The Cowardly Lion Of Oz

The cowardly lion is the only character out of the Oz foursome to not really have a distinct back-story. While there are some versions of his origins in circulation, most are not considered to be canonical. Also, after “The wizard of Oz”, his appearances are few and far between. I myself conceder “Wicked”, “Son of a Witch” and “A lion Among Men” (all written by Gregory Maguire) to be a more adult version of L. Franks Baum’s Oz. The magic is still there, and I have never found a major contradiction between the original series of Oz books, and his “Wicked” series. Furthermore, not only is the “Wicked” series true to the original books, but also to the film, taking the original story by L Frank Baum, and the classic film adaptation, and meshing them together into one seamless universe. So, by default, if Baum’s Oz fails to mention something, I have no qualms whatsoever substituting bit’s of Maguire’s story in its stead. Such is the case of the cowardly lion. He really has no back-story in any of Baum’s works, and in of so called “Oz” books, by other writers his history contradicts something the original book said in one way or another. According to “Wicked”, he is an “Animal”, rescued by Elphaba (The future Wicked Witch) from the university she was attending at the time. The distinction of “Animal” instead of “animal” is a reference to any species other than human that has the ability to speak, and think for it. Basically, “animals” are normal, whereas “Animals” have the ability to think and talk like humans. The only distinction between the two is the capital and lowercase “A”. “A lion among men” (the third book in the wicked series) chronicles his story after being rescued by Elphaba, during his journey with Dorothy, and even further after the events in “The wizard of Oz”.

This is my version of the cowardly lion. I hate him, and I love him. He was without a doubt the hardest to sim. His appearance is (like my other three Sims in the Oz theme) based mostly on his film counterpart, portrayed by comedian/ actor Bert Lahr. The main trouble I ran into when making him was finding appropriate custom content to use. I feel I was EXTREMLY lucky to find the mane he is wearing, because it was created for another project, and yet it is a perfect fit for my purposes as well. The only real problem was the body mesh. I looked everywhere, and the closest thing I could find was the social bunny mesh that came with base game. However I could not for the life of me figure out how to get his outfit to use the mesh from the game, so here’s what you have to do:

In order for his costume to show up, you must download this social bunny. After you install the social bunny, you can delete the sim social bunny from your sim bin, but DO NOT delete the purple social bunny outfit from your outfits bin, because it will remove the mesh, and the lion costume will no longer show up.

For his mane, you must download and install this Aslan sim from Sapphire Sims 2. If you do not want to keep the Aslan sim, just delete him from your sim bin afterwards. You have to be logged in to download, by the way.

After that, just download this tail, and you should be good to go.