Tarzan in film, television and other non-print media
With the advent of talking pictures, a popular Tarzan movie franchise was developed, which was anchored by actor Johnny Weissmüller in the title role, which lasted from 1932 to 1948.
Other actors who portrayed the character in 1920s films were P. Dempsey Tabler and James Pierce (who married the daughter of Edgar Rice Burroughs).
Weissmüller, the son of ethnic-German immigrants from the Hungarian part of Austria-Hungary, was already well known as a five-time Olympic gold medalist in swimming.
He became the most famous and longest-lasting screen Tarzan, starring as the Ape Man in a total of twelve films, through 1948, the first six produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and the final six from RKO.
Starting afresh with an extremely free adaptation of Tarzan of the Apes which threw out everything that had gone before, the Weissmüller series was a boon to the franchise if not to the character.
In keeping with Motion Picture Production Code requirements, their son "Boy" was found and adopted rather than born to Jane.
The "Boy" character, played by Johnny Sheffield, appeared in eight consecutive films in the series, starting with Tarzan Finds a Son (1939).
Due to complex licensing issues relating to Tarzan, a number of competing films starring other actors were made during the Weissmüller period.
Crabbe went on to a career in B-films and television, including portrayals of space opera heroes Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers.
Brix, another Olympian (shotput) changed his name in 1939 and, as Bruce Bennett, enjoyed a long career in film and television.
Tarzan's Revenge, released in 1938, starred Glenn Morris, gold medal winner in the Olympic decathlon in 1936, a feat documented in part two of Leni Riefenstahl's film Olympia.
Despite Barker's aristocratic bearing and good acting credentials, Lesser insisted that he emulate Weissmüller's "Me Tarzan, you Jane" characterization.
MGM released a remake of Tarzan, the Ape Man in 1959, a poorly received film starring Denny Miller.
The Weintraub productions, including the Ron Ely television series (see below), dropped the character of Jane and portrayed Tarzan as an intelligent but apparently rootless adventurer.
In contrast to most earlier Tarzan films, the Weintraub productions were in color and were shot in exotic locations such as Kenya, India, Thailand, Malaysia, Mexico, and Brazil.
While restoring Tarzan’s identity as an intelligent human being, Greystoke portrayed his adaptation to civilization as a failure, and his return to the wild as a matter of necessity rather than choice.
Essentially a follow-on to Greystoke, this film was set in the 1920s and attempted to capture the flavor of some of the later novels in the Tarzan series, in which the ape-man encountered increasingly fantastic civilizations hidden in the deep jungles.
It stars Alexander Skarsgård and Margot Robbie as Tarzan and Jane, along with Samuel L. Jackson, Christoph Waltz and Djimon Hounsou.
The new approach blended the characters and the setting from the Burroughs novels with the events of the Congo Free State in the late 1880s and historical figures with a significant role at the time, such as Leon Rom as portrayed by Waltz.
[3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13] On September 30, 2022, The Hollywood Reporter has announced that Sony Pictures has picked up the screen rights to Tarzan and is looking to deliver a "total reinvention" of the character.
[18] The film opened in a number of countries in late 2013 and early 2014, but received mostly negative reviews and as a result no theatrical release was planned for the U.S.
Among the latter is Starzan, a Philippine Cinema comedy film loosely based on the original Tarzan franchise satirizing western entertainment.
The first was variously titled Tarzán en la gruta del oro/King of the Jungle/Tarzan in the Golden Grotto (1969) and portions were filmed in Suriname, Florida, Africa, Spain and Italy, with interruptions when the producers ran out of money.
Sipek claimed the film company could not pay the huge licensing fees from Edgar Rice Burroughs' estate and settled for the name "Zan" or "Karzan"[20] for the character.
In 1976, Richard O'Brien wrote a musical entitled T. Zee, loosely based on the idea of Tarzan but restyled in a rock idiom.
[23] Meanwhile, television had emerged as a primary vehicle bringing the character to the public, as the corpus of Tarzan films, especially those of Johnny Weissmuller and Lex Barker, became staples on Saturday morning TV.
The latest television series was the live-action Tarzan (2003), which starred male model Travis Fimmel and updated the setting to contemporary New York City with Jane as a police detective.
Netflix aired an animated series titled Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan and Jane set in modern-day where 16-year-old Tarzan (voiced by Giles Panton) returns from the African jungle to a London boarding school where he meets Jane (voiced by Rebecca Shoichet), who helps him solve environmental injustice, crimes and mysteries.
The series begins as a comical parody of Tarzan, but later expands to other settings, such as a martial arts tournament in China, professional wrestling in America, and even a fight with vampires.
From the mid-1950s, all the extant sound Tarzan films became staples of Saturday morning television aimed at young and teenaged viewers.
