Saturday, November 29, 2014

Literary Toons: Tarzan and the Vikings (1976)

From Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle:

The Ape Man (Robert Ridgely) discovers a tribe of Vikings, descended from a tribe that had landed in Africa more than 1,000 years earlier. Everything else is, well, predictable......



Lord of the Jungle has been described as the most faithful adaptation of the Edgar Rice Burroughs books, topping not only the movie series, but also Ron Ely's 1966-8 live-action series. Disney's subsequent adaptation, while it went far off the track, also enabled Tarzan to be well spoken.

Rating: B.

4 comments:

magicdog said...

I would love a reboot of this version of Tarzan, but for now, it's the Disney version most of this generation are familiar with.

It wasn't until I was older before I could fully appreciate this incarnation; at the time I didn't know how close this was to the original Tarzan books. Many of the names Tarzan refers to are all in the books - from Nakima to Tantor, to Bulgani, to Usha the wind.

The late Bob Ridgely was also a great voice match.

In the end credits you may have seen the name "Chuck Menville" as a writer and producer. He was in fact the father of VA Scott Menville, who voiced all sorts of animated characters over the past 25 years.

hobbyfan said...

So there is at least one actor with an inside connection into the business outside of the producers' families. I wonder if Chuck is still writing, and maybe, if he is, WB can hire him to help some of the idiots writing for them.......

magicdog said...

Sadly, Chuck Menville died back in 1992. He did have an impressive body of work during his lifetime.

hobbyfan said...

Oh. Didn't know about that. I do know that he did do some writing for Hanna-Barbera at the end of his career.