Disney's Tarzan at 25: A Cutting-Edge Animated Hit That Became an Also-Ran
Disney's Tarzan at 25: A Cutting-Edge Animated Hit That Became an Also-Ran
Tarzan was the sixth-highest-grossing movie of 1999, yet has less Disney presence today than Mulan, Hercules, or Stitch.
Wow this author really has it out for Phil Collins. Tarzan is my favorite Disney soundtrack since I was little.
Because it wasn't a very good movie. It was supremely forgettable. Jane was a far more interesting character than Tarzan, and she had less screen time than Rosie O'Donnell as the annoying sidekick. The villain was cartoonishly evil even for a cartoon. The soundtrack was like if easy listening had a baby with synthesized djembe and that baby was raised inside an elevator. It's also narrowly avoiding all of the racist context of the original stories by pretending there are zero black people in equatorial Africa.
And I liked the movie.
Granted that's part of the story, if Tarzan met with natives at any point he wouldn't exactly be a monkey man anymore would he?
Except in the original story, he does meet with natives. They kill his mother, which begins a feud. Tarzan introduces himself to Jane as a killer of black men.
So you can kind of see why they left that out of the Disney version. Edgar Racist Burroughs, more like.
I still think they should have continued the plot line of the books where he A) becomes a soldier in the French Army, B) discovers like 3 different lost cities of gold, and C) travels to the center of the earth
TIL
And made Phil Collins fffilthy rich. Dude even performed the foreign-language versions... in a bunch of languages he does not speak.