So I've been diving into Lion King Development Lore recently after reading one of the early scripts during an internet outage. That script was "King of the Beasts", which is a fascinating read, but not the first or only publicly released development script. apparently the first ever draft of the film was the same as this submission's title. Afterwards, I also read a very, very, VERY old fanfic by Michael Espinoza called "The Lion Who Would Be King" while deep diving through the fandom's Geocities era. I don't really like most fanfic unless I'm making fun of it, but this one had me hooked. It was Shakespeare mixed with a lot of early development ideas for both TLK movies, which worked surprisingly well and also motivated me to make this. I deadass can't remember the last time I drew in TLK style.

The Lion King has quite the history, which I'm sure most fans know about already but the uninitiated may not. I'm not going to detail every facet of the film's development - the fan wiki is what that's for - but I will drop some trivia for the sake of giving context to this piece.

The guy featured here isn't meant to be a TLK fan character. I don't really have much interest in making those. This is Simba. Or, rather, Simba if Disney had gone with a previous idea of Simba being a white lion. To be frank I believe that idea, unlike a handful of others utilized in the end product, came from an actual phenomenon in the wild, and wasn't a detail taken from That Other Lion Cartoon that nobody shuts up about whenever a new TLK incarnation is released. His mane is based on the original concept for his adult mane, which I feel has more personality then his canon one.

Personally I'm glad they made Seemboo "average" instead of white, but I always have had a soft spot for leucistic animals.

This doubles as a future example of a new sort of commission I've never done before but will be releasing in early December OOOOOOOH