Tarzan
Tarzan...
I occasionally go back and read old'ish books which everyone thinks they know the story of, but no one has actually read. I've been meaning to read Tarzan for a while now, and when I realized there was a movie coming out, it pushed it forward on my agenda. Unsurprisingly, the movie bears little resemblance to Disney.
Interesting points...
-Tarzan grows up with apes. The kind of apes is never specified, except to state that they aren't gorillas. They mate for life.
-Tarzan is not friends with the jungle animals. Mostly he becomes king of the jungle in the same manner that any animal becomes king, which is to say he defeats/kills a lot of them in battle. Most of the apes (the king ape Kerchak and his adopted mother's husband Tublat, who are two very different apes. Disney apparently combines them) both want him dead and passively try to let him die, or outright attack him. Tarzan finally kills Kerchak when Kerchak kills Tarzan's mother in a fit of rage. He also kills lots of other animals. (He does respect the elephants collectively, but they're not really friends, and that's as close as it gets.)
-Jane doesn't teach him to speak English. He teaches himself to read and write from books, and once he meets white men, it's a Frenchman, D'Arnot, who teaches him to speak. He doesn't actually talk to Jane until the last chapter of the first book, which ends on a cliffhanger with Jane likely going to marry Tarzan's cousin Clayton and Tarzan choosing not to identify himself as Lord Greystroke. (He's learned to be a civilized gentleman remarkably fast.)
-Speaking of Clayton, apparently according to Disney, he's a villian out to sell all the animals to the zoo. In the book, he's a very respectable suitor of Jane's who she would have been glad to marry if Tarzan didn't come along. (Then there's the obnoxious Robert Canler who she hates and who is trying to force to marry him through a debt.)
The list goes on, but I'll stop there. One other amuzing point, though...
-I've heard comments about Tarzan wearing clothes and being clean-shaven being silly Disney PG'ing the story. However, these points do come from the book. He gets the clothes from the savage negro cannibals who he easily defeats and/or kills due to his superior white man intellect. (You didn't think a book written in 1914 was politically correct, did you?) He teaches himself to shave because by the time he's a teenager he's taught himself to read and learned he's a man, and that men are better than apes. But then he's afraid he's turning into an ape because he's growing hair on his face and body, so he learns to shave.