Lurker, you and I clearly have exceedingly difference tastes. Yes, The Lion King was adapted from a cartoon, but ye gods it's a wonderful show. Julie Taymore really made it her own. The costumes are fantastic; the minimalist set design is brilliant. Visually, it is one of the best shows I have ever seen and deserved the Tonies it won. Quite frankly, I think it's a better stage show than cartoon, although I suppose they can't really be compared.
I don't care if it's not original or it came from some "high brow" book. It has music, dancing and a story therefore it's a musical since the person who created it did take the time to write a story for the songs.
No one (as far as I can recall) said that they aren't musicals. They're just not the best musicals.
Sometimes a story doesn't have to be really great to be enjoyable. How many times did you go, man, it was a silly movie but definitely worth watching? To me this type of musicals are like that.
Personally speaking, it's very rare for me to enjoy a movie without enjoying the plot.
There might come a time that these so called you call "not musicals" may in fact be a new approach of doing musicals and in time the story line will improve. Yes, it's musicals for dummies, well, at least, people whom I know who find musicals a waste of time and money has now branched to other "original" musicals they wouldn't be caught dead watching. I think this is becoming a trend since younger people (teens, teenagers, young adults) are not into this type of entertainment at least this is way for them to embrace cultural arts.
If that's so, good for them. I'm glad that more people are going to the theatre. And yes, they may be popular, but popular does not always equal good. I'll be honest, the only musicals of this type that I've seen were "We Will Rock You" and "Saturday Night Fever." I was not at all impressed, but I suppose I shouldn't judge the others on that basis. However, I still don't count them as up there with, say, Wicked or Hairspray and doubt that I ever will. They may be fun, but that does not make them great.