Tarzan has a mullet. Jane wears a purple minidress. The animation is choppy, backgrounds repainted from old Jungle Book ripoffs. The voice acting is off — Tarzan sounds like a chain-smoking California surfer. “Whoa, cheetah, not cool, man.”
The Internet Archive preserved this because no one else would. 47 people have downloaded it since 2007. The comments section is a slow-motion ghost town: “I watched this as a kid in a dentist’s waiting room.” “Does anyone know who voiced the leopard?” “The last six minutes are missing. I’ve been trying to find them for 12 years.” You scroll down. One comment from 2023: “I found a Betamax copy at a church sale in Ohio. The ending is just Tarzan driving a Ford Taurus into the sunset. Jane says ‘Let’s get Taco Bell.’ I am not joking.” But that video file isn’t online. Only the corrupted one remains.
The .avi file is corrupted in the last six minutes. Someone uploaded it in 2007 with the filename: TARZAN_1999_DUB_UNKNOWN.avi The description is blank. The uploader’s handle is @jungle_dubber . tarzan 1999 internet archive
You hit download. Just in case it disappears tomorrow.
But here’s the strange part: Around 17 minutes in, the audio switches to a different language. Not Spanish or French. Something unidentifiable — maybe a lost Esperanto dub recorded in a basement in Prague. The subtitles are broken English, translated by someone guessing: Tarzan has a mullet
So you watch the first 54 minutes again. And when the screen goes black at the 1:00:14 mark — right as Tarzan swings toward a low-poly CGI waterfall — you realize: This isn’t just a lost movie. This is a digital fossil. A weird, unauthorized, mulleted Tarzan from the very edge of the 20th century, preserved forever in the Internet Archive’s warm, humming servers.
You click play.
“I am not ape. I am not man. I am… sad for my banana.”
Here’s a short piece inspired by the search query — imagining the lost digital echoes of a specific, almost-forgotten adaptation. Tarzan 1999 – Internet Archive The voice acting is off — Tarzan sounds
The video begins with a warped Disney logo — not the official one, but a hand-drawn castle melting into pixel static. A date burns in: . Not the 1999 Disney Tarzan with Phil Collins. No — this is something else. A direct-to-VHS production by a studio called “Golden Films” or perhaps “DIC” — but the credits are smudged, like VHS tracking errors made permanent.