>>115333263You have to understand the timeline of events.
The Kimba accusations began as soon as the Lion King originally released in 1994. Kimba actually was a fairly recognizable character in media within the US at the point in time, as the english dub of his 1960s series would've been rerun regularly as cheap schedule filler. There was a significantly good chance that a 20-40 year old in the 90s who had watched cartoons when they were young would have encountered Kimba at some point in their childhood, even more so if they worked in the animation industry. I'm not even sure if the Roy Disney memo had come to light during the initial controversy, but I recall newspapers mentioning it in passing and even my older sister repeating it to me (not sure where she picked it up). At any rate, the Kimba accusation was widespread, so much so that it turns up in the Simpsons 2 or 3 years later.
The accusations pick up steam again in the late 00s, I believe because of the rise of clickbait media. I really can't think of better clickbait than "The Lion King is a ripoff", especially when most of your audience were too young to have heard the controversy back when it first arose. But you end up in a situation where the people writing the articles and the people reading them both have never seen any Kimba media, and the article creators are piecing shit together from what they can find through google imagesearch and youtube videos. I don't know if you've ever written a thesis or anything, but as long as an article is published or a video is available, even if its WRONG, then it is something you can cite as a source. That's why you have actual authors and professors using dubious sources and flimsy evidence in the YMS video, they've technically done nothing wrong academically.
And finally, another set of articles were created when the live action Lion King released, all of which were based on the previous articles from the 00s. Basically a game of telephone at that point.
