Pop Culture Chronicles

Tarzan

Tarzan has been in the comics for about as long as comics have been around. Some of the earlier comic book stories were reprints of newspaper strips. Titles like Tip Top Comics (1936), Comics on Parade (1938), Large Feature Comic (1939), and Sparkler Comics (1941) featured Tarzan stories.

The most popular Tarzan series spanned at least three publishers running from 1939-1979. Dell published the Tarzan title from 1939-1947 for 131 issues. Issues 132-206 appeared under the Gold Key label from 1948-1972. DC Comics continued the numbering with 207-259 (1972-1977). Then Marvel secured the rights to Tarzan with renumbering starting in 1977, running for 29 issues and three annuals. 

The Tarzan comic series often complimented the Tarzan movie series which was produced during many of the same years. In addition to various stand-alone Tarzan movies, the movie series starred the following actors in the lead role: 

- Johnny Weissmuller [12 movies] (1932-1948)

- Lex Barker [5 movies] (1949-1953)

- Gordon Scott [6 movies] (1955-1960)

- Jock Mahoney [2 movies] (1962-1963)

- Mike Henry [2 movies] (1967-1968)

- Ron Ely [2 movies] (1970) 

Several of these actors appeared as Tarzan on photo covers of the comics. The Dell series featured Lex Barker on the covers from issues 13-54 and Gordon Scott from issues 80-110. Gold Key featured Ron Ely on at least four covers (162, 165, 168, 171). To my knowledge, Johnny Weissmuller, the most popular Tarzan never appeared on a comic cover. Some fan sites have mistakenly listed him as pictured on Dell covers, but these pictures are actually of Lex Barker who bore some resemblance to Weissmuller.  

The Tarzan comics have boasted such artistic talent as Hal Foster, Jesse Marsh, Joe Kubert, and John Buscema. The 80s were slow years for Tarzan in both movies and comics, with highlights including the 1984 Greystoke movie and Marvel's accompanying adaptation. A seven issue mini-series was published by Malibu Comics in 1992-93. The mid-nineties through early 2000s found Dark Horse with the licensing to Tarzan including comics series and an excellent mini-series in which Tarzan teamed with Batman in an Elsesworlds story set in 1939.

Tarzan has mostly been absent from the movies with exceptions including the live action feature Tarzan and the Lost City starring Casper Van Dien and Disney's animated 1999 feature which brought Tarzan back into vogue (though its TV and video sequels were quite bad).

Dynamite Entertainment published a 15-issue Tarzan series titled Lord of the Jungle in 2012-13. Tarzan may now have a new lease on life in the movies with a new Tarzan feature scheduled for release in 2016. It stars Alexander Skarsgard as Tarzan and Margot Robbie as Jane. I'm hoping this movie will breath new life into Tarzan while being grounded in the source material. Perhaps this will launch a new franchise.  

The Wild Wild West

I love introducing my kids to stuff I grew up watching. Sometimes they rate my old TV favorites as awesome and other times they find them cheesy. All four seasons of the TV series The Wild Wild West are on DVD, so we recently watched the first four episodes of season two. I started with season two since it was the first color season. 

The same plot formula was used in the first three episodes. An evil maniacal genius wants to take over the world (or a part of it). His henchmen are mostly silent bafoons. There is a damsel in distress, but James West isn't sure he can trust her. The sets, colors, and costumes are outlandishly over-the-top. The villains were played by such notables as Victor Buono (King Tut on Batman), Boris Karloff, and Michael Dunn as Dr. Loveless, a recurring character who is an evil dwarf and West's arch nemesis. He is instantly my teen-aged son's favorite villain, as he was mine when I was a kid. My 11-year-old daughter says West's pants are too tight, so she attributes his fighting abilities to "spandex power."

The fourth episode was a little less formula with Ida Lupino as a kind-of female Dr. Frankenstein who resurrects cadavers and disguises them as government agents to carry out assassinations. West and Gordon are both kidnapped and locked in her dungeon one dark and stormy night. The episode is notable for being the only one in which Robert Conrad gets less screen time than Ross Martin whose Artie Gordon character is a bit more developed and gets to fall in love and to demonstrate his fencing prowess. It's definitely the best episode of the four. 

For the uninitiated, The Wild Wild West was far from being a conventional western. It was about two secret service agents, James West and Artemus Gordon who worked under President Grant and traveled by private train car. While West was typically the fighter and the ladies' man, Gordon was a master of disguise and inventor of gadgets. West was created to be a James Bond on horseback.

I hear that the third season was slightly more conventionally western which makes me want to watch it and refresh my memory. I was excited to get home from school on weekday afternoons at four o'clock during the 70s to watch this series in syndication. I later watched it on Saturday nights at nine on an independent TV channel out of Texas.

The series combined the western, spy, and sci-fi genres. It was popular enough to be a comic book with seven issues published in 1969, the final year of the TV series run. The final season saw little of Ross Martin who was recovering from a heart attack throughout most of filming. He and Conrad were reunited in 1979 and 1980 for two made-for-TV movie sequels. A James West Limited Edition Action Figure in the likeness of Conrad was produced in 1997.

The theatrical Wild Wild West with Will Smith bears little resemblance to the TV series and is best forgotten. But rumor has it that the man who revived Battlestar Galactica will soon be pitching a revived Wild Wild West to the TV networks. We shall see.