Return of Ghost of the Son of the 31 Days of Cheese - Day 6 - The Adventures of Tarzan.

Again sorry we will make up the missing days of Cheese as the month wears on.

Anyway one of the most iconic characters in fiction is Tarzan – created by Edgar Rice Burroughs in 1912 (in book form in 1914) when he wasn’t doing the Mars series or the Plecudar series (set in the center of the earth) or the Land that time Forgot Series  let’s face it  the man was busy at his death in 1950 he had written almost 80 novels.  I’d guess in addition to being highly imaginative and a good writer, he was a very fast typist.  Anyway as noted Tarzan along with Dracula, and Sherlock Holmes is one of the most iconic fictional characters of the last 200 years. Hell even today say Tarzan and someone will either say “me Jane” or give out a version of the Johnny Weissmuller yell.

That’s as may be the later 20^th century and the 21^st century have not been kind to Tarzan. The inherent racism that a white child could become king of the jungle is rather off putting .  it’s a mark of the changing times one assumes.

However that did not stop some folks from trying to reboot the series. One deiced to tell the story from the point of view of Jane – the Infamous Tarzan of the Apes staring Bo Derrick – another was to play it very very straight the film Greystoke – the Legend of Tarzan  - but another way was to set it in India and add sons The Adventures of Tarzan – 1984.

The film begins as most of these sort of films being with the painful and ugly death of Tarzan’s parents , in this case they are killed by angry natives who I have to say look very very uncomfortable in their loincloths – which really look more like colored fruit of the loom BVD’s than loin cloths but no matter.

We skip some years ahead to discover that a circus owner has hired one DK to hunt down this Tarzan fellow and bring him back to the circus. Meantime a young woman named Ruby is traveling to the same area to meet with her estranged father after the death of her mother.  Daddy Sheety, DK and Ruby – after signing a song – go on a perilous trip – Ruby is in heels which may not be the best idea for mountaineering shoe ware – Daddy to find a lost tribe, Dk to find Tarzan and Ruby well  in the end to find Tarzan too.

Tarzan is played as an inarticulate noble savage – which to digress a bit is not quite cannon – in ERB’s books Tarzan was fluent in several languages having  taught himself to read English and later the first human language he learned to speak was French  - so the whole grunting and me Tarzan you Jane thing was a Hollywood invention.

As I said I digress.  It seems Tarzan is much taken with the young Ruby who truth be told is not bad looking – he steals into her tent and later kidnaps her – she breaks away from him at that time runs into a cobra and is bitten on the thigh. Tarzan seeing this sucks the poison out of her thigh.  How this scene got past the censors is beyond me – really.

There is a later scene where Tarzan cops a feel of the semiconscious Ruby and the squeezes his own chest for the sake of comparison.

After this there are two songs , a sub plot dealing with a savage tribe that ends up killing everybody in the expedition except DK , Ruby and Tarzan – the film really veers from rather light hearted to savage in a nanosecond.  and Tarzan ends up in the circus  in the end after a massive loss of life Tarzan and Ruby head back to the jungle on the back of an elephant while a film guy offers them a role in his next film.

I’d have to think even by the standards of bollywood this was an odd film – one of the songs Tarzan my Tarzan features Ruby wearing pretty much nothing writhing about on the ground or in the water – a more apt title of the song would be Tarzan f-k me now in the name of god.

Enjoy with Indian takeout.