Kansas City actor follows up viral mask video with a ‘Lion King’ COVID vaccine tune
Look who’s back in the recording studio, this time with Simba.
Kansas City actor Noah Lindquist found viral fame last fall with a COVID-19 parody of the showstopping “Be Our Guest” song from “Beauty and the Beast.” It scooped up millions of views on social media.
The 25-year-old Lindquist, a Kansas State University music graduate, lives in Topeka and had been working hard to make a name for himself in Kansas City musical theater circles when the pandemic struck.
Frustrated by people who refused to wear masks, he created a parody song, “Wear a Mask.” It currently has more than 3 million views on YouTube alone, where one commenter last year called it “the anthem 2020 needed.”
This past week, Lindquist released a follow-up parody video to encourage people to get the COVID-19 vaccine.
But this one ran afoul of Facebook.
The song is written to the tune of “I Just Can’t Wait to Be King” from the 1994 animated Disney film “The Lion King.” Elton John and Tim Rice wrote the music and lyrics.
Lindquist’s version is called “I Just Can’t Wait for Vaccines.”
It’s just as cheeky as “Wear a Mask,” with well-placed jabs at anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists.
In the movie the song is performed by Simba, gal pal Nala and the red-billed hornbill Zazu, accompanied by a chorus of giraffes, rhinos and assorted animals. Lindquist sings all the parts in his version, with Zazu as the naysayer.
Here’s a verse:
(Zazu) “You’d know they’re just injecting tracking chips, if you were smart.”
(Simba) “We don’t need advice from anti-vaxxers, for a start.”
(Zazu) ”If this is where America is headed, count me out!
“While you sheep wait for your doses, I’ve a double dose of doubt!
“This liberal mind control is quite obscene.”
(Simba) “Oh I just can’t wait for vaccines.”
At the end of the video, Lindquist added the link to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s COVID-19 vaccination page — CDC.gov/vaccines/covid-19.
Like the first video, Twitter kingmaker Rex Chapman shared it with his more than 1 million followers. As of Thursday morning the video had reached nearly 400,000 views on Chapman’s Twitter account.
Lindquist grew up in a musical theater family and has appeared on several Kansas City stages. Not that he was expecting “Wear a Mask” to vault him to fame … but did it?
“It did not,” said Lindquist, who is still working at a coffee shop in downtown Topeka. “It was something that got a lot of attention for a while, and as most things that go viral do, the attention just died down a little bit as it usually happens. But, you know, it was a lot of fun while it lasted.”
He had been looking for another parody target and landed on the hot topic of vaccines.
The lightbulb moment came when one day he, like many people, thought to himself, “Oh gawd, I can’t wait to get the vaccine.”
He posted the video on the same social media platforms he used for “Wear a Mask,” but this time he got shot down — perhaps temporarily — by Facebook and Instagram.
“Minutes after I shared the video directly to Facebook, I was told (by Facebook) that my video was blocked in over 200 countries because they detected copyrighted material that belonged to Universal Music Group,” he said.
“I was under the impression that I had fair use under copyright law, because I had no trouble whatsoever with the ‘Wear a Mask’ video. And the same thing happened to me on Instagram. They gave me the exact same message.”
Both Instagram and Facebook gave him the chance to dispute their decisions and he did, arguing that he was protected by parody laws. Twitter and YouTube allowed him to post the video with no problems.
“And so that point, it’s really up to them to decide whether or not that’s legitimate,” Lindquist said. “I do think not being able to share it to Facebook and Instagram hindered the potential spread of the video.”
He set the bar so high for himself the first time that all that viral attention made him nervous about trying to snag lightning in a bottle twice.
“My ‘Wear a Mask’ video was such a surprising and overwhelming success that I worried that any follow-up I create will not be as popular, or not be as good, and I thought I was going to set myself up for disappointment if I tried to repeat the success,” he said
“And because of that, I didn’t pounce on an opportunity to create something new. That anxiety really held me back. Because I just thought, wow, this is such a big deal, this is such a success, I can’t possibly repeat it. So why would I even try?”
But encouraging words from one of his former theater professors at K-State sent him back into the studio.
Now he waits to find out his Facebook fate, a decision he expects in the next few days.
This story was originally published March 5, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
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