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Hista is the main antagonist in the The Legend of Tarzan episode "Tarzan and the Challenger". He is a massive red snake who threatens the gorilla family and no one seems to be able to fight him evenly.
He was voiced by Frank Welker, who also did the vocal sound effects of the other animals in the same TV series.
Biography[]
Little is known about Hista's origins. According to an elder of the gorilla family, the serpent first attacked them decades ago when Kala was an infant. For weeks on end, Hista pursued the gorillas no matter where or how far they ran. Eventually, Hista disappeared and was never seen since.
In the present day, the giant snake suddenly returned and attacked while Tarzan was having a picnic with Jane. Moyo, one of the gorillas in Tarzan's family, managed to fend off Hista and chase him away for the time being. When Tarzan returned, Moyo boasted about this one-time accomplishment, claiming that Tarzan was too busy being with Jane to protect the family, and challenged Tarzan for leadership of the gorillas. Moyo defeated Tarzan, though only because Tarzan had saved Moyo from an imminent death of being impaled on sharp spikes. Moyo led the family away and (by an error in judgment) into a tar pit. The gorillas soon faced off against Hista again, who was seeking revenge. After some conflict, Moyo and Tarzan eventually cooperated to rescue the family and lure Hista into the tar pit, where the great snake became stuck and sank, ending Hista's reign of terror forever.
Trivia[]
- Hista is one of the few villains of the TV series to not speak a single word of English.
- Hista is one of the few villains of the TV series to die.
- Hista has poor vision and relies on his ability to sense body heat to track his prey. Interestingly, he is the only snake in Disney so far who is pointed out and displayed to have this trait.
- Hista has a pair of fangs, which no real python has, as they are not venomous and kill prey by constricting them.
- Hista seems to be exceptionally long-lived for a python, as he is both massive and old, having attacked the gorilla family when Kala was young. This likely makes him 30+ years of age at least.
- Though it is unspecified what kind of snake that Hista is, Hista is likely an African rock python (Python sebae sebae), which can grow to lengths of more than 20 feet. However, Hista is closer to 40–50 feet, making him freakishly large even for his species and more in line with prehistoric snakes like Titanoboa in terms of size.
- In actuality, real pythons in Africa cannot eat gorillas as they are simply too big to eat. This is shown not to be an issue to Hista due to his enormous size.
- Hista is based on many theological, mythical, folkloric and cryptozoological stories of unimaginably large and dangerous snakes in the jungle (most notably the Biblical book of Genesis), many tribes also speak of snakes so freakishly large that to many they would appear as modern-day dragons or wyrms, easily dwarving even the largest known snakes to science (some mythical tales speak of snakes large enough to form rivers by slithering across the ground).
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 Villains
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