Wow Hoe!

Tarzan grows up in the jungle because the sailors on his parents’ ship mutiny and maroon them there. Two decades later, the sailors on his cousin’s ship ALSO mutiny and maroon him and Jane in the exact same area where Tarzan happens to live

He’s raised by apes after his parents die because one of them who’s been carrying around her own dead baby is moved by the maternal spirit to drop its corpse in Tarzan’s crib and pick up the human baby instead

Tarzan teaches himself how to read and write fluent English by reading his parents’ old books

He later leaves Jane and co. really passive-aggressive notes telling them that he’s Tarzan and they better not touch his stuff

Tarzan also rescues them from various jungle troubles in person, but he can’t communicate with them because he can’t speak/understand spoken English

Jane and her friends spend their entire time in the jungle thinking that there are TWO DIFFERENT people who keep saving them: their reclusive host who leaves them salty messages and signs his name Tarzan of the Apes and then that other guy who lives with the apes

Literally they never put two and two together until Tarzan tracks them down in America and tells them he was Tarzan all along

Which he does in French

Because back in the jungle he rescued a French guy who taught him how to speak that language

So Tarzan can read and write English but speaks only French by the time he leaves the jungle

Jane goes back to America while Tarzan is off helping his French friend, and he follows her all the way home just to arrive the day before she’s gonna marry a rich guy to cover her father’s debts. It’s literally one of those Taylor Swift STOP THE WEDDING tropes, but with this weirdly buff ape man yelling in French instead

Jane’s father has debts because he borrowed a ton of money to charter a ship and follow a pirate treasure map he found, which, logical. We’ve all been there

The sailors on that ship are the ones who mutiny and maroon Jane earlier on, after finding the treasure and deciding they want to keep it for themselves

But Tarzan sees them rebury the chest and he digs it up and takes it with him to America to find Jane. The sailors are later very confused when they go back and find the treasure missing

Meanwhile Tarzan’s friend keeps trying to convince him that he’s the son of those two adult skeletons in his cabin, but Tarzan is all like, nah, I’m pretty sure that baby ape skeleton in the crib was theirs.

Oh also yeah, Tarzan totally just left all three skeletons lying around until his human friends showed up and were like, boy, you’re nasty

Also Tarzan needs a lot of convincing to believe that his ape foster mom wasn’t his birth mother

Like an absurd amount of convincing, really

His friend finally proves it by dragging Tarzan to a fingerprint expert in Europe to compare his prints to the baby ones that his dad fortuitously recorded in his journal just before he died.

The fingerprint proof means he’s actually the heir to his family’s title and wealth instead of his cousin, but he decides not to tell Jane about it

Because after Tarzan interrupts her wedding plans and gives her the pirate treasure (so that she doesn’t have to marry the rich guy), she turns down Tarzan’s own proposal and agrees to marry his cousin instead

And he’s like, alright, and leaves

Truly one of the great love stories of our time

But I feel the need to add that Edgar Rice Burroughs was a salty mofo!  He threw such shade, what a dude.

Ok so here’s the story; he was working as a pencil sharpener wholesalemen for seven years (I know, startlingly mundane) when his wife had their second kid in 1909, he was bored beyond occupation and had copious spare time and began reading pulp-fiction magazines. In 1929, he recalled thinking that

“…if people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those magazines, that I could write stories just as rotten. As a matter of fact, although I had never written a story, I knew absolutely that I could write stories just as entertaining and probably a whole lot more so than any I chanced to read in those magazines.”