You won’t see that scene in Disney’s excellent new animated “Tarzan” (review). That’s not surprising. To Burroughs’s dismay, the Tarzan of Burne Hogarth’s gorgeous ’30s comic strip and the Tarzans who swung through radio and TV shows, as well as 47 movies, all lacked subtleties. Not that Burroughs could afford to whine much. As John Taliaferro shows in his absorbing new biography, “Tarzan Forever” (Scribners), Burroughs pioneered spinoffs and character licensing.
Will kids today take to Tarzan? It would only be shocking if they didn’t. The most interesting thing about Tarzan is that while he changes, swinging from book to comic strip to movie, he never loosens his grip on our imaginations. First appearing in All-Story magazine in 1912, he has few rivals for the title of the century’s most durable literary hero. As Tom Schumacher, president of Disney animation, says, “We love Tarzan because of the fundamental sense of adventure and the fact that he is primal man who can take control of the world through a set of skills that we would all desire to have.”
The fact is, the fantasy succeeds because it only plays in our imaginations. As Schumacher notes, what makes Tarzan perfect for a cartoon is that Tarzan’s moves, as Burroughs describes them, aren’t things a human can do. No one, certainly not a kid, wants to look foolish. So sooner or later we all put aside playing Tarzan. But the idea of Tarzan is something to conjure with forever. In fact, the older one becomes, the more alluring the Ape Man’s appeal. We age, he doesn’t. We struggle to hack through life’s viney complications, he soars overhead. Part savage, part polymath, this cornball fantasy figure hasn’t aged a day. Me Tarzan? You bet.
