In Popular Culture
In 1994 the Walt Disney Animation Studios animated movie The Lion King brought the phrase international recognition, featuring it prominently in the plot and devoting a song to it. A meerkat and a warthog, named Timon and Pumbaa respectively, teach the main character, a lion cub named Simba, that he should forget his troubled past and live in the present. The song was written by Elton John (music) and Tim Rice (lyrics), who found the term in a Swahili phrase book. It was nominated for Best Original Song at the 1995 Academy Awards, and was later ranked the 99th best song in movie history by the American Film Institute on a list of 100.
- In the 2006 South Korean comedy 200 Pounds Beauty, Kang Han-na (Kim Ah-jung) often draws a sign supposedly symbolizing hakuna matata for good luck in love.
- In the July 25, 2007 episode of Jeopardy!, "What is hakuna matata?" was the Final Jeopardy question."
- The PlayStation 3 game Afrika was renamed Hakuna Matata in its Asian release.
- In the first season of Benidorm the quiz at the Solana featured the question: "What is Swahili for no worries?"
- Debby Ryan covered the original song for "Disneymania 7" in 2011.
- On the premiere episode of The Real World: St. Thomas, Marie and Robb learn they both have a tattoo that reads "hakuna matata".
- In episode 4 of Citizen Khan, Mr Khan mentions the Hakuna Matata.
Read more about this topic: Hakuna Matata
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“The lowest form of popular culture—lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives—has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.”
—Carl Bernstein (b. 1944)
“Parents’ ability to survive a child’s unabating needs, wants, and demands...varies enormously. Some people can give and give....Whether children are good or bad, brilliant or just about normal, enormously popular or born loners, they keep their cool and say just the right thing at all times...even when they are miserable themselves, inexhaustible springs of emotional energy, reserved just for children, keep flowing unabated.”
—Stella Chess (20th century)
“The anorexic prefigures this culture in rather a poetic fashion by trying to keep it at bay. He refuses lack. He says: I lack nothing, therefore I shall not eat. With the overweight person, it is the opposite: he refuses fullness, repletion. He says, I lack everything, so I will eat anything at all. The anorexic staves off lack by emptiness, the overweight person staves off fullness by excess. Both are homeopathic final solutions, solutions by extermination.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)