Posted on 11/22/2018 1:40:23 PM PST by CaliforniaCraftBeer
lol...So Betty actually knew Tarzan?
It caused quite a scandal back then.
I liked the John Carter books best.
Never even watched trailers for the movie, as there is no way Hollywood wouldn’t screw that setting up something awful.
Tarzan is far inferior to Mowgli as a character.
Fourteen is about how old I was when I read the Tarzan series. I wonder how well they would hold up if I were to re-read them now in my late sixties.
I recently re-read the old Conan stories. They held up pretty darn well.
https://sites.google.com/site/skprofile00/reh-stories
A bit before my time, but they came on tv in the 60s and I really enjoyed them. Loved the books, too, in my teens.
Heard from my mom that the Tarzan movies were on the ‘no watch’ list for Catholics. Tarzan and his mate were not married!
The late Philip Jose Farmer loved Burroughs, and while the sci-fi in Burroughs is much less plausible (ahem) even than most sci-fi, and the writing never quite emerges from the pulp level, Farmer noted that any writer who can create the most recognizable character in the history of literature cannot be taken lightly.
Ron Ely played Doc Savage in a movie, too. Way fun!
The Ahnold movies didn't move the needle. The REH stories would make a great foundation, and for that matter, some of the 1970s reboot stories (Carter, Sprague de Camp, etc) would make a great path for a preplanned series of annual summer blockbusters. They'd just have to be careful with the casting, pick someone young enough and good enough, but not someone who will play hard to get later. Or maybe just intentionally recast the lead role for each movie, make that part of the publicity. There have been something like six James Bonds, for example.
When I left for Vietnam, I had 19 first edition Tarzan, Mars and Pellucidar novels sitting on a bookshelf in my room, they belonged to my father before me. And every one of them had been signed by Edgar Rice Burroughs. When I returned from Vietnam 3 years later, she’d cleaned the room and disposed of what she called my junk. She told me she gave all the books to Good Will.
Lord Tyger by Farmer is weird, weird book. A sort of deconstruction of Tarzan, of how you could actually get something in real life close to ERB’s vision. Not for the squeamish, if I recall he has his character having sex with the gorillas.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Tyger
Freegards
It seems the big weak point, in my view, is the screenwriting. Maybe they have to dumb it down for the average movie goer but I can’t sit through all the drivel when the abandon the original story plot to expound on some goofy, politically correct tangent.
Game of Thrones managed to get past this for HBO. Lord of the Rings managed to keep much of the original storyline, until The Hobbit, anyway.
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