Leo the Lion is a sequel to the Japanese anime television series Jungle Emperor, or Kimba the White Lion. Osamu Tezuka had always wanted his story of Kimba to follow Kimba's entire life, and the Jungle Emperor/Kimba series was such a hit in Japan that Tezuka produced a sequel, without his American partners, in 1966. An English dub of the series was first broadcast in the United States in 1984 on the Christian Broadcasting Network. Making the series without a co-producer gave him complete creative control. For example, Tezuka changed the conclusion of his original manga story to a happy ending.
Leo the Liondoes not follow immediately from the end of the Kimba series. Instead, the story begins a couple of years following the end of the previous series. To English-speaking audiences, the behavior of the title character is inexplicably out of line with what was established in the first series. At the end of the first series, in the original Japanese script, Kimba promises to keep his animals separate from humans. It is this promise that drives the seemingly hermit-like Leo in this series. As the series unfolds, the focus shifts from the title character to one of his cubs, the male named Rune. This series as a whole is about Rune's growth, from a whining weakling to a confident leader. This Japanese series was dubbed into English by a company based in Miami, Florida in the United States known as SONIC-Sound International Corporation, and run by Enzo Caputo. Leo the Lion aired on CBN Cable Network in 1984, The theme song for the English dub was written by Mark Boccaccio and Susan Brunet. Stuart Chapin, who dubbed many of the voices into English, "colloquialized" all 26 scripts. After Chapin and Caputo clashed about basic matters, Chapin ignored most of the plots and made up the scripts as he pleased, matching the dialog to lip movements. Thus, an elephant quotes a poem by Emily Dickinson and a gadget-heavy spy episode becomes a vehicle for "Sterling Bond", James Bond' hapless brother. In later scripts, puns abounded. In the last script, Chapin had Leo/Kimba explain the Kimba name mix-up.
Characters
While there is a common misconception that Leo's cub Rune is Leo himself, Leo is actually grown up to a fully adult lion with white fur. Unlike the previous series, the producers of the English-dubbed version of this series used the original Japanese names for nearly all the characters:
