Film Trivia Fact Check: Can you feel the truth tonight about The Lion King’s biggest song?

The internet is filled with facts, both true and otherwise. In Film Trivia Fact Check, we’ll browse the depths of the web’s most user-generated trivia boards and wikis and put them under the microscope. How true are the IMDb Trivia pages? You want the truth? Can you handle the truth? We’re about to find out.

Claim: A few weeks before [The Lion King] opened, Sir Elton John was given a special screening. Noticing that the film’s love song had been left out, he successfully lobbied Jeffrey Katzenberg to put the song back. Later, “Can You Feel The Love Tonight” won him an Academy Award for Best Original Song. [Source: IMDb]

Rating: True

Context: The Lion King needs no introduction but gets one anyway. Still, “Circle Of Life” is not the centerpiece, Oscar-winning number on Elton John and Tim Rice’s stampeding soundtrack. That belongs to “Can You Feel The Love Tonight,” and of all the film’s numbers, it’s the one that Lion King co-director Rob Minkoff said had the “most diverse history” on a 1995 commentary track. It’s that “diverse history” that never stopped changing, its legend growing and shrinking with each telling. That’s the circle of life for you.

“Can You Feel The Love Tonight” had a difficult birth. On the 1995 Laserdisc commentary (later unceremoniously dumped and hidden on the 2011 Diamond Edition Blu-ray), Minkoff claims that lyricist Tim Rice, a frequent collaborator of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Elton John, wrote some 18 versions of the lyrics. Meanwhile, Disney’s team of animators struggled to find the right way to present the unabashed romance of the track. The process reveals the tricky balance of talking animal movies: How to represent chaste desire between creatures that don’t express emotions with their faces like humans, all in a way that won’t disgust and alienate children. 

“At times, we had the whole thing with their mouths open on screen; at times, we had Pumbaa and Timon sing the whole song, which was really funny,” Minkoff says. This latter idea was the version Disney first screened for Elton John, and he was not amused. “Elton said, ’Wait a minute, you don’t understand. I always loved the point in Disney movies when the prince and the princess get to sing about how they feel about each other. I wrote this song thinking it was going to be a classic Disney love song.’”

Minkoff’s version paints a kinder picture of John’s reaction to Pumbaa’s baritone singing voice. In 2017, Ernie Sabella, who voiced Pumbaa, elaborated on what happened to his vocals in an interview with Cinemablend. “We recorded the whole song. It didn’t show up because Elton John said, ‘I don’t want a big, stinky warthog singing my love song!’”

John must have jettisoned this memory of a “big, stinky warthog” crooning his song. In his subsequent tellings of the story, “Can You Feel The Love Tonight” was excised entirely. In 2016, he recalled that he saw a finished version of The Lion King without the song and appealed to then-Disney studio head Jeffrey Katzenberg, questioning its whereabouts: “I said, ‘Jeffrey, what’s happened to the song?’” Katzenberg told John that the filmmakers couldn’t find the right place for it, but he eventually acquiesced. Katzenberg picked the song up from the cutting room floor and found a spot for it at the end of the second act. In later interviews with John, Katzenberg gets cut from the tale. 

“The whole Disney team came down to Atlanta and showed me a rough cut of the nearly finished film, and there was no ‘Can You Feel The Love Tonight,’” John said in 2024. “So I asked, ‘Where’s “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?”‘ And they go, ‘Well, we just couldn’t find a place for it,’ and I go, ‘It’s a love song. Every Disney animation film has a great love song. You really ought to reconsider this.’”

In the end, John was right. The love song made the cut, it still featured a bit of Timon and Pumbaa bookending the scene, and the circle of life spun on. “Can You Feel The Love Tonight” reached number four on the Billboard charts and won a Grammy and an Academy Award, setting John a course for his EGOT completion in 2024. However, Sir John does not consider “Can You Feel The Love Tonight” The Lion King’s signature song. That still belongs to the “Circle Of Life.” 

“Because it’s the song of The Lion King,“ John said. “The Lion King starts, and you hear the ‘Circle Of Life,’ and you think of The Lion King. To me, that’s the song that makes The Lion King, but I’m not going to complain.” Well, unless a warthog gets caught singing it.