What's The Shocking Origins of Something Everyone LOVES?
Am I the Genius?
amithejerk.com
4.6 • 767 Ratings
🗓️ 25 May 2026
⏱️ 24 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | The Shocking Origin of Something That Everybody Loves |
| 0:04.0 | I met a writer named Thomas Deich when I was in college. |
| 0:08.0 | He wrote The Brave Little Toaster. |
| 0:10.0 | He told us Disney hired him to write a movie about lions. |
| 0:14.0 | He wanted to do King Lear with lions because the plot mirrored how lion prides operate. |
| 0:19.0 | Old, lazy but powerful male, dangerous daughters. But Disney |
| 0:23.2 | said they wanted a young hero, so he changed it to Hamlet with lions. Uncle kills father, |
| 0:28.8 | kid runs away, ghost of dad visits and calls for revenge, but with a happy ending, like Timon |
| 0:33.9 | Pumba, a Rosencratzen-Gildenstern. He wrote a nine-page treatment and turned it in. |
| 0:38.7 | They said thanks, but no thanks, and then fired him. The movie comes out. It's pretty clear they've |
| 0:43.4 | taken his idea and they didn't pay him. He said Disney was notorious for doing this to creators. |
| 0:49.1 | I read years later that he'd sadly taken himself off our mortal coil. I never think about the Lion King without thinking |
| 0:55.0 | about him. They made so much money off his idea and he got nothing. I'm not diving deep into big |
| 1:00.4 | authorship questions, I'm just passing on the story about how I remember it as he told it to us. |
| 1:04.9 | This was 25 years ago that we met him. All movies are collaborations. I don't think this defined his |
| 1:10.2 | life or that his ending was an outcome of Disney's poor treatment of him. |
| 1:14.1 | He told my creative writing class that story to teach us about the perils of writing creatively for corporate clients. |
| 1:19.9 | He wasn't super angry about it, just annoyed. He was a great writer and was still struggling financially when that happened. |
| 1:26.3 | The larger point is that he felt |
| 1:27.5 | exploited, and it sucks when big corporations don't share their profits with those who contribute. |
| 1:33.4 | Sherman Kelly wrote the lyrics to Dancing in the Moonlight while recovering from a violent |
| 1:37.7 | attack carried out on him and his girlfriend by a youth gang. He envisioned an alternative reality |
... |
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