Uncle John’s Slightly Irregular Bathroom Reader (20 page)

And then what happened? Turn to
page 228
.

Light snack: Americans eat about 95 million pounds of marshmallows every year.

Over the years we’ve reported how Disney animators massaged, rewrote, censored, and sanitized classic fables and fairy tales for mass audiences. But this is the first time we’ve ever heard of them “borrowing” so much of another artist’s work. Did they? Or was it just a coincidence?

I
NSPIRATION

In 1950 a Japanese artist named Osamu Tezuka created
Jungle Taitei
(
Jungle Emperor
), a story about an orphaned lion cub who is destined to rule the animals in Africa. From 1950 to 1954 it was a Japanese comic book series, and in 1965 Tezuka turned it into Japan’s first color animated television series. The following year, all 52 episodes were released in the United States under the name
Kimba the White Lion
. Over the next few years,
Kimba
enjoyed some success in syndication, mostly on local or regional TV stations, and Tezuka freely acknowledged that the work of Walt Disney—
Bambi
in particular—was an inspiration for the story of his lion hero.

In 1994, nearly 30 years after the creation of
Kimba
and five years after Tezuka’s death in 1989, Disney released its feature-length animated film
The Lion King
—about an orphaned lion cub destined to rule the animals in Africa.

FALSE PRIDE

Officially, the executives and animators at Disney denied they had ever even heard of
Kimba
. But fans of the original
Kimba the White Lion
were incensed with the many similarities they found between the two projects. A group of more than a thousand animators in Japan sent a petition to Disney asking the studio to acknowledge its debt to the original series. Disney refused, citing only
Bambi
and Shakespeare’s play
Hamlet
as influences.

Walt Disney reportedly met Tezuka at the 1964 New York World’s Fair and mentioned that he someday hoped to make something similar to Tezuka’s earlier creation,
Astro Boy
. But Disney died in 1966, 28 years before
The Lion King
was made. If he really was a fan of Tezuka’s work, would he have approved of the project?

COPYCAT

Hot flash: 7% of people say they get heartburn every day.

Some of the most striking similarities between
The Lion King
and
Kimba the White Lion
:

•
The main characters’ names are remarkably similar: Simba and Kimba.

•
Both are orphaned as cubs and destined to become rulers.

•
Each lost their father in treacherous circumstances.

•
In
The Lion King
, Simba turns to a wise but eccentric baboon (named Rafiki) for guidance. In
Kimba the White Lion
, Kimba turns to a wise but eccentric baboon (named Dan’l Baboon) for guidance.

•
One of Simba’s friends is a hysterical yet comical bird (named Zazu). One of Kimba’s friends is a hysterical yet comical bird (named Polly).

•
Simba has a cute girlfriend cub named Nala. Kimba has a cute girlfriend cub named Kitty.

•
Simba’s chief nemesis is Scar, an evil lion with a scar over his left eye. Kimba’s primary nemesis is Claw, an evil one-eyed lion with a scar over his blind left eye.

•
In
The Lion King
, Scar enlists the aid of three hyenas (Shenzi, Banzai, and Ed). In
Kimba the White Lion
, Claw enlists the aid of two hyenas (Tib and Tab).

•
Kimba and Simba each speak to the spirit of their father, who appears in the clouds.

•
The image of Simba standing on Pride Rock in
The Lion King
is almost identical to an image of Kimba as a grown lion, standing on a jutting rock surveying his kingdom in
Kimba the White Lion
.

CAT FIGHT

Disney may have “borrowed” the idea, but they were legally protected. Mushi Productions, the company that made
Kimba the White Lion
, went bankrupt in 1973 and U.S. rights to the show ran out in 1978. That means
Kimba
was in the public domain. Someone tried to release it to home video in the U.S. in 1993, but was delayed by a lawsuit from an undisclosed company. At the same time, details of Disney’s new movie began to surface. In an online chat in 1993, Roy Disney mentioned Kimba, the lead character in Disney’s next animated film,
The Jungle King
. (
Kimba
’s original English title was
The Jungle Emperor
.)

Time
magazine was originally going to be named
Facts
.

Random bits of interesting information from the BRI files
.

10 Highest-Scoring Words in Scrabble

1. Bezique

2. Cazique

3. Jazzily

4. Quartzy

5. Quetzal

6. Quizzed

7. Zephyrs

8. Zincify

9. Zinkify

10. Zythums

6 Things That Can Kill Dracula

1. Sunlight

2. Garlic

3. Crucifix

4. Holy water

5. Wooden stake

6. Silver

9 Most Common U.S. Town Names

1. Fairview

2. Midway

3. Oak Grove

4. Franklin

5. Riverside

6. Centerville

7. Mount Pleasant

8. Liberty

9. Salem

7 Things Invented by Canadians

1. Snowmobile

2. Washing machine

3. Zipper

4. Plastic garbage bag

5. Foghorn

6. Electric range

7. Paint roller

5 Songs About Fruit

1. “Banana Boat Song”
(Harry Belafonte)

2. “Blueberry Hill”
(Fats Domino)

3. “Cherry Cherry”
(Neil Diamond)

4. “Lemon Song”
(Led Zeppelin)

5. “Little Green Apples”
(O.C. Smith)

6 Vegetables That Are Really Fruits

1. Cucumber 2. Okra

3. Eggplant 4. Tomato

5. Pumpkin 6. Squash

4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse

1. Pestilence 2. War

3. Famine 4. Death

9 Jackson Siblings

1. Michael 2. Janet

3. LaToya 4. Rebbie

5. Marlon 6. Randy

7. Tito 8. Jackie

9. Jermaine

7 Types of Triangles

1. Equilateral

2. Isosceles

3. Scalene

4. Right

5. Acute

6. Obtuse

7. Oblique

11 Wars Involving U.S.

1. Revolutionary War

2. War of 1812

3. Mexican War

4. Civil War

5. Spanish-American War

6. World War I

7. World War II

8. Korean War

9. Vietnam War

10. Persian Gulf War

11. Operation Iraqi Freedom

Dromomania
is an abnormal impulse to travel.

Does the name Howard Schultz ring a bell? He’s the guy who figured out how to get you to pay $4.50 for a 75¢ cup of coffee
.

T
ALL ORDER

In the early 1980s, a Swedish plastics company called Hammarplast sold plastic coffee filters that fit over a thermos. One day in 1981, one of the company’s salesmen, 27-year-old Howard Schultz, happened to notice that a small Seattle coffee roasting company called Starbucks Coffee, Tea and Spice bought more of the filters than the entire Macy’s department store chain did. Why?, Schultz wondered. And who would bother making coffee using such a tedious method when an automatic drip coffeemaker could do it all at the push of a button?

Schultz was so intrigued that he made a trip out to Seattle just to have a look at the company. He visited Starbucks’ retail store in the historic Pike Place Market, where they sold fresh-roasted coffee beans by the pound and coffee-making supplies...but no coffee drinks or any other beverages by the cup. Schultz took a tour of the roasting plant and met the company’s co-founders, Jerry Baldwin and Gordon Bowker. He also drank some of the darkest, strongest, best-tasting coffee he’d ever had.

A FRESH START

Schultz decided right then that he wanted to work for Starbucks; but convincing Baldwin and Bowker to hire him took a little more time. It wasn’t until about a year later, when they were planning to open the company’s sixth store and the first one outside of Seattle, that they agreed to take Schultz on as director of retail operations and marketing. Even then he had a vision of building Starbucks into a regional and later a national chain, but like Baldwin and Bowker, he saw the company as a retailer of coffee
beans
that people would buy to make coffee in their own homes.

Then in the spring of 1983, Schultz made a trip to Milan, Italy, to attend an international housewares convention. He decided to walk from his hotel to the convention center. On the way he passed four coffee bars, each one of them overflowing with people who were lined up to buy espressos, cappuccinos, lattes, mochas, and other exotic drinks.

Number of Starbucks in Chicago’s O’Hare Int’l Airport (2004): 15. In all of South Dakota: 6.

SOMETHING BREWING

Schultz had already noticed that customers who were new to premium coffee got intimidated just standing in a Starbucks store—how many people could tell the difference between Sumatra coffee and Arabian mocha java, between Italian roast and French roast? Even Schultz was a newcomer. In the week he spent in Milan he drank his very first espresso and his very first latte.

Schultz came to realize that espresso bars were the means by which he could reach beyond Starbucks’ traditional, narrow clientele of coffee connoisseurs to a much larger customer base: people who’d never tasted really good coffee before and had no idea what they were missing. By serving
cups
of coffee and giving people a place to drink it, Starbucks stores could become a lot more than just a place to buy coffee beans. They could serve as a “third place,” as Schultz liked to call it, a place outside of the home and the workplace or school, where people could hang out and enjoy a coffee just as if they were in an espresso bar in Italy.

If Shultz had a hard time convincing Baldwin and Bowker to hire him, convincing them to sell coffee by the cup was an even bigger challenge. It took him a year just to get them to put a single espresso machine in the company’s sixth store when it opened for business in downtown Seattle in April 1984. By June that store was averaging 800 customers a day compared to 250 a day at the other Starbucks locations; but even then Baldwin and Bowker refused to sell ready-to-drink coffee from the other stores. “We’re coffee roasters,” Jerry Baldwin told him. “I don’t want to be in the restaurant business.”

IL GIORNALE

In late 1985 Schultz quit his job at Starbucks and founded an espresso bar chain called Il Giornale, which he named after an Italian newspaper. The first Il Giornale opened for business in Columbia Center, Seattle’s tallest skyscraper, in April 1986.

So why isn’t the world’s largest espresso bar chain called Il Giornale? Because in 1987 Jerry Baldwin and Gordon Bowker decided to sell Starbucks. Schultz, who by now had opened three Il Giornales of his own, managed to raise the $3.8 million he needed to buy the six Starbucks stores and the roasting plant. He had a decision to make: Should he keep the Il Giornale name, or go back to Starbucks? He asked around for advice. Nobody knew how to pronounce Il Giornale, people told him, and they didn’t know how to spell it, either. Starbucks it was.

The South American basilisk lizard can run up to a quarter mile across the surface of water.

COFFEE BUZZ

Starbucks grew exponentially in the years that followed. By 1990 it had grown to 55 locations. The company went public in 1992, and by the end of the year it had 165 locations. Five years later it had 1,412 stores, and by the end of 2002 it had more than 5,800. As of September 2004 Starbucks has 7,569 stores in 31 different countries around the world. It made nearly $268 million in profits in 2003.

How fast is the company growing today? Every time a Starbucks barista finishes working an eight-hour shift, a new Starbucks has opened somewhere in the world, and the rate of growth is increasing. The company hopes to grow to 25,000 locations around the world in the next decade. Is that kind of growth even possible? Here’s a clue: Italy has a population of just under 58 million people or about one fifth the population of the United States. It has more than 200,000 coffee bars.