Your history with LK

[Animal of the Wild]

This is the place to share your story about LK.

Well, I pretty much knew of Timon and Pumbaa from the series. It came on during 1995-99, while I was about 1-4, so I have some vague memories of seeing it on the disney channel at home, and then occasionally on TV at hotels for a while afterwards. The most memorable incident was in July 2002 when I was 7, when we stopped at a hotel and it was playing on Toon Disney. I remember seeing "Mister Twister" adn possibly "Big Top Breakfast". I had never been really into this show but it brought on some nice nostalgia, seeing it again. The thing that really struck me was that the theme song billed it as "The Lion King's Timon and Pumbaa". I had watched the original movie like crazy in late summer of 1999, but barely remembered it, and certainly didn't remember T&P being in it.

Anyways, I remember when 1/2 came out, and I thought it looked weird...but seemed irrelevant seeing as I couldn't remember movie 1 well.

I browsed through an upload of the movie on youtube in January 2009, but it was in the spring of 2011 and beyond that I became familiar with the storyline, the characters, etc...and in fall of last year I got really into it.

What about you?

[InsaneSeagull]

Well, my story isn't that interesting, to be honest, but OK. I think I mentioned it on this forum a few times, though.

I think I watched TLK, or some parts of it, when I was very young (probably 5), but even now I can hardly remember anything but that part where Mufasa talks to Simba about ruling over Pridelands. After that, it's been quite a long time before I started watching anything from Disney at all, maybe I was 12 or 13. Then I got a CD with TLK 1 1/2 (yup, yup) on it. I watched it once and fell in love with it! Literally XD . I started watching it daily, and so it went. I just couldn't get why it's even called The Lion King when lions didn't even appear that much (yeah, just the thing I hate about 1 1/2 at most now). I mean I knew it was a midquel of the real story called The Lion King, but I couldn't remember that movie had anything to do with T&P. And so it went on... and I forgot about it. Yeah, literally forgot about my passing obsession.

And again, years passed. This time I was maybe 16, and I decided to watch Disney again. Many of the movies I never even watched before, and I got into it much quicker than I thought I would. And, out of a miracle, I remembered one movie with T&P I watched and loved... and decided to re-watch it. At first, I couldn't even remember the name of the movie. But, this is how I finally watched it again, and then watched the first one and got even more obsessed with it than I ever was with 1 1/2. I must admit I wasn't that obsessed with Scar in the beginning, as I got after few more watches, but that's how it usually works with me and villains. Not long after I watched the first, I watched SP, and fell in love with Kiara, and Kovu.

From that moment forward, I never stopped loving it. I watched all the movies, more than once (especially TLK and SP) and I'm very fond of every single character from the movies (okay, Uncle Max pisses me off!). I joined this community... and I guess you know how the story continues =) .

[Regulus]

I watched the movie, and then I realized that I liked it. Then I found myself over here, somehow.

[Carl]

The year was 1994. I was two years old. My parents took me to the theatre for the first time. The movie we were going to see.... The Lion King. What happened next I will never forget... because I don't remember it to be able to forget it.

At any rate, I've loved the movie ever since. We got it on VHS and I watched it all the time. Some time later, I would run around the house on my hands and knees, saying "I'm Simba!" and I had a cat (whose name was Esmeralda because of the Hunchback character) whom I would address as Nala and she would follow me around even though it wasn't her name I was addressing her by.

In '98 when SP came out, my grandparents bought the VHS of it for me and my siblings. We watched it, and I loved it too. For years I watched it way more than the original, that is, until the original was re-released on DVD, at which point I took up watching it every day again, and some times more than once a day (lol TLK was my life in middle school, TLK and Spyro xD).

Shortly thereafter 1.5 was released and we got that on DVD (and at some point we got a DVD of SP) and I watched it and loved it too. So then for a while I just watched that one. Now I watch all three sporadically, but mostly just the first one.

During all of that time I have often drawn TLK characters and TLK styled characters. About 2 years ago I saw a link to MLKFAA on Firestar's DA gallery (KaiserTiger) and so I noted her and asked about the site. She said it was great for LK art, but that there was less feedback than DA (well, there's more feedback here for me, but I'm pretty much invisible on DA, so xD). Anyway, I joined later that month and at first kept to the FAA. I got bored though and started posting in the section that was at the time known as the "Smarty Pants" board which has now become "World Issues."

I was still not around much at that time, and it wasn't until about May last year that I started being more active. In the time since then, I've really gotten into fan theories and fan fictions, and RPing, and as you all can see I am still here.

Aaaand... that's about it.

[Tsuki]

Hmmm. I REALLY have to think now. Movie came out in 1994 and that's when I started Primary School. I went to see it with my cousin at the cinema and I was just blown away. I remember my Mum getting us some little sticker books of the Lion King before hand and we went to MacDonalds and I got a Scar toy (Lost it now ).

So since seeing the movie, I was totally obsessed with it! I had loads of Lion King merc as a kid and for Christmas my Mum's friend bought me a floppy Simba plush which came with me everywhere and I still have him . I also had a Lion King rain coat and and a swimming bag for my swimming class. I was seriously obsessed with this film. My Grandad got me a Pirate ( ) VHS of the Lion King and I never really owned a proper version of it. On a family holiday to Turkey, I bought a casette tape of Lion King songs .

Then I kind of forgot about the Lion King until I went into the Disney Store one day and they were advertising the sequel. I got so excited and my Mum preordered it for me while I looked at the toys. But at the time I didnt know who any of the characters were so I didnt buy any. I think I may have got a Kiara toy in Macdonalds but cant remember. So we got the VHS and my sister watched it to death as a toddler and of course I watched it with her. I really liked Kovu and Zira but I didnt think it was as good as the first. I also remember finding the Vitani, Nuka and Kovu plush in a supermarket in France but I didnt have enough money to get them . Sucks.

My Lion King obsession kind of died down for a few years until my Nana bought me the Lion King plantium addition on DVD with a free Simba Beanie plush for Christmas. I couldn't wait to watch all the bonus features too and I have watched this dvd to death that part of the rim is kind of breaking away. I still plays though . So after this I was determined to find the second one on DVD as our video copy had broken and the sound wouldn't work. It took me AGES to find it on DVD but I eventually got it second hand for £10 .

For my 18th Birthday, my Mum won a trip to New York for 3 people and took me and my Nana along. And my Nana wanted to get me something special so asked me if I wanted to go on a Helicopter ride or go see a Broadway. Of course, I chose a Broadway show and we went to see the Lion King. Gosh it is AMAZING!!! I'd love to see it again but I missed it when it was in Manchester recently . But I have seen it and I'm on the prowl for a Broadway Scar plushie .

So then what? I think it was the Diamond release. Or maybe the 3D film. Think it was the 3D film. I went to see that with my Ex and the detail was just....wow!!! I preordered the Diamond edition on DVD and when my friend came to visit me, we each got a Scar/Taka plush . Got the DVD but I was disappointed to see it didn't have any extras on it so I ended up getting the Double Play one with all the bonus extras .

This either came before the Diamond release or after. Can't remember but when I went to Disney Animal Kingdom in Florida with my friend, we went to the Lion King show. It was childish but I enjoyed it .

Think that's it. I'm looking at seeing the Lion King West End though :3.

[Ninaroja]

I was 2 or 3 when I saw TLK for the first time (making the year about 1998/1999) and I was hooked from the beginning. When I was about 12 I sort of stoped liking it so much and forgot about it completely until 2011 when I watched the movie again after 4-5 years of having nothing to do with it whatsoever. And that's when my super-obsession began and I love it.

I explained this more in full here

[Regulus]

[quote="Regulus"]I watched the movie, and then I realized that I liked it. Then I found myself over here, somehow.[/quote]

To elaborate on this, now that I have the time:

For many fans, TLK was the first movie they watched, or perhaps the first movie they ever enjoyed. For others, it has been something that they have simply grown up with. From what I've found around here, watching the movie back in the day on VHS on a near daily basis actually doesn’t seem that uncommon.

But, I’m not one of those fans. I was only a few months old when The Lion King was first in theaters. Sadly, I have no memory of watching it then. I was far too young.

But, of course, four years later, there was a sequel. Do I remember that? Nope. The first movie I ever saw in theaters was Stuart Little, and that was in 1999, so you get the idea here. It was still before my time (although, oddly enough, I still consider myself to be a 90's kid, because I remember that last year of that decade).

So, you see, I don't actually remember watching TLK for the first time at all. In fact, I don't think I ever watched it until... actually, I'll get to that later.

But, that being said, I do remember growing up around TLK. Although I don’t ever remember watching the movie when I was really young, oddly enough, I know I could recognize the characters and places without ever a second thought. They are icons of our entire generation, basically.

In fact, my earliest memory of The Lion King isn’t watching the movie itself. If my memory serves me correctly, my first recollection of anything TLK-related was when I was about 9 years old. I went over to my friend’s house, and he was showing me his video game collection, just like any kid would have done. Of course, one of the games that he showed me was the ridiculously-difficult 2D platformer for SNES.

Did I think anything of it? Not really. I don't even think he let me play it. It was just a game, in my eyes. The music was good and catchy, but it wasn't anything special. It was that game based on that lion movie. Nothing more, nothing less.

Not long after that, I moved far away. I actually did not find it too difficult to leave the past behind me—more than likely, that was because I was so young. I had long forgotten all about the Lion King, until I started seeing advertisements on TV for the Lion King 1 1/2. Why they resorted to using proper fractions is beyond me, but I digress.

It was at that point, when, if I remember correctly, I watched all three of the movies. No, I did not cry at Mufasa’s death. In fact, I don’t really remember much about the movie at all. Only one thing stood out to me, and that was Hakuna Matata.

You see, my stress tolerance is abysmal. It always has been. Even back then when I was in the fourth or fifth grade (which I was, at that time), I used to worry about a lot of things, and even back then, it would interfere with my happiness. It’s not like I’ve had a difficult life. I really haven’t, and that’s not what this is about. But, that one song really helped me to live with it. The problem free philosophy was something that I really took to heart.

Heck, even to this day, I still remember the exact thing that I was worried about while I was watching the movie. Had it not been for Hakuna Matata, I probably would have gone insane by now.

But, back then, I totally denied all of that. I told myself it was just another movie. In time, it became just another movie, even though it had so much of an impact on the way I thought about life.

So, after that, a few more years passed. Occasionally, a few things would remind me of The Lion King, on very rare occurances. Every time, I would simply put it off to the side, and ignore it. Oh, yeah, that movie, I would think to myself. Now that I look back, it was almost like I was trying to avoid thinking about it, but I have no idea why.

But then, there was one day, about four or five years after that, when I was reminded of it. It was in my freshman Earth Science class. Sometimes when we would work, my teacher would put on music. Of course, one of the songs just had to be Hakuna Matata.

It was at that moment when I began to realize that something must have been wrong with me. Just listening to that song sent chills down my spine, although I knew it shouldn't have. That rarely happens to me, if ever. I thought I was nuts. I told myself it was just my imagination.

Yeah. I ignored it again, that time.

About a year after that, I was talking to a friend, and he made a Pumbaa fart joke referencing The Lion King. After not seeing the movie in so many years, I didn’t understand what he was referring to. So, of course, he showed me a video on YouTube, and explained his reference. Wouldn’t you know, it was Hakuna Matata.

For some odd reason or another, it was almost painful to watch. Simba looked so depressed and hopeless, but the song was so happy and carefree. I knew half the lyrics, and almost found it difficult not to sing along, which is not something I would typically never do.

Again, I tried to ignore it. I tried to pretend like it was just my imagination. I couldn't even watch the whole video because it gave me too many feels.

The next time I heard about The Lion King, it was over the internet. I was reading someone's rant about something, when three words caught my eye: Lion King Fandom.

Now, at this point, I was around 17 years old. I had been around the internet long enough to know that there is a fandom for just about anything. Yet, despite this, it still amused me that The Lion King had its own fan base. Wasn't that a kid's movie? I laughed about it, and decided to move on.

But I didn’t move on, thankfully. At that point, curiosity had got the best of me. After a few days, I decided to figure out what was so special about the movie, once and for all.

I found the movie on YouTube, and I watched the opening scene of it. It was really nothing all that worthy of my attention. Feeling rather relieved at the end of the Circle of Life sequence, I stopped and decided that I had other things to do.

It was just a movie, I again thought. There wasn't anything special about it. So I returned to my life, as normal. Nothing to see here.

I still couldn't give it up, though. I tried to forget about it, but a few months later, I found what was unmistakably TLK fan art.

I wasn't looking for it. I just stumbled upon it, and I looked at it for a minute...

One of the cubs was very clearly Simba, but there was another, lighter one, sitting beside him. I had no idea who she was. I thought she may have been a fan character, or a character from TLK 2 or TLK 1 1/2.

You know what happens when I don't know things, right? I look for answers. I can't help it; that's just what I do.

So, I just had to figure out the name of this other happy, rambunctious little cub. Where did this take me? Back to YouTube, of course. I was reminded again that I needed to watch this movie.

After about a week, that was what I did. I started watching clips of scenes, just so that I could figure out who the creamy-colored cub was. I still didn't feel like watching the whole thing, so I settled with little bits and pieces to satisfy my curiosity. I thought I was just feeling a little nostalgic, and I thought it would go away after a few minutes.

Boy, was I wrong.

Of course, you guys know what actually happened. As I started watching scenes from all three movies, I realized something. TLK wasn't just a kid's movie. There was a lot going on, and it was actually very entertaining in a way that I never would have expected.

I had to watch more. I had to see the whole thing to understand it all. There was no stopping it.

So, I watched the entire movie from beginning to end.

At that point, I was addicted. I was beyond addicted. I was having a very crappy week, that week. I was bored, stressed, and overall rather confused with myself. An hour and a half later, I suddenly had a new perspective on many things.

My eyes were watery nearly the entire time. Every scene completely pulled my heart out and twisted it around. That’s very unusual for a person like me. I didn't even know I was capable of feeling such things.

To put it simply, it was such an intense experience, that I just had to watch it again. I began to think about it all day. I couldn’t help it.

So, I inevitably watched it again, just to let it sink in. Again, I couldn't wrap my mind around it. So I watched it again. And again, and again, and again.

All of that happened just days before the release of TLK 3D in theaters. When it premiered, I was right smack in the midst of that "OMFG I can't breathe because TLK is such a good movie" phase.

Unfortunately, I never saw it in 3D during its two-week run, and I immediately regretted that decision. To this day, not skipping my evening chemistry lecture to watch it in theaters was by far the worst decision of my entire life, so far.

And that was where MLK came in. MLK was one of the first websites I found, besides the Wiki and lionking.org, which hosted more information on TLK than I knew what to do with.

Being totally addicted to TLK during that time, I couldn't help but want to blabber on about how deep I thought the movie was and how much I loved it, and all that. So, in less than three weeks after I first watched TLK, I joined this forum...

And I've been making really long posts ever since. It's all gone downhill from there.

[SimbasMate]

When I was about five years old, that was the first time I saw The Lion King. Unfortunately, TLK was already in theaters before I was even born. So I never got the opportunity to see it then. So back in the good old days of SM's cubby years, my mother always would drop me and my younger brother at her house for a while. In my grandmother's room, there used to be a very big cabinet that stood near her closet door. It had two doors, and once you opened them, viola: a huge collection of VHS tapes sat upon the shelves in the cabinet. It was like a movie lover's heaven in there. My grandmother had tons of movies, from Disney to Pixar, to non-animated movies, such as The Sound of Music and Titanic.

So in this cabinet of movieness, I'd always pick out TLK to watch while I was visiting my grandmother. She had a TV with a built in VHS player (not everyday you see those anymore, eh? ) and I'd always go grab some cookies from the cookie jar and pop in TLK. ^^

I don't remember the very first time I watched TLK. All I can remember is that this movie has been so helpful to me in more ways than one, and I have loved it ever since I was a kid. I can also remember very vividly of myself getting so excited whenever I Just Can't Wait To Be King came on. I'd jump on my bed like Simba and Nala were jumping about near those elephant's feet in the scene. That was my favorite scene in the movie, and still my favorite whenever I watch TLK.

The years went on, and I grew up. I don't recall watching TLK as much as I had when I was in the ages of 10-12. Not sure what I was obsessed with then, but that time doesn't really matter because it wasn't until I was 14 I decided to watch TLK again. And as many others have said, once I re-watched it, I realized I still loved this movie. Thus, began again.. my TLK obsession.

TLK has been there for me so much. I remember going through a traumatic childhood event, and I would pop in TLK once again when I would have memories of this certain event. I think that TLK had helped me along in this specific event by the lessons Simba teaches. He loses his father, he thinks it's his fault. He runs away from his problems, and then he finds out that you really can't just run away from the problems that you haven't solved yet, because they are always going to be there no matter what until you finally grow a pair and face them. I know now that I have had this problem in my face a lot. I tend to run away from what I have to face, and I find sometimes I am very afraid to face them. But once I finally get some good advice from my monkey shamans, I realize that facing problems and solving them is something we are all going to have to do in life, and more than once. It's life and crap happens in life. It isn't going to do you any good to run away from what you must face.

I think I may have gotten off topic here, but I really do tie my history with TLK and what I have learned from it together, because they are the same thing to me. If I never had a history with this movie, I honestly don't know who I'd be today. TLK has defined me so much, and I really am happy that I have this movie around, always.

I absolutely love this movie, and I always will. I am a proud Lion King fan, and I will be forevermore.

[DGFone]

I really like how my story with the Lion King began: It began with a visit to the dentist's, many years ago... (Okay, maybe not that many.) I've explained some stuff here, but I will get into more detail in this post

So to begin: Yes, The Lion King was one of those movies I saw when I was very young, and I enjoyed it a lot, but for a long time, it was just another movie. and that was that. The only thing I really remembered back then was that I really likes the Elton John version of Can You Feel The Love Tonight, but not much else.

So this is where the dentist comes in: As a form of patient comfort, I got to pick an audio cassette tape (yes, that long ago - CD players were still quite new, and MP3 players didn't even exist) from a collection of several. Looking over the list, let's just say that I didn't recognize anything but the soundtrack for The Lion King. Deciding not to gamble with a bad choice, I went with the Lion King tape. Because I knew that song the best, I replayed Elton John's Can You Feel The Love Tonight over and over again. The cleaning ended and I left, without giving the event much thought.

It actually took a second visit to the dentist (half a year later), when I chose the same cassette again. I liked it alright the first time around, and I still had no clue what the other options were. Except that this time, I inserted the tape on the wrong side and didn't get the same song as before. For that matter, I didn't get any songs at all, for it was the side with the score on it. I liked the music, and I remembered some of it, but only a little. What I do remember clearly though was really liking a particular segment of music, which unfortunately, I didn't know the name of it, and in the pre-YouTube days, I had no way of looking for it on my own. Not knowing the name of the score made things a lot better in the end, in my opinion, because for many years, I would on several occasions search for this short piece of music.

Thought out the years after that, I would try to find out what that short segment was, but it took a few years for YouTube to come along, so naturally, I didn't exactly put much effort into this prospect. A few times I listened to bits of the score, but that was about it. Although I believe around this time I somehow got a copy of King of Pride Rock onto a family laptop. This comes back about two years later:

Around 2007, family and I were on a summer vacation in Idaho, and one night I was looking for music to place on my new Ipod. I was looking for a specific song from Tiberian Sun (Time Bomb) when I saw on the laptop the song, King of Pride Rock. With a thought of "Why not?", I put it on the Ipod. The next day we went on a very hard but great day hike in Yellowstone, and on the way back, I listened to King of Pride Rock, and whoa, did I love it. I think the thunderstorm at the same time had something to do with it. That night, despite a very bad internet connection, I went and downloaded obtained Under The Stars. Ended being that the end of this song was the very segment that I was looking for all these years!

So when we got home, the first thing I did was look up the entire soundtrack on YouTube, and I loved all of it. But the thing is that I still didn't really "love: The Lion King. I only had two songs on my Ipod, and would occasionally listen to the rest on the interwebs, but that was largely it.

I don't remember exactly how it happened, but around mid 2010, I stumbled across some Lion King fanfiction, and it was then that I really wanted to see it again. I don't remember if I watched the movie online or not, but from then on, I was hooked.

Also at that time, I started working on my big non-school project: I was learning Blender so that I can make my own F-18, the very one you can see in my Avatar. I knew that I didn't have enough free time for both expanding my TLKness and the F-18, so I decided to do one at a time. This was also when I discovered MLK, and so I made a deal with myself: When I release version 1.0 of the F-18, I will sign up for MLK. That's right: my MLK anniversary is also my F-18's birthday. Let's just say that this motivated me a lot into working hard and fast on the plane in my spare time (of which I mostly started as an excuse to spend more time on my computer, but actually did, ironically enough).

It took me over half a year to complete though. That entire time, I lurked on MLK. (Shut up!) Around this time I created my first avatar, as well as the signature that as of this post has never been changed. It basically came from the realization that in the TLK universe, the lions look up at the stars as gods/guardians, and yet us humans are placing satellites up into orbit, which look like stars from the ground, and of which many are made to look back at Earth. I thought it's a rather cool irony, and therefore made the signature using a screen-cap taken off the MLK database, a screenshot of a mod in FreeSpace 2 (for the stars and Earth), and a stock image of the Hubble Telescope. Yes, I know that thing doesn't point at Earth, but whatever.

So finally, on March 13th, 2011, with the last Ctrl + W (save shortcut in Blender), I finished the first version of my F-18, and right away created my account here on MLK.

And the rest, as they say, is History.

[Sarafina_]

When the special edition was released in 2003, I was nearly 5 years old. I got the VHS for Christmas, and loved it. Though I found Mufasa's death really scary... I remember I've read a childrens book about SP, but not seen it as a kid.

Then, a year ago, when we had singing tests in the music classes, one student was singing in other classroom and everyone else was watching TLK. I fell in love with it and I had to see it over and over again. I became a fan, I watched the sequels, started to draw TLK characters and now I have some kind of a collection too. I've been a fan for one year. It ain't a long time but I hope I will be a TLK fan rest of my life ^^