A Love Letter to Phil Collins 

You might know him for that infamous drum fill, but for me, Phil Collins will always mean one thing: Tarzan

Skip to 3:15 for a good time.

By almost every measure, I should have hated Tarzan when I was a kid. I was a devout follower of the Disney Renaissance, and could often be found spinning around my living room singing "Poor Unfortunate Souls" or "I'll Make a Man Out of You" when I got bored with running laps around the backyard pretending to be a knight.

Maybe it was foreshadowing for the theatre kid tendencies which would emerge later in life, but I fucking loved Disney musicals.

I'm sorry for all the times I made you listen to those songs for hours without a break, Mom.

So, why, you might be asking, was Tarzan any different from other Disney movies of the Renaissance era? After all, it has more than a few similarities. It's gorgeously animated, whimsical, and based off of a very well known story.

It's just not a musical. At least, not in the traditional sense.

For those of you who have lives, in the '90s Disney went on a historic run. The studio had been seeing diminishing returns for years, and had to make some big changes if they were going to turn things around. For their new projects, they adhered more closely to the traditions of musical theatre. Instead of creating stories that included songs, the songs became an integral part of the storytelling itself. Beauty and the Beast, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin and The Lion King were all products of this ethos. But after 10 years of astonishing success, the directors of Tarzan decided to switch things up again.

Instead of Tarzan bursting into song about the pains of being torn between two worlds, or Jane belting a line about "finding a whole new world," or Clayton getting an iconic villain song, all the musical duties in Tarzan fall on one man's shoulders. Philip David Charles Collins.

Damn, I didn't know he was that British.

Tarzan broke the mould that just a decade earlier had revitalized the entire Disney ethos by leaning into the traditions of musical theatre. As Stephen Sondheim said: "When the characters can't speak, you sing, and when you can't sing anymore, you dance." Well, Tarzan doesn't do a whole lot of any of those. Instead, the music in the film is almost entirely non-diegetic. It comes not from the characters, but from everyone's favourite Gen X, prog-rock drummer, and saviour of Genesis (I've been assured that this is a top-notch reference, though I'm still not quite sure what it means).

Soaring orchestral music is switched for guitar, synthesizers, and drums. I remember watching the opening scene and instantly knowing that Tarzan was going to be completely different from what I had expected. This was a new kind of Disney movie for me. And I loved it.

Even though the ballads and I Want songs that I adored had disappeared, against all odds, a tiny six-year-old fell in love with Phil Collins. Tarzan just wouldn't be the same without him. All of the enduring images of the movie that I have are linked directly back to the music. Tarzan's parents' epic fight for survival during "Two Worlds." A blue butterfly in front of baby Tarzan's face while Collins croons the chorus to "You'll Be I My Heart." Tarzan triumphantly swinging through the trees to the epic synth riff in "Son of Man." And of course, Tarzan discovering humanity overtop the drums in "Strangers Like Me."

Look how into it Phil is. He loves his drums.

My new affinity seemed to work out for my parents as well. Because the songs were so different from the other Disney fare, they became consistent items on playlists in our house. Phil Collins was a welcome break from show tunes for them, and they even slipped some of his non-Tarzan offerings in, just to see if I would notice.

Slowly, the door that had been cracked open by my newfound love for prog-rock led to other music. Encouraged by my burgeoning tastes and desperate to add some variety to my most played music, my parents started to show me other music that we could all enjoy.

There was Toto, Yes, Billy Joel, Bowie, E.L.O. Before I knew it, "A Whole New World" was replaced by "Africa" during my dance parties, and I was practicing air guitar instead of pirouettes. Probably a good thing. I am many things, but a good dancer isn't one of them. Even from a young age, you could tell.

Through it all, there was still Tarzan. I don't know if we watched it so much because I loved it, or I loved it because we watched it so much, but it doesn't really matter. For most of my young life, it remained one of my favourites. I've come to realize that is not a very popular opinion.

Compared to the other Disney Renaissance films, Tarzan gets a bad rap. Some even go so far as to say that the break from the musical formula is what helped kill the historic run of '90s classics. Even if that's true, it doesn't take away from the power of the music itself. The music provides the beating heart of the narrative, exactly like all the movies that came before it. Even though the characters aren't the ones telling the story, the lyrics themselves still do a great job of illustrating their inner worlds.

I can see there's so much to learn

It's all so close and yet so far

I see myself as people see me

Oh, I just know there's something bigger out there

Add a few grunts, and that could be spoken by Tarzan himself!

If anything, without Collins' contributions, the movie would be even less present in the popular consciousness than it already is. Like I said before, all of the iconic imagery in the film comes back to the music. If the songs themselves were weak, we would have forgotten about the movie long ago. Without Phil Collins, Tarzan would have gone the way of other Disney B-sides, like Sword in the Stone and (aside from one iconic track) Pocahontas.

It's exactly for that reason that Tarzan belongs in the conversation about "Music That Makes the Movie." Sure, you can criticize it for having less complex characters or a weaker narrative than its peers, but I will hear no slander against the soundtrack. It elevates what would have been a mediocre film into one that has left a permanent mark on my consciousness (and forever altered the course of my musical tastes).

Though the break from tradition may not have produced a film for the ages, I will forever be grateful to Tarzan. Just as the boy raised by apes learned to appreciate the best of two worlds, I learned to appreciate a whole new world of music because of Phil Collins. Ever since then, I've been battling allegations of being obsessed with "dad music." And you know what? It's time I wore that as a badge of honour.