…just as there is really only one James Bond. Sean Connery is the ultimate Bond, of course, (although my kids might say “Pierce Brosnan”!)
And we Boomers would have to agree on the one true Tarzan: Johnny Weismuller.
Lordy, was I a Tarzan fanatic from 4th grade throughout high school! It started with the movies starring Weismuller. You could occasionally catch one on one of the two television stations we received in the little Nebraska town I was living in–usually on a Saturday afternoon.
My buddies and I were always playing Tarzan: building treehouses, hanging ropes to swing from tree to tree. Man, those were good times…
There were about a dozen Weismuller Tarzan movies made. The first six have been packaged and are available on DVD as THE TARZAN COLLECTION STARRING JOHNNY WEISMULLER. Volume 1 is available at Amazon, for about fifty bucks direct–or only about twenty bucks if you click the “used/new” link (twenty bucks for a “new” copy!).
The 2nd volume comes out Tuesday and also includes half a dozen episodes–which I think completes the Weismuller “body of work” in the Tarzan genre.
Parenthetically, let me say that the most fun I ever had reading books was growing up with Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan series. Oh, to be a kid again…
I just remember some part in some movie where Cheeta dies, and I think I rewinded it and played it over and over again because it was so damn funny.
Comment by Clint — October 29, 2006 @ 3:28 pm
You are not my son!
(Actually, I think you may be referring to a Tarzan marathon that was on PBS a few years back that I had you boys watch a little of. We watched a couple of episodes–each of which had a cheesy clip of Tarzan, and in one case Cheetah the monkey, being attacked by a charging rhinoceros. I think that same clip–Tarzan or whomever jumping around in front of a back-lit screen projection of a rhino–was in about every Tarzan movie. I think the rhino got Cheetah once, but the monkey ultimately survived, didn’t he?)
Comment by Jerry — October 29, 2006 @ 4:09 pm
I like Sean Connery the best too
Comment by Cody Pettit — October 31, 2006 @ 9:41 pm
If ya think that all the Weissmuller films were as entertaining as I do, you may be interested in know that Boy is still alive and kicking. He’s 77. Johnny Sheffield
has fond memories of his 8 Tarzan movies with Johnny Weissmuller. He’s been know to enjoy chatting on Skype as
mebomba.
Comment by Ray Mayes — November 2, 2008 @ 4:58 pm