TARZAN LORD OF THE JUNGLE (1976-79)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological, sociological*

Filmation Studio's TARZAN LORD OF THE JUNGLE enjoyed 36 episodes spread out over four seasons on CBS-TV. As of this writing, only Season 1, consisting of 16 half hour episodes, has been released to DVD. Yet somehow I feel confident in making a summary statement about the entire series--

TARZAN was to Filmation what JONNY QUEST was to Hanna-Barbera.

I refer not to the overall level of craft or to audience reception, but to my perception that the Filmation raconteurs pushed themselves far more than they ever had before (with adaptations like SUPERMAN and AQUAMAN) and certainly more than they would in future. 

Of course, with a show produced for Saturday morning television, there was no way Filmation could include any of the visceral violence of Burroughs, even putting aside the company's budgetary limitations. But in lieu of fight scenes the producers used rotoscoping to lend a sense of pleasing grace to animals and to the ape-man himself. 

There were other compromises. Though 1976 wasn't as afflicted with political correctness as current cartoons are today, LORD's producers evidently shared the same intuition that guided Disney's 1999 TARZAN: if you don't have any Black Africans in the stories, no one can complain about how they are depicted. But unlike the Disney version, Filmation's LORD compensates by having the ape-man run across assorted "lost races," though not nearly as many as Burroughs himself created. Thus the stories usually concern Tarzan meeting some sort of exotic society-- a race of ten-foot-tall giants, or one made up of antique Vikings, or knights in armor, or worshipers of a long-lived woolly mammoth. There's even a passing reference to the land of Opar, the lost kingdom Burroughs himself utilized most often.

My favorite episodes, though, are the two involving the lion-worshipers of Zandar ("Cathne" in Burroughs' TARZAN AND THE CITY OF GOLD). This was one of the author's best Tarzan books, and though of course the cartoon couldn't deal with any of the more mature elements, I appreciated that the animators did a great job designing Nemone, one of the many pagan queens who threw themselves at Tarzan's bare feet.

It's here that Burroughs' protagonist gets his first incarnation as "Tarzan, Eco Warrior." To Filmation's credit, the ape-man's love for his jungle kingdom-- which extends to having a strange rapport with animals other than apes-- comes across as heartfelt in the scripts, so that the ecological themes aren't intrusive. There are of course some weaker stories, which in my opinion tend to be the ones with SF-elements, particularly Tarzan's two close encounters with extraterrestrials. 

It also helps that Tarzan uses most of the animal-names in the ERB glossary without stopping to explain any of them, and in place of the overly wacky chimp from the movies, Tarzan's main companion also hails from the books, the semi-cowardly monkey N'Kima. There's no Jane in the first season, nor any other romantic dalliances for Tarzan, but there are a number of female support-characters who are generally portrayed as possessing strong agency, maybe more than a lot of Burroughs heroines.