It's Tarzan time!

Watching the swimmers at the Rio Olympics, my mind went back to the ace swimmer and also the famous Tarzan, Johnny Weissmuller. He was our school-days hero when Tarzan movies were the rage and how we tried to imitate his yodelling call to say nothing of the “Me Tarzan, You Jane” line.

So, it was Google time which describes him as “Hungarian-born American competition swimmer best known for playing Tarzan in films in the 1930s and 1940s.” Today we know the name sounds German but in those fledgeling days, it was beyond our realm of understanding.

Weissmuller also won five Olympic golds and one bronze and lived from 1904 to 1984. Ironically he was struck by polio at the age of nine and was recommended swimming as a way to get out of it. The exercise skyrocketed him to fame.

My earliest memory of him is rescuing ‘Boy’ (John Sheffield) from an African spider’s web - but I am not able to identify the movie. ­Could have been ‘Tarzan Finds a Son’ (1939) in which Tarzan and Jane (Maureen O’Sullivan) adopt a child survivor of an air crash. It is directed by Richard Thorpe from characters by Edgar Rice Burroughs and covers a large canvass, strewn with jungles and other hurdles but in those early days our critical skills were yet to be honed.

So let’s confine ourselves to the enjoyment of the story and in the next two films ‘Tarzan’s Secret Treasure’ (1941) and ‘Tarzan’s New York Adventure’ (1942) the foursome, Weissmuller, Maureen O’Sullivan, John Sheffield and Cheetah was intact.

‘Secret Treasure’ is about an expedition team coming to Tarzan’s escarpment because the two members Medford (Tom Conway) and Vandemeer (Philip Dorn) find out that there’s plenty of gold in there. They want Tarzan to show them the location.

As though he would but the natives intervene and capture the expedition team. How they find their way out with Tarzan doing his utmost as he usually did much to our juvenile delight. Those were the days my friend…

‘New York Adventure’ takes our hero out of his comfort zone and into the big city. It is about circus workers, who land an aircraft in the jungles of Africa in search of lions for their circus. While trapping them they run into Tarzan, Jane and Boy. While watching Boy’s tricks with the elephants (shades of our own Sabu, the Elephant Boy,) Circus head, Buck Rand (Charles Bickford) realises that Boy would be a big draw at the Circus.

Meanwhile, the group is attacked by natives (a common occurrence in Tarzan films) and Tarzan and Jane are believed to have perished, so they take Boy to New York. When Tarzan Jane realise that Boy has been taken to New York they follow and it is a whole new experience for our jungle hero. He is befuddled by the lifestyle and gadgetry of “civilisation.”

But he displays his quiet “noble savage” ways by complaining about the necessity of wearing clothes and observing that the opera singer he hears on a “noisy box” is “woman sick, scream for witch doctor” and expressing his childlike wonderment at taxi cabs. He is also surprised to see various African-Americans making a living in New York, which had not yet earned the name of Big Apple or Big Bad Apple.

Tarzan tries to get Boy through the Courts but doesn’t succeed. So he has to take the law in his own hand and his escape route is riddled with adventure including jumping off Brooklyn Bridge. It is the shortest of the three movies, just 71 minutes. They are all below 90 minutes, the Bunuellian limit with ‘Tarzan Finds a Son’ the longest at 88 minutes.

Whether it was the cost of raw stock or the overall expenditure of the shoot one isn’t too sure but how we today envy that period. There were others who played the Tarzan role after him, like Tony Scott and Lex Barker among others but they were a long way behind him. Johnny Weissmuller is said to have had five wives but let’s leave that to the gossip magazines.