Tarzan A to Z | Frances Gifford

Tarzan A to Z | Elmo Lincoln

Adam Strange hates planet-sized cephalopods

By Carmine Infantino, RIP. [The Golden Age]

Tarzan A to Z | D'Arnot

Tarzan 101 | Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle

Celebrating Tarzan's 101st anniversary by walking through Scott Tracy Griffin's Tarzan: The Centennial Celebration.

Except for a couple of children's books about the Tarzan Twins (that Griffin covers in a separate section), Burroughs took a four-year break from Tarzan stories after Tarzan and the Ant-Men. When he came back, he jettisoned most of Tarzan's supporting cast in favor of stories in which Tarzan wanders the jungles, helping explorers and discovering new lands. The first of these is Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle, in which the ape man and an American photographer discover a hidden valley inhabited by medieval knights. Curiously, most of the cover art for various editions of book features Tarzan rescuing a gorilla from a giant snake. That's cool and all, but I don't understand why they're hiding the lances and plate mail that make this novel distinctive.

Burroughs got some great feedback from readers about his new approach and that pleased him; not only because people liked it, but because he could write this kind of story a lot more quickly and easily than the more complicated plots he'd been doing up to then.

Griffin includes a supplemental chapter after the one on Lord of the Jungle, but it really ties in with the next book instead of this one, so I'll cover it next week.

Tarzan A to Z | Cheetah

Tarzan 101 Movie Review | Tarzan of the Apes (1918)

Scott Tracy Griffin covers the Tarzan movies in Tarzan: The Centennial Celebration, but unlike the novels, he doesn’t talk about them one by one. Instead he separates them into eras: silent films, MGM, etc. That’s understandable, but I’d like to dig into them more deeply than that, so I’m going to include some Tarzan movie reviews in Tarzan 101 as a supplement to walking through Griffin’s book.

The first Tarzan film was the silent Tarzan of the Apes in 1918. It was apparently a two-hour film, but half of the footage is lost. What’s left appears as a special feature on Al Bohl’s documentary about the making of it: Tarzan, Lord of the Louisiana Jungle. It’s probably not fair to judge the film on half its footage, but that’s what we got and there’s enough there to get a feel for what the filmmaker’s were after.

It’s a pretty faithful adaptation. It opens in London with Lord Greystoke’s appointment to stop the Arab slave trading in British Africa. I’m cynical enough to suspect that the parts of that sentence that most trouble the characters are “Arab” and “British,” not “slave trading,” but that’s not explicit in the movie. We can pretend that the British were morally opposed to slave trading in general if we want. What I like about the scene though is Lady Greystoke’s insistence on going with her husband. The men don’t want to let her and her reply is something like, “Can only men have courage?” She knows it’s going to be dangerous and inconvenient, but she doesn’t care, because she’s brave. Though that's right out of the novel, the film’s Lady Alice isn’t as weak as Burroughs’, who’s so fragile that she goes insane after an animal attack.

As in Burroughs’ novel, there’s a mutiny on the ship to Africa and the Greystokes are put on shore. In the film, their ally amongst the mutineers is a man named Binns, who plays a much larger role than his counterpart in the novel. Binns escapes the ship in order to continue looking out for the Greystokes, but he’s captured by those Arab slave traders and tortured for years. He comes in and out of the story at key times, eventually teaching young Tarzan to read before going back to England to let Tarzan’s relatives know that an heir of Greystoke is still alive. It’s a major change from the novel – and an unnecessary one, I think – but I can see why the screenwriters wanted to help explain some of the more incredible and coincidental parts of Burroughs’ plot.

The Greystokes’ life in the jungle is an accurate, though abbreviated version of what’s in the novel, as is Tarzan’s early life among the apes. Young Tarzan is played by 11-year-old Gordon Griffith, who does an amazing job of communicating the various emotions Tarzan goes through as a boy: mischievous playfulness with the apes, careless curiosity in his parents’ cabin, concern over how different he looks from the apes, and joy at finally figuring out why that is. He’s a fine actor and a great Boyhood Tarzan. It’s no wonder that he was asked back to play young versions of Tarzan and Korak in a few other films following this one.

Adult Tarzan is played by Elmo Lincoln, an enormous actor with an unfortunate wig and headband. At first look, Lincoln appears to be a bad actor, hamming up his performance with over-exuberant gestures and chest-thumping like a professional wrestler. Some of that’s to be expected in silent acting, but Lincoln goes overboard. After a while though, I realized what he was doing.

His performance started to remind me of Griffith’s as Young Tarzan and I figured out that Lincoln was playing his character as a child in the body of a grown man. Instead of crazy, his gestures are meant to make him look innocent and uninhibited. That reading is supported by the way he acts when he meets Jane. The literary Tarzan is curious and attracted to Jane, but he’s also noble and polite. Lincoln’s Tarzan woos Jane like a kid on a playground. He’s shy and uncomfortable and inappropriate around her, and she has to teach him how to behave around women.

It’s not my Tarzan, but it’s as valid a choice I guess as Johnny Weissmuller’s monosyllabic grunts. But where Weissmuller’s version still manages to hold onto Tarzan’s dignity, Lincoln’s doesn’t. The juxtaposition of how childish he’s acting with how large he is makes him look uncomfortable and silly.

Even the two-hour version of the film only covers the first half of the novel it’s named after. The movie ends weirdly, with Jane’s party out in the jungle looking for her when Tarzan – who’s rescued her from cannibals – returns her to the cabin. As I said before, the romance between the two of them has been awkward up to that point, so the audience is supposed to be uncertain about Jane’s feelings for Tarzan. He hasn’t completely repulsed her, but she also hasn’t warmed up to him as obviously as she does in the book. The film ends with her calling out to him as he’s about to return to the jungle and then they run into each other’s arms. If the movie had just been about the romance, that would be a fine ending, but there’s a lot more going on and plot threads are dangling all over the place. It feels very unfinished.

The plan of course was to complete the story in the sequel. It was a shady thing to do since National Film Corporation had only bought the rights to the one book and were milking two movies out of it, but the scheme worked and they made Romance of Tarzan out of the second half. Unfortunately, that movie is lost.

There was some drama around the release of Romance because it caused problems with the adaptation of Burroughs’ second novel that he was trying to get going. That movie is also lost, so since I won’t be reviewing it, I think I’ll wait and cover it when we get to that section of Griffin’s Centennial Celebration.

Tarzan A to Z | Bolgani

Tarzan 101 | Tarzan and the Ant-Men

Celebrating Tarzan's 101st anniversary by walking through Scott Tracy Griffin's Tarzan: The Centennial Celebration.

The idea for Tarzan and the Ant-Men came from Burroughs' editor at All-Story, who suggested Burroughs write a story about Tarzan among Lilliputians from Gulliver's Travels. Burroughs liked the idea, but wasn't sure he could make it work. After some negotiating and collaborating though, he wrote the novel about a race of 18"-tall humans who ride tiny antelope and live in domed, hive-like cities.

Tarzan discovers the Minunians after crashing a plane in the otherwise impenetrable Great Thorn Forest. He doesn't meet them right away though, but first encounters a civilization of ape-like Amazons who rule over their men. Escaping that group, Tarzan finds the Minunians and gets involved in the conflict between two of their cities, Trohanadalmakus and Veltopismakus (the long names being another homage to Gulliver's Travels). There's apparently even a scene in which Tarzan is tied down - Gulliver-like - by his diminutive captors.



I haven't read Ant-Men, but I understand that there's a troubling plot thread when Tarzan returns to the Amazon group and finds that - inspired by Tarzan's rebellion - the men have overthrown the women and properly subjugated them. Since this is How Things Should Be, the women are naturally happier in their new role serving the men. Again, I haven't read Ant-Men yet, and I don't know what biases may have affected this interpretation of it, but some of the other Tarzan novels have similarly dated viewpoints on issues of equality, so it's not hard to believe.

Esteban Miranda (the Tarzan lookalike from Tarzan and the Golden Lion) also has a subplot in Ant-Men as he escapes his fate from the end of Golden Lion and makes his way back to Tarzan's estate to cause more trouble. It's not terribly vital to the story (in fact, All-Story eliminated those sections when they serialized it), but helps build the tension as the reader wonders if Tarzan will return in time to set things straight.

Griffin's supplemental chapter for this novel is called "Tarzan the Polyglot." It lists all 29 languages Tarzan learned in his career (including Latin and Mayan!) and shows how that gift is foreshadowed all the way back to the first novel when Tarzan not only teaches himself to read English, but also tells D'Arnot that he understands "a little of the language of Tantor, the elephant, and Numa, the lion, and of the other folks of the jungle." Quite a huge difference from the monosyllabic guy made famous by Johnny Weismuller.

Tarzan A to Z | Apes

I'm a fool for trying this, because I have no time, but I'm gonna try the April A-Z challenge. If I just make it a pictorial feature, maybe I can pull it off. That's kind of cheating though, so I haven't officially signed up or anything. Just something fun for the month.

Thunderbirds are PROCEED WITH CAUTION

I somehow missed participating in the White Elephant Blogathon last year. That’s totally on me, but thankfully host Paul C. from the Silly Hats Only blog reached out to remind me this year. I had a blast being forced to review The Legend of Boggy Creek in 2011, so of course I was all in for this year’s.

If you’re not familiar, the idea behind the White Elephant Blogathon is for participants to submit the name of a movie that they’d like to see someone else have to watch and review. It can be a good, classic movie, but it’s more fun if it’s divisive or out-and-out crap. (My submission falls into that last category: The Beast of Yucca Flats.) Paul then puts all the submissions into a hat and divvies them back out again. This year, I drew Thunderbirds are GO.

Paul can pick movies for me to watch anytime, because like Legend of Boggy Creek, this is something I’ve wanted to watch for years and just needed the proper push. I’d never seen an episode of the Thunderbirds TV show and it was in 2004 that I realized that I was missing out on a large part of ‘60s pop culture. That was not only the year in which Team America: World Police parodied the show, but it was also when Jonathan Frakes directed a live-action version starring Bill Paxton, Anthony Edwards, and Vanessa Hudgens. Getting assigned Thunderbirds are GO (the 1966 feature film sequel to the TV series) was an excuse to finally see what this was all about.

To prepare for Thunderbirds are GO, I first wanted to see the show. My initial plan was to watch all 32 episodes, but I only got a couple or three in before I realized that wasn’t going to happen. The premise of Thunderbirds was pretty genius, but the execution wasn’t so much.



Thunderbirds plays off of two things that were super popular in the late ‘60s: disaster movies and James Bond. Series creators Gerry and Sylvia Anderson had the truly brilliant idea of making a show in which a wealthy family uses high tech gadgets to save people from a different disaster each week. Something else that was pretty popular in the late ‘60s was Bonanza, so Thunderbirds’ Tracy family follows a similar model to the Cartwrights, with widower Jeff Tracy living with his grown sons: Scott, Virgil, Alan, Gordon, and John. The sons were all named after Mercury Seven astronauts and Jeff was himself a former astronaut in the show. Also like the Cartwrights, the Tracys were served by an Eastern manservant (Bonanza had Hop Sing; Thunderbirds had Kyrano). Replace the Pondarosa Ranch with an awesome, secret island and throw in an Emma Peel-esque super spy with a tricked out, pink Rolls Royce and you have the makings of a great show. At least in theory.

Even if you’ve never seen an episode of Thunderbirds, if you’ve heard of it you know that it was filmed with marionettes instead of live actors. The Andersons used that technique on several shows including Supercar, Fireball XL5, Stingray, and the Thunderbirds spin-off Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons. “Supermarionation” (as they called it) gives the show a distinctive look and helps integrate the characters better with the world of miniature models that they live in. It does take some getting used to though, and it also limits how exciting the action can be when the characters can’t run realistically or even move very fast. It’s that sluggishness that ultimately dooms the show (and the feature film that followed it).

The slowness isn’t just the puppets’ fault; it’s the whole pace of the show. I gave up my plan to watch every episode when I recognized a repeating formula after the second or third one. A disaster would occur, the local authorities would attempt a rescue and fail, then the Tracys (aka International Rescue) would get called in. Sometimes IR’s attempt would succeed on the first try, but sometimes they’d have to regroup and come up with a new plan. It was a lot like watching a real-life rescue operation on the news: interesting to see them engineer new solutions, but not very thrilling.

There would also be long sequences of just looking at the models that make up the world of Thunderbirds. To be fair, they are fantastic models and I want to live in that world. If Thunderbirds were made today, there’d be a endless line of toys and playsets to buy and I would get every single one of them. Thunderbirds is like porn for people who enjoy scale models, but that also means that the show lingers on the money shots a lot instead of moving on with the story. Thunderbirds was an hour-long show with only a half-hour’s worth of material.



In my revised watching plan, I picked out episodes that sounded less formulaic. Any episode prominently featuring Lady Penelope (the Emma Peel-like character) was bound to be enjoyable because those were spy stories. There was also a fantastic episode (my favorite that I watched) in which scientists created an animal-growth serum in their swamp lab, but it got into the swamp and turned the gators huge.

I tried watching a few episodes with the show’s recurring villain, The Hood, but those were usually the least interesting. The Hood was Kyrano’s half-brother and he had some kind of remote-control, hypnotic power over the Tracys' servant. The Hood’s plans usually involved creating some sort of disaster so that International Rescue would have to come out, then he would try to take pictures of their vehicles (the titular Thunderbirds) to sell to shady dictators or whathaveyou. It’s always understood on the show that it would be The Worst Thing in the World for pictures of the Thunderbird vehicles to get out. Absolute secrecy was a non-negotiable requirement for any rescue mission they agreed to undertake, and attempting to kill the Hood was always a justifiable response to his shutterbugging.

So I have very mixed feelings about the show. It’s slow and occasionally stupid, but the model porn is awesome and some of the stories are really cool (like the one with the runaway monorail). All of these strengths and weaknesses are magnified in Thunderbirds are GO.

The plot of the feature film revolves around (but doesn’t at all focus on) the first manned mission to Mars. On the initial launch, the Hood sneaks on board the spaceship for reasons I don’t entirely understand and accidentally causes it to malfunction and be destroyed. Suspecting intentional sabotage, the government asks International Rescue to oversee the second launch attempt. The Hood again sneaks on board (again, for a purpose that escapes me), but IR is all over him. He escapes, but Lady Penelope chases him and – after an extended sequence over land, sea, and air – shoots down his helicopter and kills him. This is all in the first twenty minutes or so of the movie, so if you’re wondering what drives the rest of the 93-minute film, you’re on exactly the same page I was at that point. Maybe you’re also like me and figure that maybe the Hood wasn’t really dead, but would return to cause more trouble. If so, you’re wrong.



What actually happens for the rest of the movie that actually has anything to do with its plot is that the spaceship goes to Mars and the astronauts have a pretty cool fight with some awesome-looking Martian rock-snakes. This has nothing to do with the Tracys, but there is a random mechanical failure on re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere, so International Rescue gets to come in for that part. While the astronauts are on Mars though, IR’s simply having some downtime, with youngest brother Alan pouting about having to stay at home with dad while older brothers Scott and Virgil hang out with Alan’s crush, Lady Penelope. There’s an extended dream sequence in which Alan fantasizes about going with Penelope to a space nightclub, which would be enough to get Thunderbirds are GO on the White Elephant list all by its lonesome.

Having struggled so much with the TV show and Thunderbirds are GO (I couldn’t bring myself to watch the second feature film, Thunderbird 6), I hoped that Jonathan Frakes’ live-action Thunderbirds would be exactly what I needed. I remembered it being panned in 2004, but I was still hopeful that live actors and good CGI could do exciting things with this cool concept. Unfortunately, I couldn’t even finish the thing.

About halfway though, I realized what was going on and got on IMDB to check a theory. Sure enough, Spy Kids was released in 2001, with two sequels following in 2002 and 2003. In 2004, there was no new Spy Kids movie and Universal saw the opportunity to fill that hole. It’s just too bad they used Thunderbirds to do it.

Instead of being about a retired astronaut and his five, grown sons, the live-action Thunderbirds has Bill Paxton as a still-active Jeff Tracy leading his four oldest sons on rescue missions. Picking up the theme from Thunderbirds are GO, youngest son Alan feels left out, but it’s because he’s a freshman in high school. While he’s home on Spring Break, the Hood (played by Ben Kingsley in a performance that reminds me how nervous I should be that he’s in Iron Man 3) takes over Tracy Island and incapacitates the older members of International Rescue. Alan teams up with the children of Kyrano and Brains (the nerdy inventor of the Thunderbirds in the TV show) to save the day and prove that kids can be heroes too or some such stuff. Brains didn’t have a kid in the TV show and Kyrano’s daughter was a grown woman, so a lot of tampering had to be done to force Thunderbirds into the Spy Kids mold. I turned it off, longing to see marionettes punching each other.