In some ways it's a goddamn crime that the version of Tarzan that Millennials grew up with was saddled with Phil Collins music and Rosie O'Donnell's voice blasting like an air-horn throughout. I recently tried to re-watch the Disney version of Tarzan, and for all the technical achievements of the film, that "let's do things tied entirely to what's popular in the moment", upon reconsideration, makes the film a grating mess.
I guess Gen X may have been the last generation to be given Tarzan to enjoy in steady doses. I remember watching black and white Tarzan on TV as a kid, and I have to assume it was Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan with Cheeta. It's also possible we were watching later movies, the 1960's TV series... Who knows? Tarzan has known a lot of incarnations in film and television, including maybe the version that really informed me most about Tarzan,
the 1970's-era cartoon show.
Before the release of 1984's
Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, Marvel put out a Tarzan magazine comic which covered the first half of the first Tarzan novel.
And this was really what informed me as to the more detailed version of Tarzan's origin.
Like a lot of kids, we played "Tarzan", even if I can't really recall what that meant other than climbing whatever we could get a grip on around the yard and imagining we'd made friends and foes of the 10 or so jungle animals we could name. But being able to talk to monkeys and lions seemed like a pretty good deal to us. The 70's and 80's were still safely within the 20th Century, and the notion of High Adventure was still very much a marketable commodity at the time, across nearly all genres, and Tarzan was right at the center of that.
I finally
watched the original Johnny Weissmuller movie and read the actual Edgar Rice Burroughs
novel of Tarzan of the Apes just last year. The book is a book of its time, as is the movie, and both have their place in history. While the prose of the novel may be purple and many ideas in the book would now seem dated, the story still holds as an adventure and romance. And if we're looking for our own cultural DNA, both Tarzan and ERB's John Carter are vital to understanding what was to come with superheroes and superhumans in fiction and popular culture, and - of course - that's now escalated to culture writ large with fifth generation offspring of Burroughs' creations throwing shields in billion dollar movies.
All that to say, I was a bit pre-disposed to want to see a new Tarzan movie, and, yet, I've seen very, very few of them to date. Not even
Greystoke, which I am told again and again is not worth seeing.