BURBANK, Calif. (AP) -- A Christian group that claims ``
The Lion King'' briefly shows the word ``sex'' says there are also risque scenes in two other popular Disney feature cartoons.
The American Life League maintains there is the audible message ``Good teen-agers, take off your clothes'' in ``
Aladdin'' and, in ``
The Little Mermaid,'' a wedding officiate becomes visibly sexually aroused.
The anti-abortion group, based in Stafford, Va., wants the Walt Disney Co. to remove ``
The Lion King'' from video stores. It says it was alerted to the appearance of the word by a woman who said her 4-year-old son noticed it.
Disney spokesman Rick Rhoades said Friday that the league is imagining things in all three films and that the company is not recalling video tapes of ``
The Lion King.''
The group did not ask that Disney remove ``
Aladdin'' and ``
The Little Mermaid'' from video stores.
The segment in question in ``
The Lion King'' occurs about midway through the movie when Simba, the hero, plops down and a cloud of dust rises above him. As the dust begins to trail off, it forms the letters S-E-X, with each letter fading as the next becomes clear, the group says.
Rhoades said the scene simply shows ``swirling dust in the night sky.'' ``Seeing anything in `
The Lion King' other than a good wholesome family film is purely perception,'' he said.
The league also claims that, in a scene near the end of ``
The Little Mermaid,'' a man performing a wedding is shown in profile and gets an erection as the bride and groom approach.
In ``
Aladdin,'' the objectionable words are allegedly spoken in a whisper when Prince Ababwa calls on Princess Jasmine in the scene before the magic carpet ride.
Disney animators have snuck bawdy messages into earlier releases.
In 1994, eagle-eyed viewers of the laserdisc version of the Disney co-production ``
Who Framed Roger Rabbit'' got a glimpse of cartoon character Jessica Rabbit without underwear, and of graffiti offering Disney boss Michael Eisner's home phone number as that of a brothel run by Allyson Wonderland.
SourceThese are most of the famous subliminal messages in the Disney movies.