Film Theory: Did Scar EAT Mufasa? (The Lion King)

hold up so mufasa dies right but what happens to his body hyenas don't usually eat lions and there's no other animal that eats them except other lions so watch this scene one more time is that you don't think wtf so that means tick tock did it check talk already did it hello internet welcome to film theory the show that just can't wait for you to smash that subscribe button to help us get over the 10 million subscriber mark you know disney's original lion king is one of the greatest animated movies ever made heck it is probably one of the greatest movies ever made period animated or otherwise and one of the reasons it's so great is that the story it tells is extremely simple and straightforward there's a kingdom there's a good king a son in line to succeed him an uncle who'd like to succeed him a murder plot a lot of guilt and a lot of growing up to restore balance it's tragic but triumphant epic but intimate and there's not a whole lot else no stupid b plots no extraneous characters no awkwardly shoehorned in merchandising opportunities or universe building cameos there's just no fat on this one which leaves pretty little room to theorize since by the end the bones are picked clean but speaking of bones recently a new theory is cropped up on the internet tick tock specifically suspecting that the lion king might be holding a dark secret in plain sight and no it's not the leaves in the wind spelling out some secret message wait what do they say pause the video matt pat is king wow who knew that a 1994 disney classic would have so much respect for me no friends today online theorists are asking the question that no one ever thought they needed an answer for what happened to mufasa's body after he died namely did scar eat his dead brother ladies and gentlemen bear those teeth and ambitions because it's morty time leave your theories in the comments below i'll pick my favorites in the next episode of morty i am so glad that we're trying to make this a thing now okay so here's the breakdown in january of this year the tick tockers classy king zero and not alexis lol presented an incredibly compelling theory that really got the internet's brains working here's what they noticed in the movie mufasa dies by falling from a cliff during a wildebeest stampede simba discovers his father's dead body not realizing that evil uncle scar was the one that caused the entire situation scar convinces him that he'll be blamed for the quote-unquote accident and that he should flee then sends his three main hyena henchmen to chase him down which they fail to do because no one is good at their freaking jobs not even in the animal kingdom come back editors come back i didn't mean you you guys are great you guys are great the last time we see mufasa's physical body scar is standing next to it while simba and the hyenas run away scar returns to tell the rest of pride rock that mufasa and simba are both dead which apparently they accept without question despite the fact that scars sounds like the most obviously evil guy of all time why quiver with fear now scar don't look at me that way anyway fast forward through some coming-of-age business eating bugs blah blah blah never really liked the timon and pumba section to be honest forget akuna matata nine-year-old matpat was all about the political intrigue anyway about 48 minutes into the movie we get our first cut back to the pride lands so we can see how poorly things are going under scar's rule i feel like most people probably remember this scene for this bit sing something with a little bumps in it it's a small world after all oh no anything but that because disney doing self-parody at the time was new as opposed to something they do literally every movie now but what these tick-tackers call out in their short little mini theory is scar picking his teeth with some bones and playing around with a large skull that as they imply via google image search looks very much like a lion skull add to that the fact that hyenas apparently don't tend to eat lions but other lions do and you've suddenly got yourself the connection that suggests something much more sinister they think that the skull is actually that of mufasa himself and that it's evidence that scar not only killed his brother but cannibalized the evidence and kept his bones as a trophy now that's nasty but is it true well we asked the world's top experts online behavior but those people are really expensive so instead we looked it up on the internet which is free and probably just as good so let's start by looking beyond just the headlines presented to us in this tick tock forgive me if i'm a wee bit skeptical of the evidence here being a one-line summary from the google result of a mental floss article the theory here really hinges on three main details one that hyenas don't eat lions two that lions eat lions and three that this is indeed a lion skull so first do hyenas eat lions well despite the fact that classy king's text says that hyenas don't usually eat lions the article he's showing in the background doesn't say that at all in fact that whole article says nothing about whether or not a hyena will eat a lion instead what he's highlighted in his tick tock is talking about hyenas eating lion leftovers i.e whether hyenas follow lions around to eat the remnants of their meals which fun fact they do but it's not as common as media would lead you to believe yes hyenas are scavengers but they also get the vast majority of their food by hunting for themselves and that is why you don't believe disney movies or tick tockers but okay still doesn't address the question would hyenas eat a dead lion and the answer to that is yes yes they absolutely would to them meat is meat is meat based on all of my research spotted hyenas which is the species that we see in the lion king they're not picky eaters they're willing and eager to eat everything from zebras to birds to reptiles to bugs heck they're even capable of eating rotten meat without getting sick hyenas are pretty much garbage disposals with legs as such a fresh lion carcass would be the equivalent of a steak dinner for them so already it's highly likely that if presented with opportunity the hyenas would absolutely have eaten mufasa but here's the twist if they had you wouldn't know it you see hyenas practice osteophagy they eat bones animals do this to supplement their diet with calcium and phosphorus that their bodies might be lacking and for hyenas they leave no part of their meal wasted with strong biting jaws and highly acidic stomachs that are able to break down bone efficiently a pack of hyenas can entirely devour a 400 pound zebra 180 kilograms in less than 25 minutes leaving behind nothing well nothing but red stains on the ground so while yes they would have eaten mufasa gladly the fact that his bones might still be around imply that maybe they didn't which brings us to question number two would a lion eat another lion in the tick tock we see classy kings google search for what animals eat lions what's hidden behind those search result drop downs though are the actual results and i'm here to show em to ya the top search result comes from what eats.com where we see the following quote right there in the evidence box quote lions have almost no predators however old sick lions are sometimes attacked killed and eaten by hyenas which flies directly in the face of the earlier observation in the tick tock about hyenas man and people try to accuse me of skewing the facts in order to fit my theories tick-tock you shameless anyway while the evidence of a mufasa hyena feast keeps stacking up digging deeper into the facts you see that no lions in fact do not tend to eat other lions except in the most extreme of circumstances in fact this question was asked of derek and beverly zhu bear wildlife documentarian studying lions on the podcast fresh air but if a lion kills a lion will the lion eat no the lion will not eat um another lion and in fact often the lions won't even eat other predators so if they kill a hyena they won't eat it either unless they are in absolute uh desperate times you know maybe at death's door uh lions really don't um have to eat other predators but i mean if they're dead already they still won't eat them no they don't and you know you can trust them they have british accents the reason why is that it just doesn't yield a reward versus effort food ratio that makes it worth hunting one another lions are violent creatures that are hard to kill why put yourself at risk trying to eat one when you can just try and chase down another helpless zebra as far as i can tell cannibalism in lions is very very rare only happening in cases of desperate hunger and almost never with an adult male consuming another adult male more often it's sometimes with lions killing and eating the cubs of a rival which again doesn't really help us in the case of mufasa's missing body the most famous case of lion cannibalism actually came with the mapago brothers a group of six male lions who over the course of 16 years just roamed around a massive south african national park declaring their dominance by killing off entire prides they were like the biker gang of apex predators if this was the walking dead they'd be like the savior's gang the six members of the mapago brothers even had names there was the leader makulu rasta pretty boy kinky tail mr t who pitied the fool and wouldn't you know it but none other than scar but despite our theory today it was mr t who was the cannibal of the bunch eating young cubs from rival prides but again a super rare instance and not an adult male eating another adult male also just to throw this in here as a side note a later scene in the tik tok theory shows the quote that kinky tale one of the mapago six was eventually killed and eaten by a rival tribe of lions i looked into that blog post the writer and the death of kinky tale which is part of a larger documentary on that exact lion pack and there is actually no evidence of the lion being eaten even the author of the blog walks back his language in a comment on the post itself so i'd take that one with a hefty grain of salt but who knows maybe scar the movie lion and not the south african lion bully just really is that vindictive that he wants to dunk on his dead royal brother by dunking his brother's body in stomach acid which leaves us with our third and final question is that even a lion's skull in the scene no zero for three on this one tic toc theory you see lion classification is pretty simple in the fact that there's only one species of lion out there the panthera leo and from there they've historically only been two subspecies african lions and asian lions which was recently reorganized a bit but still fairly simple breakdown and because of that the skulls of lions all tend to look the same relatively short muzzle large nasal cavities big orbital holes for the eyes i'll admit the skull in the movie does at first glance looks similar to the google image results for lion's skull but we're also talking about a second or two of footage from a tick tock anything could look similar in that amount of time look closer and you see that the muzzle of the skull in the movie is a lot longer than mufasa's muzzle but that's splitting hairs or splitting lion noses i guess the real kicker here is the teeth lions have three types of teeth incisors small teeth at the front of the mouth for ripping and tearing big canine teeth those long sharp teeth that are used as weapons to capture and kill prey and a third type of tooth called the carnassial large modified molar teeth found in the back of the mouth which work like scissors to cut the large chunks of meat into smaller bits it's actually a lesson that i taught oliver the other day carnivores tend to have sharp teeth because they need to rip and tear meat herbivores have flat teeth for grinding plants and what do we see in the skull that scar is holding sure there's one big canine in there but everything else is a lot of small flat teeth with two oversized incisors at the front of the mouth notice that there's no secondary fangs no prominent bottom jaw and most notably of all none of those weirdly shaped carnassial teeth in the back for chopping meat now compare that skull with the skull of a primate like say a baboon notice the oversized front incisors the smaller flat molars towards the back of the mouth the overall longer muzzle that gives the entire skull a more elongated shape i don't know about you but that seems like a much closer match to what we're seeing biologically in short our tick tock theory stood upon three major points and not a single one of them panned out not one hyenas will eat dead lions lions will attack and chew but tend not to eat other adult lions even when in territorial disputes and the skull we're seeing probably isn't even a lion's skull any way you slice it this theory is done plus even if we ignore all of that and assume scar did try to eat mufasa he wouldn't have been able to do it all at once even the largest male lions will typically only eat about 16 pounds 7.25 kilos of food in a day in reality lion packs will sometimes stay close to a kill for a decent amount of time to fend off scavengers until they've completely finished it in other words scar couldn't have sat down and gobbled up his big bro on the dl before jetting off to pride rock to make himself the new king he'd have to have done it over the course of several days but our last bit of evidence against this theory comes not from science but from the story here's the thing the reason we can even do something like this for a 20 plus year old disney cartoon about talking lions and not for a lot of other talking animal movies what do you want i want you to go out and kill kill kill uh earbud was a lot darker than i remember is that lion king actually has a philosophical core to what happens in the movie everything you see exists together in a delicate balance when we die our bodies become the grass and the antelope eat the grass and so we are all connected in the great circle of life that is barely 20 seconds of dialogue from the great james earl jones and it is some heavy stuff for a kids movie but mufasa isn't just hanging a lampshade on the whole yeah we totally ate like half those guys in the front row from that christening after the elton john song but he's also setting up the transcendental naturalism of this movie's story the philosophy that we have to accept death as a part of life because it's a part of the overall natural life cycle he's describing nature as a cyclical food chain positioning the proper death for apex predators like himself and simba as becoming the grass which just so we're on the same page here actually means that they become fertilizer for the grass after their bodies are eaten by vultures insects worms and well anything else that wants a crack at him or you know his dead carcass just rots away in the hot sun of the african serengeti think about that for your childhood hero in other words mufasa's view of how the circle of life is supposed to work wouldn't just be that his dying is natural but that his being eaten after dying is natural too maybe not by his jerk brother ideally but by something however the whole second and third act plot of the lion king hinges strongly on the implication that his murder is such a fundamental violation to the proper order of the pride lands that it actually puts nature and the world itself out of balance symbolically that balance begins to be restored not when simba defeats scar but when scar himself gets eaten go back and watch the ending again rain the number one thing you need not only to put out the dramatic final battle fire but also to restore life after a drought doesn't technically return when simba wins it only comes after scar himself gets eaten by the hyenas oh wait there's a lion getting eaten by a hyena forgot to put that moment in your tik-tok theory huh now again this is magical realism in action so it's not exactly proof of anything but if we were to extrapolate a specific mechanic to all of this we could infer that not only did scar not eat mufasa but maybe nobody did that being murdered far away from where his body could be a part of that symbolic natural cycle of life literally broke the chain in the circle of life itself and it isn't fully restored until scar takes his place literally and figuratively in the stomachs of his own hyena foot soldiers or maybe we're just overthinking it the point is this any which way to sunday we're gonna call this theory debunked there's just no real proof here in the movie's text the weird meta text or the actual signs to support the idea that scar ate mufasa and all we had to do to prove it was one remind you to double check everything you see on tick tock and two that everyone else in this beloved family classic movie is eventually going to gruesomely devour each other in one way or another happy ending but hey that's just a theory a film theory and cuts you

Channel: The Film Theorists

Views: 3,323,160

Rating: 4.9427152 out of 5

Keywords: lion king, disney, lion king theory, disney theory, lion king remakeboot, j cole lion king, the lion king, lion king full movie, lion king songs, lion king on ice, simba, mufasa, nala, scar, be prepared song, circle of life song, disney lion king, lion king disney, film theory, film theorists, matpat, lion king 2019, the lion king 2019

Id: CaYU9fpG_nM

Length: 16min 5sec (965 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 01 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/bishopbane]

Not sure if I remember this correctly but I think Adum already mentioned this in one of the twitch lion king edit highlight video...

Oh great granslamander if you hear my call I BEYcon you to look through your archive and link the proof.

[u/sjrslev]

I think Adam said something similar to this when asked why scar didn't just eat Simba. Scar wouldn't eat Simba or Mufasa because the lionesses would be able to smell it.

[u/TamimtheKA]

Vore

Vore

[u/GrandSalamancer]

I've heard this one before. I'm not surprised MatPat is scraping the bottom of the barrel again.

[u/Pavloskar]

If look closely you'll see there is a question mark on the thumbnail

[u/P13R4T]

OP beat me to it, for some reason I can’t post any links :(

[u/magearon]

Except that's clearly a baboon skull

[u/silver16x]

Oh please don't vore me daddy scar

[u/Jack_Hoffa]

mmm… vore.