Disney's box-office 'Lion King' made into TV series
By Vernon Scott
HOLLYWOOD (UPI): Seldom has successful cross-pollination of movies and TV been more apparent than in Disney's animated cartoons.
Previously it was the transition of the animated smash hit Aladdin from big screen to smash hit little screen series. The coming U.S. TV season will find two raucous, dim-witted characters from last year's Disney box-office triumph, The Lion King, starring in a syndicated series in the Saturday morning cartoon ghetto for the sand pile set.
Its stars are street-smart, self-important Timon, a bossy meerkat, and Pumbaa, a slow-witted, easygoing warthog. Together they provided the comic relief for The Lion King. They bring their Hakuna Matata (no worries) brand of madness to the new series this September in The Lion King's Timon and Pumbaa.
Ernie Sabella, the voice of happy-go-lucky Pumbaa, radiates the warthog's good nature if not his physical misfortunes. Pumbaa is to Timon what Art Carney was to Jackie Gleason, or Lou Costello to Bud Abbot, or Jerry Lewis to Dean Martin.
Timon's voice is provided by Nathan Lane whose own personality is sometimes inseparable from Timon's.
But it is the ebullient Sabella who does most of the talking for the duo.
Curiously, these contrasting performers are the closest of friends, a pair of competent New York stage actors who find sudden fame out of keeping with their previously muted acting careers.
Of the unaccustomed celebrity, Sabella says, "I love it, especially when the stewardesses in first class hand me an air phone and ask me to talk to their kids.
"We had no idea this would happen in 1992 when we auditioned for the parts. I thought we'd be fired. I told my agent, 'Don't get used to this. They'll use us for a few weeks and then they'll hire big stars for their voices.'
"Why not, with James L. Jones, Jeremy Irons and Whoopi Goldberg in the cast? Every voice was a big name, and then Ernie and Nathan?
"We never did voice-overs in our lives.
"We were doing Guys and Dolls on Broadway when they asked us to come in and read to play the hyenas. We improvised some dialog. When we were through (director) Roger Allers looked at me and said, 'You'll be hearing from me!'
"I thought, 'Yeah, right.'
"Nathan shared my doubts. Nathan and I have been best friends since 1976 when we got to know each other at auditions. We're both New Yorkers.
"Anyhow, that day with Disney we ran to the elevator, thinking they'd never call us again because we didn't read any of the lines for the hyenas. See, when we walked in we were shown the cartoon characters, but I didn't know one from the other. Neither did Nathan. But I started talking 'like this.'"
Sabella's voice rose to a gravely shriek that might be described as a cross between the wail of a turpentined cat and the screech of a wet and angry chimpanzee.
"Everybody laughed," Sabella said, "so I figured I was on the right track. When I saw the drawing of the warthog I didn't know what kind of noise an animal like that made. I just gave him a scratchy, excited, high-pitched voice.
"Nathan tells people he's just using his own voice for the meerkat. But he isn't, and the voice he uses makes me fall down and laugh. Who knows what a meerkat sounds like."
Sabella is convinced their friendship and easy familiarity helped win the jobs.
"We spent one or two days recording the voice about once a month for the next two years working in the New York studios.
"I'd say we ad-libbed at least half the time. They were delighted with our improvisations because so many of them worked. A lot of them didn't, but overall it played well."
Sabella chuckled. "It helped that I look like a warthog and Nathan looks like a meerkat.
"The writers were great about our ad-libs. They told us to 'jump off the page' whenever we wanted. We kept breaking ourselves up, and the directors in the booth were crying and howling with laughter.
"They gave us a song to sing, The Warthog Rhapsody, which is on the CD along with Hakuna Matata."
"The Lion King" changed the course of their lives, although it did little to enhance their bank accounts.
"It's really coffee money," Sabella said without rancor. "I told Nathan it's the best part-time job we ever had.
"About nine months before it was over we thought maybe they wouldn't be firing us after all.
"Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was chief of production at Disney at the time, grabbed us after the first screening and said, 'You guys saved our butt.'
"Even while we were making the movie Disney was thinking about the TV series. We're still not getting rich, but it could lead to other new things for Nathan and me, including some comedy movies where we'll be seen as well as heard."