The "Over a Century of Jungle Love" Story

It was an ordinary day.  Thinking back to all the great movies that I saw with my friends when I was young.  Sometimes my mom or dad would take me and a friend to see a movie, but I eventually was allowed to attend the movies by myself with a friend or two.  Often ventured to the second block of North Queen Street where there were multiple movie theaters to take your dollar.  Some of my favorites were the Western movies, but I can still see that guy swinging from the tree.  You know, Tarzan!  I'm sure if you are past the prime of your life you have to remember those great movies where he saved Jane from some catastrophe.  Just the other night on TV was a replay of a black and white Tarzan movie.  Didn't watch it because the Phils were playing and I couldn't miss the game - even though I got upset with the game and turned the TV off.  It was in 1912 that Edgar Rice Burroughs created the fictional hero.  If you might have been walking past a newsstand that year you might have looked at the October issue of All-Story magazine.  On the cover was a thinly clad man sitting on a rampaging lion, his knife raised for the kill, as another man (the lion's target) looks on in horror.  "Tarzan of the Apes" was born.  It was the story of the English lord who was raised by apes in an African jungle and eventually became king of his ape tribe and fell in love with the beautiful marooned Jane.  It wasn't until January 27th, 1918 that the first movie about Tarzan was made, mostly because they didn't know how to film something like that.  It opened at New York's Broadway Theater and was a hit, being one of the first films in history to gross over a million dollars.  The producers promised the largest and finest specimens of apes to be found ... not two or three lions, but a herd of twenty or thirty, plus wild boars, leopards, antelopes, and other African animals.  The movie didn't have everything the producer said, but people loved it anyway.  Elmo Lincoln was the first of many Tarzans, but perhaps two of the most famous were Johnny Weissmuller and Buster Crabbe. Tarzan made his first radio appearance, if you can imagine that, on September 10, 1932.  In 1959 Burroughs died, but by then the Tarzan character wasn't the popular one that thrilled the masses in the first half of the century.  In 1962 a Los Angeles librarian tried to take the Tarzan books from the shelves, since Tarzan and Jane weren't married and the books were immoral.  By the early 60s the Tarzan movies were being shot in exotic locales around the world and finally made the leap to TV in 1966.  I saw many of the Tarzan movies, but I must admit that one of the most recent which was filmed in 1981 and featured Bo Derek, Richard Harris and Miles O'Keefe in a more mature version of the story, was .... well, very interesting.  There were over 45 Tarzan movies made with the 1999 Disney animated version one of the biggest hits.  I'm sorry to say I missed that one.  I would have been tough to top Bo Derek walking around the jungle dressed in ......... well you know, so I passed on the last one of Burroughs' hero.  It was another extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary guy.