麻豆传媒

Hollywood loves a gigantic ape. It gave the world King Kong and in Disney鈥檚 remake of The Jungle Book, it has given King Louie an upgrade. A big one. Formerly an average-sized orangutan, his lumbering body now fills an abandoned temple deep in the Indian jungle. In his introductory scene, he chucks a handful of juicy papayas at Mowgli鈥檚 feet. The fruit seem like dice in his enormous hairy fist.

You鈥檇 be forgiven for thinking the producers have taken liberties, and it鈥檚 true there is a bit of artistic licence in there. But Louie 2.0 is more rooted in reality than you might think. Once upon a time, Asia鈥檚 tropical forests were indeed home to an unusually large ape.

King Louie鈥檚 swinging tune I Wan鈥檔a Be Like You made him one of the best-loved characters in the 1967 animation. For the 2016 version, the producers encountered a problem: 1967 Louie was an orangutan and orangutans don鈥檛 live in India.

A bit of digging provided a solution. Over the millennia, several apes have lived in India, including one with a catchy name and a big reputation: Gigantopithecus. Said to have stood up to 3.5 metres tall, it is the biggest ape ever to have walked the Earth.

Read about the Indiana Jones-esque discovery of Gigantopithecus and the ongoing search for his remains in our recent feature

King Louie was reborn: a King Kong-sized ape with a distinctly orangutan-like appearance. His lyrics were rewritten so there could be no mistake about his identity.

How close did Disney get to its muse鈥檚 physical appearance? Frankly, who knows. 鈥淲e really don鈥檛 know what Gigantopithecus looked like,鈥� says an amused , at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. The beast is well and truly extinct, and despite nearly a century of hunting, all that has been found are a handful of jawbones and thousands of teeth. Porcupines are thought to be to blame for that.

In defence of Disney, Gigantopithecus is often placed in the orangutan family, though Yingqi Zhang at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing says it鈥檚 just as likely to be more closely related to chimpanzees and gorillas.

What of its size? King Louie鈥檚 hulking frame is a bit of a stretch, even for Gigantopithecus. The species that lived in India, G. giganteus, probably stood no taller than a living human, but its Chinese cousin did grow to be much larger. Some have suggested G. blacki could have been 3.5 metres tall. , said he is 12 feet tall 鈥� although we think that must be sitting down.

Then there鈥檚 the fact that Mowgli would never have encountered Gigantopithecus, even in China. It is thought to have gone extinct around 300,000 to 400,000 years ago, long before humans arrived in the region. Realistically, if anyone bumped into Gigantopithecus, it would have been Homo erectus.

But heck 鈥� this is Hollywood. Ciochon says Gigantopithecus was evolving to be bigger still when it went extinct. For the sake of argument, let鈥檚 imagine a small population clung on for another 200,000 years. If this were true, the largest great ape may well have been larger still, and could have met the first Homo sapiens to arrive in Asia.

And what of the biggest of all Hollywood apes? In the original King Kong, ambitious young adventurers discover King Kong in south-east Asia. Two years after the movie鈥檚 1933 release, an ambitious young researcher, Ralph von Koenigswald, found the first Gigantopithecus tooth in a Chinese apothecary鈥檚 shop. In the realm of gigantic apes, truth can be every bit as strange as fiction.