Few projects in Elton John’s long career have been as universally beloved – or as commercially successful – as Disney’s 1994 animated musical The Lion King.
The soundtrack, created in partnership with lyricist Tim Rice, earned Sir Elton his first Academy Award, gave Disney another instant-classic score during its early-’90s golden run, and went on to become one of the best-selling animated film soundtracks of all time. Yet for all the critical acclaim and global sing-alongs, one particular number nearly had Elton wondering if he’d taken a wrong turn somewhere in his career.
In the finished film, classic ‘Hakuna Matata’ is performed by Timon (Nathan Lane) and Pumbaa (Ernie Sabella) – a cheeky meerkat and a cheerfully oblivious warthog – as they introduce the philosophy of “no worries” to young Simba (voiced by Jonathan Taylor Thomas and later Matthew Broderick).
It’s playful, relentlessly catchy, and, for a generation of children, impossible to forget. But for the legendary singer-songwriter, first seeing the lyrics, it was something else entirely.
“I sat there with a line of lyrics that began, ‘When I was a young warthog,’” he told Time. “I thought, ‘Has it come to this?’”
It wasn’t the first time a pop artist had been asked to stretch their style for a film project – but fart jokes in a Disney ballad about a flatulent warthog was new territory.
In his memoir Me, Elton admitted he decided to approach it with a mix of humor and pride: “At the risk of being big-headed, I’m pretty sure that in a list of the greatest songs ever written about warthogs who fart a lot, mine would come in somewhere near the top.”
The irony is that Elton almost didn’t have the opportunity to write it at all. Before The Lion King, he had never scored a film or written for the stage, and Disney executives assumed he wouldn’t be interested.
“Funny thing is, when you get established, and you’re older, people get afraid to ask you to do things,” he told Famecrawler. “They say, ‘Oh, he won’t do that.’ Like when Tim Rice called me to do The Lion King in 1993, it changed the course of my career. [Tim said,] ‘Disney said you’d never do this. And you’re a friend of mine, and I told them you will.’ I said, ‘Tim, I’ve worked with you before. I love you. Of course, I’ll do it.’”
Beyond the awards – including the Oscar for ‘Can You Feel the Love Tonight?’ – the project unlocked new creative avenues for John. Speaking to Rolling Stone, he reflected: “It gave me the opportunity to write for the stage. It gave me more strings to my bow. Up until that point, I was just doing records, videos, and touring. Of course, nobody knew it was going to be this big.”