No, really!" Pumbaa, the warthog, grinned sincerely. "Let's hit the road. "So clear up one thing for me. If you weren't gonna eat me, what kind of a wacky wild pig are you?" "I'm an insectivore!" "Oh ho! A bug-eater! Me too, I just never had a name for them myself. I'm partial to the crunchy critters myself!"
"I prefer the slimy ones!"
"Pumbaa, this could be the start of a beautiful... acquaintanceship."
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