Hacker Cinema
Tarzan
1999 · Film · 88 min
Directed by Chris Buck, Kevin Lima
Tarzan was a small orphan who was raised by an ape named Kala since he was a child. He believed that this was his family, but on an expedition Jane Porter is rescued by Tarzan. He then finds out that he's human. Now Tarzan must make the decision as to which family he should belong to...
4 negative8 neutralfrom 12 commenters
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12 comments on Hacker News
Oh man! Mandrake 8!
That was my first really fun Linux setup. At the time, I had RedHat running at work and was running SGI IRIX daily along with WinNT 3.51 then Win 2k.
I had setup Ogle to play DVD media and at that time DECSS was a controversy. People could have legal media, legal drive, display, computer, sound, but playing the movie under Linux was a crime.
Any how, I set Mandrake up in our bedroom so my wife and I could enjoy great movies. Ogle would just play the movie. No bullshit, insert disk, press T then P and you were into the movie.
That was a hit and the fam wanted a DVD player for the living room.
I got one and the second day, I got the call: "this POS is broken"
M: What happened honey?
H: It won't just play the movie
M: Which movie?
H: Tarzan
M: Slaps head! Of course. Honey, that one has 15 mins of previews that players will not skip.
H: WTF? That one you made sure would. Why?
[I explain OSS and she gets it and always has since. Neat!]
M: OK, I can solve the problem.
I ripped the movie, brought it home and proceeded to do that to all the kid movies.
They love it and when they break one, I just make another. Same for the neighbors kids mooching one, etc...
Mandrake was nice. I had it running on a Matrox G400 card that could do a very respectable TV out. Was gorgeous on our huge Sony WEGA set in the living Room.
Good times!
Full disclosure, I own a significant share of Disney, not significant in the sense from the perspective of the company, but significant from the perspective of my portfolio. Against the advice of my broker I own Disney and Microsoft as individual stocks while the rest is indexed.
I love Disney, we go once a year to a disney property and I love their animation and stories. While I am neither here nor there about Marvel and have not seen a single Marvel movie, I also live Star Wars and Indiana Jones. I have been on stage at the Indiana Jones special effects show thanks to my kids volunteering me.
I also consider myself to the politically left of center.
So when I say this, it is from a position of love and real financial commitment to Disney.
Disney needs to get the hell out of identity politics. They need to return to great story telling not look for ways/excuses to inject diversity at the expense of story. Tarzan did not need a gay ape. Treasure Planet did not need a Chineese character and Mulan did not need white characters or a hero who had no journey.
This last point I find very frustrating. For some reason, Disney has seemingly abandoned the hero's journey as a plot element for many of its newer releases. Failings are what makes characters relatable and I feel Disney has lost sight of that.
All this ti say, Disney just does not seem to tell good stories any more.
Different medium, but I've always been impressed with the commercialism of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
He pioneered the multimedia empire with Tarzan -- books, comic books, radio, movies... he was happy to make money off of any way he could.
> It seems pretty telling that you didn't actually answer what should have been a simple question.
it is not.
I do think that a black woman can represent purity.
It simply doesn't fit the story as it has been written in the case of Pinocchio.
If you have to explain why things are the way they are, you're probably overthinking them.
Let's explore why the "representation era" is a smokescreen, shall we?
Imagine a no brainer: a black Tarzan.
There would be nothing strange about it, he's living in the jungle in Africa.
Except now you have to rewrite all his back story, because Tarzan is the son of a white British lord and his white British wife.
You can rewrite them too, as a black British lord and his black British wife.
Except now you also have to explain why in an all white community, the British lords, there is this odd couple.
Where do they come from?
How do they made it to becoming lords?
Are they black people living as white people or do they help the black community?
etc.
What's the problem?
The problem is that Tarzan was written by an American author of British Puritan ancestry, supporter of eugenics and scientific racism, beliefs that he used extensively in his books.
No matter how many black people they put in the story, they'll never be able to fix it.
They shouldn't adapt the story, they should write a new story or adapt a story where black people are already protagonists of the story.
That would actually mean something, but it wouldn't generate much attention I guess...
Less attention = less money (or a loss)
If Disney things that Pinocchio needs "fixing" they better leave it alone, because Pinocchio is a story from 150 years ago and it is not adherent to contemporary American standards in many ways.
Including the presence of a human eating monster fish.
See, simply putting "black person" in the cast doesn't add anything to any story,it doesn't improve representation, people don't actually feel more engaged, it's simple easy selling identity, but, tbf, it generate a lot of buzz, and buzz is all studios need right now, they won't admit they are remaking for the nth time an old story because are incapable of writing new ones, so they are distracting the audience with this silliness, hoping it will work.
Even Pixar is stagnating dramatically, take their Luca, directed by an Italian, set in Italy, I should feel oh so represented, but exactly because it plays with my culture trying to sell it to people who don't know it very well, I found it embarrassing.
The moral of this story is, I guess, that representation is overrated and there is much more to a movie than simply watching someone who looks like me for the sake of watching someone that vaguely looks like me.
> Ok, so is the portrayal in the 1940's Disney Pinocchio equally as outlandish considering she's just a white woman with blond hair? Would you be reacting the same way if they cast a white woman in the role?
Do you realize it is the same Disney both times, do you?
Two wrongs don't make a right.
> in which case the blue fairy already didn't have blue hair?
Yep.
Disney, being wrong since 1940s.
I wasn't born back then and we had no internet, but yeah, I prefer the Italian adaptation of Pinocchio with the blue fairy having blue hair.
> Because people like the Disney version of the story?
so there are times when cultural appropriation is actually OK?
As a member of the culture that story comes from, do I have a say or should I bow to the Disney overlords?
The Wikipedia article for 1999 in film is there for all to see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_in_film#1999_Wide-release_films
Between The King and I (Disney animated), Baby Geniuses, Doug's 1st Movie, 10 Things I Hate About You, Wing Commander, The Rage: Carrie 2, My Favorite Martian, and Office Space, I see plenty of sequels, low-effort trash, and remakes. And that's just stuff that came out in the first three months of the year.
edit: We got a remake of Wild Wild West, a remake of Tarzan, a sequel to Austin Powers, a sequel to The Brave Little Toaster, a prequel to Star Wars, and our second Shakespear adapation of the year in months 4-6.
double edit: In 7-9, we got another Muppet movie, an Inspector Gadget remake, The Haunting and The Thomas Crown Affair were both remakes, a Universal Soldier sequel, and a Dudley Do-Right remake.
I have no interest in continuing to analyze this list, thing were just as bad twenty years ago
It gets flak due to being unfinished (which is what the article is about). The movie itself jokes about it being unfinished a few times. It was also the first film released after Tarzan, which many say was the end of the 90s Disney Renaissance, so it was a tough act to follow and a tonal shift.
After Emperor's, we got mediocre films - with Lilo & Stitch being the only exception. Many consider Emperor's to be the first of this run.
If you view most golden age and resurgence Disney it's glaringly clear. By and large the women are shoehorned into submissive, weak characters at the mercy of a white knight.
The thing is, this really wasn't just a Disney thing, it was largely a Hollywood thing in general. Strong(er), three-dimensional women in film narrative didn't hit major motion pictures with significance until the late 60s and into the early 80s.
The late 1980s was an unfortunate time for Disneys resurgence, because somehow there was also a revival of strong man/weak, beautiful woman tropes in Hollywood. So when movies like The Little Mermaid, The Princess and the Frog, Tarzan, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast came out they very much followed this template.
The plots of these and previous movies hammer home that the young women are meant as prizes for men who come and save them. It's in the stories themselves.
Why did you exclude the highest grossing film that year from the list? It seems you just selected the movies you thought helped you point.
Movies among the top ten grossing which you left out of the list:
- Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace
- Tarzan
- Big Daddy
- The Mummy
- Runaway Bride
- The World Is Not Enough
- The Blair Witch Project
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_1999_box_office_number-one_films_in_the_United_States#cite_note-2
I do agree Hollywood is different today, but rehashing ideas is nothing new.
The Godfather was a book. Twelve Angry Men was a play. Ben Hur (1956) was remake of Ben Hur (1925). All the songs in Singing in the Rain was recycled from previous movies. The Lion King was the first Disney animated movie with an original story (and even then people say it was plagiarized from Kimba).
As for TV shows and made-for-streaming, do you exclude this from Hollywood? It is increasingly the same talent writing producing and acting, so it is more a question of format and distribution.
The thing is, they can keep him as a trademark even if he is public domain. This is how the Edgar Rice Burroughs Estate keeps Tarzan and John Carter, for example.
Maybe it should just be increasingly costly to maintain an old copyright, so a few high-value copyrights like Mickey Mouse could be maintained while much more literature simply passes into the public domain. Or perhaps film copyrights could be separated from print copyrights.
Or maybe we could just not have de facto perpetual copyright.
And poorly understood! George Martin of Game of Thrones writes that he's against fanfic. Because if he allows it, he can lose his copyright. Then he goes on about Tarzan, and how since people made unauthorized movies on the theme, the author of Tarzan dies poor.
Plus the standard "I made them no one else can touch", which is a valid personal feeling, but little basis for law.
You can break grammar rules and be understood. One of the points of some of the exercises was to show that communication is more complicated than the seemingly a priori rules. Human languages are not formal systems.
It's actually pretty easy with spoken language to completely mangle the rules and not only be understood but be even more evocative; that's how languages evolve.
It's more complicated with written words, but certainly possible.
One trick is to make up a completely new rule and "teach" it to the reader. Another is to create a pattern and then break it for effect. The results can be nonsensical, but quite meaningful.
Not something you might use in an everyday report or memo, but a good tool and a great way to de-provincialize language.
BTW, your "Cat mouse mouse run run." sentence can be made intelligible by inflection rather easily. In English nouns and verbs can often double as adjectives and adverbs. With a little preparation a reader can be made to "hear" the inflection and understand the meaning.
Try and puzzle this out:
((Cat mouse) (mouse run) run)
Loose meaning is something like: The catlike mouse runs with a mouselike gait.
Tarzan explaining something obvious to an idiot big game hunter...
(The movie Tarzan, though. The Tarzan in the novels actually spoke excellent English, but with a French accent.)
Another trick was to take grammars from other language and use English vocabulary. Or play Yoda like games.
Sorry, I ramble, and I've got to get up early...
In Spain it was introduced by Tarzan films.