A new Tarzan movie...

[Al Agnew]

 

I've always been a Tarzan buff.  Two of the first adult novels I ever read, back in my grade school days, were the first Tarzan books.  I have all the Tarzan novels along with most everything else Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote, and I've read them all multiple times over the years.  I even wrote the first couple of chapters of my own Tarzan novel, bringing Tarzan into the present day.  This is possible to do and stay true to the ERB books because he twice had Tarzan (along with Jane and Korak, their son) take "fountain of youth" concoctions--this allowed him to continue writing his own contemporary Tarzan novels through WWII, even though Tarzan was supposed to have been born sometime in the late 1800s.  So my idea was to explore what it would be like for someone born in darkest unexplored Africa back then to experience what the continent (and the world) is like now, and whether he would really still enjoy life given his affinity with the jungle and animals.  I also made ERB's "great apes", which weren't gorillas and in the books had their own language and considerable intelligence, the African race of the yeti and sasquatch, which in my reality are surviving Homo erectus, not apes at all, and had Tarzan working to preserve the last remaining members of the species in their shrinking wilderness strongholds.  

My novel has been languishing for a couple years, though.

Anyway, it looks from the trailer that this Tarzan is a lot closer to the original books than any of the other movie versions over the years.  The old black and white Johnny Weismuller movies were absolutely painful to watch, making Tarzan into somebody who could barely speak any English and had an IQ little better than an ape.  It also had him and Jane "Parker" living in sin in the jungle...in the books, Tarzan marries Jane PORTER, having been a perfect gentleman to her previous to their marriage.

The most famous TV version, starring Ron Ely back in the late 60s or early 70s, was a nice environmental vehicle but Ely wasn't Tarzan.  And they kept the older movie character of Cheeta the chimpanzee--in the books it was N'kima the monkey.  Drove me nuts.

So from the trailer it looks like they followed Tarzan's early childhood--orphaned baby when his parents were killed after being shipwrecked on the wild African coast, adopted by the apes (though they look like gorillas, which I don't like), rising to their "king", later encountering white people for the first time and eventually entering civilization before going back to the jungle.  It will be interesting whether they show HOW Tarzan entered civilization...teaching himself to read English from children's books and encyclopedias left by his parents, but not being able to speak the language, only read and write it, until being taken in by a Frenchman and learning to speak French.  Eventually finding out that his parents were English peers and that he inherited his father's title and property (though he first renounced it because his cousin who stood to inherit was going to marry his love Jane and he wanted her to have all the advantages of the title).

It looks like the CGI might make Tarzan's travel through the jungle more realistic, too.  In all the movie and TV versions he always swung on vines.  Which was totally stupid, because that would mean the jungle was full of long, free hanging vines that were already propped up on a limb ready to swing to the next vine--a free hanging vine, of course, would be hanging straight down; did you ever try to swing very far on a rope hanging straight down?  In the books, when Tarzan took to the trees, he traveled like a arboreal monkey, leaping from branch to branch through the interconnected jungle canopy.

I'm looking forward to the movie.

[Quillback]

As a child of the 60's I certainly saw a lot of Tarzan, there was a TV series that ran for a few years and I think they showed re-runs of those Weismuller movies every Saturday.  Never was a huge fan, but I can still do a Tarzan "Yell".

There was that movie that came out in the 80's, can't remember the name, Greystoke, Lord of the Apes, or something like that.  I looked forward to seeing it, but it turned out to be a disappointment.  Maybe this one will be better, but it sounds as if it's a replay (with a few differences) of a story that has been told so many times.  Oh well, hope for the best.

[Gavin]

Watched it as a kid, but no interest now. Guess it was more about Dad & me skipping church, watching crappy TV!, doing a few things around the house and getting out of dodge to hunt, shoot, or fish before th ladies got home from church.

[Al Agnew]

That's the thing...no movie has ever been faithful to the books.  If you haven't read the books, all the stupid Hollywood versions are okay, I guess, but Burroughs' Tarzan story as told in the first two books, "Tarzan of the Apes" and "The Return of Tarzan", is so much more interesting to me.  Quillback, the "Greystoke" movie you mentioned came the closest to the Burroughs story, but dwelled too much on Tarzan trying to get used to civilization, something that was somewhat glossed over in the books, since D'Arnot, the Frenchman who was the first white man to befriend Tarzan in the jungle, not only taught him to speak French but also schooled him quite a bit on civilized behavior before he ever brought him to civilization.  By the time he met Jane for the second time, he was driving (he drove from the East Coast of America to a small town in Wisconsin where she was visiting mainly in an attempt to avoid a suitor who wanted to marry her, which critics of the novels point out would have been quite difficult with the state of automotive technology in 1909).  He was also smoking cigarettes and drinking.  By this time, gifted linguistically, he could also speak English fairly well, though probably with an exotic accent, and read French as well as English.  (And of course, "ape" language--Burroughs invented a not too simple language for his "great apes", which according to the stories, most larger mammals could understand.  The first volume contains an "ape-English" dictionary.)

[joeD]

Remember Al, it is a fictional story written a long time ago. Your disappointment in the translation of a work of fiction to the "silver screen" is a little bit worrisome. 

Feet on the ground please.