I need to stop reading a book and then immediately watching the movie. This makes the movie feel incredibly short! I just did that with Project Hail Mary, and now I’ve done the same thing with Tarzan.
Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs is not a long book, yet there are soooo many details from the book missing from the movie. There are also a lot of changes as well as omissions.
Below is a non-exhaustive brainstormed list of differences. Beware SPOILERS of both the Disney movie and the original book.
Movie vs. Book
The Characters
In the movie, the apes are gorillas and yet have a kind of language. In the book, they are a fictional talking ape species.
In the movie, Jane and her father are British naturalists who have come to Africa to study gorillas. In the book, they are marooned by mutineers after successfully locating a chest of gold treasure.
In the movie, the Tarzan-Jane-Clayton love triangle is completely missing, because Clayton is a beady-eyed mustache-twirling gun-toting villain who wants to capture gorillas to sell, and he dies trying to kill Tarzan. In the book, Clayton is a kind English gentleman, and winds up engaged to Jane.
In the movie, Kerchak, the chief gorilla, gets killed by a gunshot. In the book, Kala, Tarzan’s ape mother, is the one who gets killed. In the book, Kerchak jealously challenges Tarzan, who kills him with his knife.
In the movie, there’s a gorilla named Terk who is Tarzan’s best friend. He’s also friends with an elephant named Tantor. In the book, Tarzan doesn’t have a best friend among the apes; he’s too different. He longs for a peer. He does ride an elephant, though, and all elephants are called Tantor.
The Cabin and its Contents
In the movie, Kala shows Tarzan the tree-house his parents built after they were shipwrecked. In the book, Tarzan finds his parents’ cabin himself. His parents were marooned by mutineers.
In the movie, Tarzan equips himself with a stone-tipped spear after seeing an animal rub its tusk against a tree. In the book, he takes a metal knife from his father’s belongings.
In the movie, Jane teaches Tarzan to read. In the book, Tarzan learns to read and write using the books among his parents’ belongings, which (as someone who taught reading to children) I find rather hard to believe.
In the movie, Tarzan learns about human culture in Jane’s camp. In the book, he learns about human culture in the cabin his parents built. While Jane and her people shelter in the cabin, they learn about Tarzan’s parents, though nobody quite realizes the forest man they’ve encountered is the son of the dead couple.
The Plot
In the movie, when Tarzan rescues Jane, she is being chased by a troop of hostile monkeys or baboons or something. In the book, she has been kidnapped by one particular ape, whom Tarzan kills. In the movie, they have a brief but important conversation in English and return to the humans’ camp. In the book, Tarzan keeps her in the amphitheater of the apes for a couple of days and feeds her fruit.
In the movie, Tarzan’s primary goal is to be accepted by his gorilla family, and it’s portrayed as a serious misjudgment when he betrays them to please Jane, whom he just met. In the end, Jane becomes a part of his world; he doesn’t become part of hers. In the book, Tarzan’s primary goal for many years is to become more human, and it is no betrayal for him to leave Africa with the foreigners, who in any case do not intend to interfere with the apes. He learns how to behave in European society, even though he finds it restrictive.
At the end of the movie, Jane chooses to stay with Tarzan, and everyone lives happily ever after, since Kerchak approved of Tarzan and made him chief upon his death. In the book, Jane returns to Europe while Tarzan is in the jungle nursing a Frenchman who had been captured by cannibals. Tarzan later goes to Europe with the Frenchman, bringing Jane’s father’s recovered gold, then follows Jane to America, where the gold allows her to escape marrying her father’s creditor. Then Tarzan saves Jane from a forest fire. Before he can declare his feelings, however, or his newly discovered identity as the true heir of Clayton’s title and estate, she agrees to marry Clayton, whom she does not love. (Gah!) Tarzan, heartbroken, graciously concedes the one and only love of his life to his rival.
In the movie, what saves everyone from Clayton and his crew is the loyalty of Tarzan’s elephant friend; Tarzan is helpless in the metal hold of the ship. In the book, it’s always Tarzan saving people. He’s never helpless. He’s Tarzan.
Today I Learned
The actor who played the villain in the Disney movie is the one who did the Tarzan yell.
