I am getting really REALLY fed up with Tarzan movies.
Edgar Rice Burroughs is a pulp genius and his body of work (a much of it as I have read whcih is everything I've been able to get my hands on) is rich and rife with blockbuster potential. And yet (as per another thread I posted a while back) most adaptations of Edgar Rice Burroughs have been Tarzan movies, and (this may be heresy to some) they haven't even been all that good Tarzan movies; The older movies castrate the character but getting rid of the violence, making him a dumb buffoon (in the novels he's a respected nobleman with a horse ranch in the congo where he can slip off from time to time when the clothes get too much for him), removing virtually all the fantastic elements and tonning down his romance with Jane, How bad? Well in the movies when Jane and arzan have a son they find him washed up on the beach from some boat accident, why? Because the producers of these films didn't want the son of Tarzan to be biological because that would imply that Tarzan and Jane had sex.
I am not making this up.
Edgar Rice Burroughs himself hated these old movies and what they did to his characters, his novel 'Tarzan and the Lion Man' is a direct response to those movie and is about Tarzan trying to deal with a mad scientist and talking gorillas but a film crew making a Tarzan movie are wandeirng about making everything worse with an actor who looks like Tarzan but is his opposite.
'Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes' starts off promising and adapts a lot of important scenes from the book but at around the halfway point it becomes a serious melodrama examing the psycological implications of a man raised by Apes adjusting to human society. While I admit this is interesting in it's own right it's not a very good adaptation of the novels.
'The Epic Adventures of Tarzan' is a forgotten TV series from the 90s that tried to adapt the novel more closely but was failed by it's budge. 'Tarzan and the Lost City' is a made for TV movie that also suffers from this problem,
'Tarzan, The Ape Man' decided to explore the erotic elements of the story but the less said about that...film the better:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfSFW93SRb4
The Disney movie with it's TV series came close to realising the character but were hampered by the Disney brand which forced a certain amount of goofiness which (in my opinion) clashed with the more serious stuff and the woefully inappropriate Phil Collins soundtrack (and I like Phil Collins!).
This latest movie has me excited and nervous; the trailers look like their trying to adapt the spirit of the novels a bit more now what with all the action adventure stuff and Tarzan being a respected lord, on the other hand the reports of rumblings behind the scenes between Yates and Warner bros has me a bit worried and this did start out as a Stephen Sommers film, he was going to make this years back but he fell out with Warner Bros and went and made 'Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book' instead (which is almost a Tarzan movie anyway), if anyone could have made a Tarzan movie like Burroughs would have imagined it it would have been the man who made 'The Mummy'. I'm also nervous because with 'John Carter' fresh on all the studio's memories if this movie fail we may never get a good Edgar Rice Burroughs movie.
What do you all think? What's your favourite Tarzan movie? What's your least favourite? Are you excited for this new movie? Do you think it'll be a disaster? Are there any directors or wrtier who you feel would do a good job making a Tarzan movie?
Edgar Rice Burroughs is a pulp genius and his body of work (a much of it as I have read whcih is everything I've been able to get my hands on) is rich and rife with blockbuster potential. And yet (as per another thread I posted a while back) most adaptations of Edgar Rice Burroughs have been Tarzan movies, and (this may be heresy to some) they haven't even been all that good Tarzan movies; The older movies castrate the character but getting rid of the violence, making him a dumb buffoon (in the novels he's a respected nobleman with a horse ranch in the congo where he can slip off from time to time when the clothes get too much for him), removing virtually all the fantastic elements and tonning down his romance with Jane, How bad? Well in the movies when Jane and arzan have a son they find him washed up on the beach from some boat accident, why? Because the producers of these films didn't want the son of Tarzan to be biological because that would imply that Tarzan and Jane had sex.
I am not making this up.
Edgar Rice Burroughs himself hated these old movies and what they did to his characters, his novel 'Tarzan and the Lion Man' is a direct response to those movie and is about Tarzan trying to deal with a mad scientist and talking gorillas but a film crew making a Tarzan movie are wandeirng about making everything worse with an actor who looks like Tarzan but is his opposite.
'Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes' starts off promising and adapts a lot of important scenes from the book but at around the halfway point it becomes a serious melodrama examing the psycological implications of a man raised by Apes adjusting to human society. While I admit this is interesting in it's own right it's not a very good adaptation of the novels.
'The Epic Adventures of Tarzan' is a forgotten TV series from the 90s that tried to adapt the novel more closely but was failed by it's budge. 'Tarzan and the Lost City' is a made for TV movie that also suffers from this problem,
'Tarzan, The Ape Man' decided to explore the erotic elements of the story but the less said about that...film the better:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfSFW93SRb4
The Disney movie with it's TV series came close to realising the character but were hampered by the Disney brand which forced a certain amount of goofiness which (in my opinion) clashed with the more serious stuff and the woefully inappropriate Phil Collins soundtrack (and I like Phil Collins!).
This latest movie has me excited and nervous; the trailers look like their trying to adapt the spirit of the novels a bit more now what with all the action adventure stuff and Tarzan being a respected lord, on the other hand the reports of rumblings behind the scenes between Yates and Warner bros has me a bit worried and this did start out as a Stephen Sommers film, he was going to make this years back but he fell out with Warner Bros and went and made 'Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book' instead (which is almost a Tarzan movie anyway), if anyone could have made a Tarzan movie like Burroughs would have imagined it it would have been the man who made 'The Mummy'. I'm also nervous because with 'John Carter' fresh on all the studio's memories if this movie fail we may never get a good Edgar Rice Burroughs movie.
What do you all think? What's your favourite Tarzan movie? What's your least favourite? Are you excited for this new movie? Do you think it'll be a disaster? Are there any directors or wrtier who you feel would do a good job making a Tarzan movie?
