It Could Always be Worse

If you've spent any time browsing through Lion King fan art, odds are you've seen drawings of a cub almost identical to Simba except for a tuft of mane on his head. This is Kopa, the son of Simba and Nala who appeared in a series of books published in 1994 that takes place after the events of The Lion King. He also appears in two lesser known audio dramas produced by the German recording company Karussell. Kopa was more or less "overwritten" when the direct-to-video sequel The Lion King II: Simba's Pride came out in 1998, when Simba and Nala's only cub was labelled as a female named Kiara.

A lot of fans have interpreted this lack of continuity as Kopa being cast aside or erased by Disney, often coming up with stories that lump the continuities of the books and Simba's Pride together, saying that Kopa was tragically killed before the beginning of Simba's Pride.

You may think this is the only case of the child of a Disney couple appearing at the end of a movie being pushed aside in favor of a completely different child of the opposite gender in a DTV sequel. However, as I found out very recently, it isn't.

I'm sure some of you have heard of the The Lady and the Tramp II: Scamp's Adventure, the 2001 sequel to the original 1955 The Lady and the Tramp, which stars Lady and Tramp's son Scamp and features his three sisters, Annette, Danielle and Colette (who weren't named in the movie itself, just the credits), as side characters. However, not many people are as familiar with the tie-in material for the original movie.

Several months after the release of TLATT, a series of newspaper comics began. These comics picked up where the first movie left off, and focused on Lady, Tramp and their four puppies, which appeared at the end of the movie. The gray pup was named Scamp (as he was in the sequel) and the three spaniel pups were named Fluffy, Ruffy and Scooter. Fluffy was prim and proper (much like her mother), Ruffy was a rough-and-tumble tomboy, Scooter was shy and quiet...

...and he was also a boy.

That's right -- Lady and Tramp originally had two sons. The only way Scooter could be told apart from Fluffy and Ruffy was the lack of a bow around his neck. He was also sometimes colored a strange purple color.

Eventually, the comic strip began to focus more and more on Scamp, and eventually, he became the star of his own comic book series, which ran until 1988. Many of the comics were written by Ward Greene, the man who wrote the short story "Happy Dan, The Whistling Dog," which partially inspired the story of TLATT. There was even a Little Golden Book published in 1958 called Scamp's Adventure, and though I haven't been able to find a plot synopsis, I'm sure it's an entirely different story than the one the sequel tells.

So, on one hand we have a character that appeared in six books and two radio dramas and was replaced by another character four years later...
...while on the other hand, we have four characters who appeared in hundreds of comics written by one of the men who inspired the original film for over thirty years, only to be replaced by a typical Disney child and three other characters whose role is so minor that their names aren't even mentioned during the DTV sequel they appear in.

What happened to Kopa certainly pales in comparison to what happened to Fluffy, Ruffy and especially Scooter.

(And speaking of Kopa, maybe I just haven't been looking in the right places, but where's all the fan art and stories about how Fluffy, Ruffy, Scooter and Scamp all died tragically at a young age and how their grief-stricken parents couldn't help naming the only male in their second litter after the original Scamp because of his incredible similarity to the older brother he never knew?)

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(Thanks to =Spotty-Servine for making me aware of Fluffy, Ruffy and Scooter in the description of this adorable fan art of Ruffy - [link] !)