Tarzan, Rewritten: What If He Was the Ghost of the Jungle?

Disney's Tarzan surfs on trees. Ours protects the whole jungle.

Disney's Tarzan (1999) is great: amazing animation, Phil Collins songs and a hero who surfs on tree branches. But what if it were a jungle action adventure? Here's our rewrite, and what we'd lose.

Tarzan becomes a legend

Poachers whisper about him around their campfires: "The Ghost of the Jungle." Nobody's sure he's real. Animals warn him when trouble comes, and he leads a team of gorillas, leopards and birds to protect their home.

Clayton becomes the boss of a poaching ring

He isn't just a hunter who wants gorillas. He runs an international operation that wants to capture every rare animal and clear the jungle for profit.

Tarzan fights back, cleverly

He sets traps that tangle poachers in vines, steals their maps, lets the air out of their truck tires and leads them in circles until they're hopelessly lost. Every vine is a zip line. Every tree is a hiding spot.

Jane becomes an undercover investigator

She's not just a scientist's daughter. She's working undercover to expose Clayton's poaching ring. She thinks Tarzan is a myth until he rescues her during a nighttime raid. Their relationship becomes a partnership: two people who want to save the same place.

The final battle

Clayton's crew tries to burn a path through the jungle. Tarzan calls in everyone: a stampede of elephants led by Tantor, flocks of birds, gorillas blocking the road. Jane leads the local rangers. Tarzan faces Clayton high in the trees. Clayton gets tangled in his own trap, and the rangers haul him off to jail.

The ending

Clayton is caught, but the people who paid him are still out there. Tarzan and Jane set off to protect wild places around the world. A legend becomes a mission.

What the original nails

Disney's Tarzan is about belonging. Tarzan is caught between two families: the gorillas who raised him, and the humans who look like him. The heart of the film is Kala, his gorilla mother, telling him to look past their differences, and Kerchak, the leader who never accepted him, finally calling him "son."

What our version breaks

Our version is cool, but Tarzan already knows exactly who he is. That means the biggest question of the original, "Where do I belong?", disappears. Without it, Kala and Kerchak have nothing to do, and the most emotional moments of the film vanish. We traded a heart for a fight scene.

The lesson

An action hero needs something to lose. Tarzan's real battle was never with Clayton. It was figuring out where he fit, and that's what made us care.

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