Environment & Energy
Related: About this forumDisney’s 'The Jungle Book' resurrects giant extinct ape
In the 1967 animated Disney film The Jungle Book, the feral boy Mowgli encounters a jazz-singing orangutan named King Louie, who implores Mowgli to teach him the secret of fire. King Louie presented a challenge for the producers of Disneys live-action, CGI-enhanced remake of the film, opening April 15. We had this notion that we would be as authentic as we could be to the region, says producer Brigham Taylor. The problem: Orangutans are not native to India.
In fact, King Louie himself is not native to Rudyard Kiplings original stories. But instead of scrapping the character, the filmmakers got creative. While researching Indias wildlife, the films art department learned that a colossal ape named Gigantopithecus once roamed the region. Various species of Gigantopithecus lived in India, China and Southeast Asia from about 6.5 million years ago until as recently as a few hundred thousand years ago. The ape was truly gigantic by some estimates, twice as big as a gorilla.
So King Louie morphed from orangutan to Gigantopithecus. The switch was a fun justification, Taylor says, to keep the character and play up his size while still staying true to Indias fauna. (Yes, the ape is extinct, but this is a movie about talking animals. And fossil evidence does suggest that the ape at least mingled with the human ancestor Homo erectus.)
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/disneys-jungle-book-resurrects-giant-extinct-ape?tgt=nr
Buzz cook
(2,474 posts)But as far as the Jungle Book is concerned, if it ain't Louie Prima I'll take a pass.