Ron Of The Jungle

I have spent weeks enjoying all things Tarzan. Next on the schedule was the Ron Ely TV series, both seasons (three DVDS - two for season one) and now that I've much more quickly than I imagined have finished the series with a smile. These are tasty television shows with a lot of natural vistas and some fine acting. 

Ely's Tarzan is "my" Tarzan, he's the first actor I ever saw portray Edgar Rice Burrough's iconic Ape Man and so like any child he's imprinted on my imagination. His sleek body style, his fluid modern speech patterns, and his handsome friendly face all add up to Tarzan in my book. I was surprised to find that the TV series only lasted two seasons. I seem to remember watching it for what seems forever. Ely as Tarzan standing atop that magnificent waterfall in the opening credits is often the go-to image in my memory when the name of Tarzan is evoked. I didn't until recently know that waterfall was in Brazil.

But alas my boyhood memories fail me a bit when it comes to the texture of the show. Its editing is more hodge-podge with clear stock footage interpolated with shots of the Ape Man and his associates. This is especially true in the earliest five or six episodes made in Brazil. The production of a weekly TV show was daunting because of weather and Ely's desire to do his own stunts which resulted in injuries and delays. The production seems to get on firmer ground after a switch to a Mexican location mixed with more interior set shooting. Yet it seems none of these things bothered a young boy rapt with romance of Tarzan, the ultimate wish-fulfillment hero, assured, strong, agile, handsome, and most of all independent. 

Tarzan's Deadly Silence was a theater release made from my favorite two-part episodes. It pitted Ely against Jock Mahoney as "The Colonel" a brutal military man who sought to build an empire among the tribes. He is assisted by Woody Strode, always a formidable presence on screen. Both Mahoney and Strode showed up on the show several times in an array of roles and added value each time. 

Tarzan's Jungle Rebellion is a compilation of two episodes from the second season. By this time the series had found its mojo and was kicking out episodes with regularity. The same faces often appeared week after week playing a gaggle of different African chiefs and white hunters and such. Often there  was a lovely dame in evidence, often she was misled or confused and likely she found her way to clarity by episode's end.  Some episodes featured Jai almost exclusively. I didn't much care for Tarzan's sidekick originally, but this viewing made appreciate you Manuel Padilla's acting much more. He does some pretty sophisticated stuff from time to time. 

Watching the series after having just seen the films produced by Sy Weintraub, it's fun to look for footage from the movies that is often used to give the television show some heft. There are fires from Joch Mahoney's India adventure we see over and over again and the "death dance" from one of Gordon Scott's movies shows up several times. Event he credits owe much to the films as the memorable gimmick of Tarzan swinging across the screen to reveal the title is actually Mike Henry.

Here are some more of Gold Key's tribute to the then-current TV Tarzan.

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Doc Savage - Hell-Reapers At The Heart Of Paradise!

I continue today with the second issue of Marvel's Black & White magazine adaptation of Doc Savage from the middle 70's. Doc Savage #2 sports a lush Ken Barr cover painting pitting a brawny Doc against a man-serpent with a baleful masked figure in the background. Underneath that cover is the editorial titled "The Great Doc Savage Interview or Why Couldn't Ron Ely Be Short and Ugly!!!" by Marv Wolfman and it essentially announces the Ron Ely interview in the back of the issue and talks about the talent in the magazine. The original script this time out is again written by Doug Moench and illustrated by Tony DeZuniga, though it looks like many Tribe members might've had a hand in the artwork at some point. 

The story is titled "Hell-Reapers at the Heart of Paradise" and it begins with a businessman named Thorne Shaw suddenly being confronted with a giant Mad Viking who attacks him announcing they are to return to the "Lost Valley of Hell". Cut to Doc's men who are assembling at the headquarters and then enter a mysterious stranger called Sandy Taine deeply covered by a hat, glasses and a large coat and accompanied by a large dog. Taine tells of a doomed Spanish galleon that was lost and sunk seeking the Northwest Passage in 1505 and then speaks of a later expedition on which Taine's father sailed only five years earlier. Of the crew that left the ship two did not return and Taine's father left no trace making him the number one suspect now that the surviving members of that expedition are disappearing. Doc overhears this tale, and soon confronts Taine revealing "Sandy Taine" to be a woman. Getting the names of the two expedition members not yet disappeared, Doc and his team race to the mansion estate of one but find only evidence of Uranium-238. Later Doc encounters the Mad Viking and after a brief fight which ends with the kidnapping of the last expedition member, Doc finds only a single clue, a gold coin. The coin proves to be fake but does hide a map to a singular location off the coast of Greenland. Doc and his team along with Taine race to the Hildalgo Trading Company warehouse and breakout a unique plane capable of flying in all terrains called the Hydro-Glider. 

Off they go and soon they are landed and cutting through the ice and find sunken ships and golden treasure strangely untouched. Next they find themselves in a natural funnel that pulls them down into a weird underworld lit by diffused Uranium. They encounter the missing expedition members who are seemingly under attack by strange lizard men. After a brief skirmish one of the members shoots a lizard man and Doc is furious. But then the Mad Viking appears, takes Long Tom hostage and reveals that he and expedition members are in cahoots to take the Uranium. Doc and his remaining team are sent down into the village of the "Reptilians" where they find Sandy Taine's father who tells them that he stood up to the rest when they wanted to steal that which made the Reptilians' life possible, the Uranium. Hence he was abandoned. He further reveals that he is changing into a Reptilian himself like the sailors who had long ago transformed and were the basis for the Reptilian society itself. Doc makes plans to rescue Long Tom while sending Renny topside to fly the Hydro-Glider into the underworld by means of a passage they discover. There's a climatic battle with the Mad Viking and his cohorts which results in the destruction of the delicate balance that made the underworld possible and water rushes in destroying all. Doc and his aides along with Sandy Taine escape via the Hydro-Glider while Taine's father chooses to die with his people believing himself to be a god. 

This main story is followed by an interview with "Ron Ely: The Man of Bronze". Ely discusses his early life, his role as Tarzan, and what he thinks of the Doc movie, being particularly unapologetic for the humor so many Doc fans find so irritating in the movie. Again, there seems to have been discussion of a second Doc movie as Ely talks about it briefly. This issue was a solid Doc story, with all the elements. The ending is a bit nihilistic for Doc with the whole civilization destroyed, but everyone seems in character. The artwork is good, but shows signs of deadline pressures in the latter pages. DeZuniga's rendering of Doc in particular is excellent most times. 

 More next time. 

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Doc Savage - The Doom On Thunder Island!

I kick off a final plunge into Marvel Comics and their adaptation of the classic pulp hero Doc Savage to comics form. After the unsuccessful run of eight color comic issues back in the early 70's, Marvel took another crack at the character trying to take advantage of the buzz around the George Pal movie adaptation of the character. They reprinted the first two issues of their Man of Bronze adaptation in a one-shot giant-size comic, and they launched a new Black and White magazine series. 

The first issue of Doc Savage the magazine sports a cover by Roger Kastel which is based on the artwork from the George Pal movie poster. Inside the front cover there's a great photo of Ron Ely who played Doc standing next to a print of classic "Man of Bronze" James Bama pose. 

Following the table of contents there's an editorial from Marv Wolfman about the magazine and the character's history at Marvel called "An Editorial in Bronze". The facing page features an outstanding poster shot of Doc and his Fab Five by John Buscema and Tony DeZuniga. This team also produces the artwork for the sweeping epic of a story save for two full-page shots by John Romita. The writer is Doug Moench and this tale appears to be an original. 

The story titled "The Doom on Thunder Isle" begin with the startling destruction of a NYC skyscraper by a lightning bolt. Cut to the Fab Five waiting for Doc to finish his two-hour training and we're off to the races. With the expanded page count they take time here to show us Doc's training as well as expanding on the feud between Monk Mayfair and Ham Brooks. A woman named Angelica Tremaine shows up to seek help on behalf of her brother Winston Tremaine an architect, and the pair had just escaped being killed in the destruction detailed on the first page. She presents Doc with a complex coded message from her brother, then they find an eavesdropper named Thomas J. Bolt who claims to have only Angelica's safety at heart. Suddenly costumed men break through the windows and a battle ensues. The villains use powerful and mysterious guns that throw electrical bolts. When they are defeated the villains kill themselves leaving Doc with only the coded message to decipher. He and his men set about to do just that and Moench really indulges himself here giving us a long and complex code that they spend several pages unwinding. They determine there is danger to Tremaine at a place called the Velvet Room and Doc hops aboard his auto-gyro and heads to that location. He finds the masked villains have already been there and abducted Tremaine but he discovers a hidden message. Then a witness comes forward but is immediately killed by more masked men who Doc then gives chase to. 

Again he gets into the auto-gyro and follows he culprits who have disappeared into a strange moving cloud. He finds a zeppelin hidden in the cloud but before he can do anything but put a tracer on the airship, doors open and giant version of the electric gun juts out and destroys the Velvet Room. There then follows another section in the story where some mysterious clues are deciphered, a statue located and a paper found within it that points to the location of a distant Pacific island. Doc and his team board their own zeppelin the Amberjack but this time underneath attached magnetically is the submarine Hell-Diver. The team pursues the zeppelin but then Doc perpetrates a ruse by luring the enemy zeppelin to fire on the Amberjack and simultaneously releasing the Hell-Diver into the sea just masking their true means of following the tracer. Johnny stays behind to pilot the Amberjack. 

Doc and his remaining men follow the zeppelin to the island and then slip on shore. The encounter many weird things including a tiger which glows with a blue light. The find more of the masked villains and another battle breaks out. Eventually among other things Doc is pitted in battle against the tiger but wins. He fought to save what he thought was a man but finds a man-beast who runs away. Doc then enters a great ziggurat which is in the center of the island and finds Angelica Tremaine threatened by the masked leader of the villains and her brother about to undergo some treatment. The villain is soon revealed to be Thomas Bolt, and it turns out that using his skills with electricity he's the mastermind behind the electric weapons as well as the mutated men who have been transformed into various man-beast combinations. These manlings are pitted against Doc and his men within an electric fence, but the man-beast that Doc had saved earlier reveals that he's actually Wiggens Tripp a rival architect they'd at first believed might be the villain. Tripp leads the manlings against the villains who have transformed and tortured them while the villain Bolt attempts to escape in the zeppelin. But the explosions resulting from the manling uprising capture the zeppelin and crashes into the pyramid headquarters destroying everyone presumably save for Doc, his men, and the Tremaines. The story ends with Tremaine regretting he'd thought ill of Tripp as the team sail home on the Amberjack. 

Following that sweeping tale, there are two interviews with George Pal about the Doc Savage movie, in which he talks about the movie and the projected sequel tentatively titled "Doc Savage, Enemy of Evil". Pal relates how he came by the Doc Savage project and seems confident there will be sequels. Alas we all know now that was not to be. All in all a really solid Doc Savage adventure. Moench might get a bit overwhelmed with the codes, slowing down the story, and the ending seems a bit underwhelming given the set-up, but it's certainly got that sprawling pulp feel. The artwork is solid, even excellent in places and frankly the B&W format suits this material very well. 

More to come. 

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Doc Savage - The Movie!

[This review of Doc Savage - The Man of Bronze was first cobbled together a decade ago. After giving it a good going over I found little had changed in my assessment.]

Yesterday was a very pleasant day. I was sitting on my front porch (the carport really) in a comfortable chair, ideal weather, aromatic cigar smoke wafting around my face, while I read a dandy Doc Savage adventure. I've been catching up on my Doc Savage reading since school has been out. While I sat there, the UPS man arrived and delivered to my eager mitts the Warner Archives Doc Savage movie on DVD. I've long had a copy on VHS, but I've been meaning to upgrade to the DVD for years. I splurged this week. Ironically, I was reading a Doug Murray essay on the movie as it arrived at my door. I took the flick and later yesterday got around to viewing it. 

It's been quite a few years and I've read many a Doc Savage adventure since I saw it. Before, my interest in Doc was mostly from the comics by Marvel and the fact the great Ron Ely was playing the role. At the time I knew a little about Doc from a few novels, but I had read precious few of them before Anthony Tollin made it possible with his current line of great reprints. Having read over a hundred of those at this point, I am better able to evaluate how effectively the movie evokes the Lester Dent stories. [Note: I have since finished he whole of the original 182 Doc pulp novels plus more than a few of the yarns written since.] And I must say, I was impressed. The campy nature of the movie is regrettable still, but after reading how Doc seems so tongue-tied around women in the novels, it sure makes his "Mona, you're a brick." line go down a bit easier. And by the way, I never realized that Mona is played by Pamela Hensley who went on to play the evil Princess Ardalla on Buck Rogers, a neat fanboy double play there.

 

The John Phillip Sousa theme still annoys a bit, but mostly because it's used inappropriately at times, such as when Doc and his Fab Five are on the journey to the Edge of the World. The Fab Five themselves are reasonably well cast for the most part, though I do think both Ham and Monk are a bit too clownish for the roles in places. Habeas Corpus annoys me in the books and continues to do so in the movie, so no change there. 

The villain, Captain Seas, seems much more typical of a Doc baddie than I realized, and even his over-the-top henchman Gorro is more in keeping than I suspected, though that satiric element does undercut the movie in places. The battle-of-a-dozen-fighting-styles at the end is cute, but it lasts too long. On the upside, the brawl on the yacht seemed pure classic Doc to me. I'm still annoyed by the sometimes slickness of the production, the nasty habit of labeling every piece of equipment Doc uses with his name seemed stupid when I saw this movie in the 70's and every time since. The movie does seem at times to be more interested in branding a toy line or something than telling a good story. 

This isn't the Doc movie I'd have made then, and certainly not the one I'd make now. But I still argue the first half-hour of the flick is pretty dang good as Doc chases the Mayan gunman across the skyscraper while the Fab Five rush to help. There is a good sense of how the books unfold. More of this would've been a great help to the overall feel of the movie. 

I'd still love to see a new Doc movie made, one with a real respect for the vitality of the character and not just for the surface features. Seeing the trailer for the first time in my memory is a treat (see below), as well as the fact the movie looks great on DVD, widescreen is excellent. If you haven't seen this Doc, see it. But if you're a fan of the books, don't judge it too harshly, but rather try to love what is best. It's a movie with mostly good intentions if not always good delivery.

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Tarzan Of The Television!

Despite the fact I have a luxurious backlog of wonderful vintage television shows yet to enjoy (Irwin Allen and Hanna-Barbera shows galore)I nonetheless found myself helpless after a week of enjoying all things Tarzan. I ordered up the Ron Ely TV series, both seasons (three dvds - two for season one) and hope to enjoy over the next few weeks. They showed up yesterday, the jungle games can begin.

Ely's Tarzan is "my" Tarzan, he's the first actor I ever saw portray Edgar Rice Burrough's iconic Ape Man and so like any child he's imprinted on my imagination. His sleek body style, his fluid modern speech patterns,  and his handsome friendly face all add up to Tarzan in my book. I was surprised to find that the TV series only lasted two seasons. I seem to remember watching it for what seems forever. Ely as Tarzan standing atop that magnificent waterfall in the opening credits is often the go-to image in my memory when the name of Tarzan is evoked. I didn't until recently know that waterfall was in Brazil.

After watching only a single episode, I can already tell my boyhood memories fail me when it comes to the texture of the show. It's editing is more hodge-podge with clear stock footage interpolated with shots of the Ape Man and his associates. The terrain seems to jump from grassland to deep jungle on a whim. None of these things bothered a young boy rapt with romance of Tarzan, the ultimate wish-fulfillment hero, assured, strong, agile, handsome, and most of all independent.

It will be interesting to watch these shows produced by Sy Weintraub after having seen for the first time the theater efforts starring first Jock Mahoney and Mike Henry. I can already tell this will be a most revealing trip through some outstanding and even some outlandish episodes.

Here are some more of Gold Key's tribute to the then-current TV Tarzan.

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