Edgar Rice Burroughs

It was on this date in 1950 that Edgar Rice Burroughs died.  He was the creator of Tarzan, John Carter (John Carter of Mars and others), Carson Napier (Carson of Venus and others), David Innes and Abner Perry (At the Earth’s Core series), Bowen Tyler (The Land that Time forgot stories) and a host of other fantasy and American western characters.

He was born in Chicago, IL on September 1, 1875.  Until he sold his first short story to All-Story Magazine in 1911, he was a failure in just about everything he had undertaken.  He served a term in the army, then worked as a cowboy in Idaho, then a shopkeeper, a railroad policeman, a gold miner, and even an “expert accountant”.

He was married, had two children and expected a third, and was flat broke, pawning what few possessions the family still had.  Then, he sold Under the Moons of Mars for $400 and that was a turning point in his life.  His next literary effort was Tarzan of the Apes.  He also sold this work to All Story in 1912.  The book of the same title appeared in 1914 and was a best-seller.  Over the next 36 years he penned almost 100 books and stories.  The most well-known, of course, were about Tarzan.

The first motion picture based on a Burroughs work was the 1918 silent Tarzan of the Apes.  It featured Elmo Lincoln as the first actor to portray Tarzan on screen as an adult (Gordon Griffith acts as a youthful Tarzan in a brief scene, and several unnamed infants picture Tarzan as a child).  Burroughs sold rights for individual pictures and so there were times when multiple features bearing Tarzan’s name were in the theaters in a short period of time.  Different studios distributed their own versions of the character.  Burroughs saw himself as striking while the iron was hot monetarily and saw nothing wrong with having various interpretations of his creation competing with themselves.  Notable Tarzan actors include P. Dempsey Tebler, Kamuela Cooper Searle, Gene Polar, James Pierce, Frank Merrill, Johnny Weissmuller, Buster Crabbe, Herman Brix, Glenn Morris, Lex Barker and Gordon Scott.

These are all English-language films.  There have been other theatrical releases and television incarnations but most of these have (mercifully) slipped away into history.  There have also been a host of non-English films about Tarzan or whose characters are somewhere between copies and rip-offs of the original Ape-Man.

The best-known in English-language circles are the films starring Johnny Weissmuller.  While great fun at times, the Tarzan of these movies is a loose caricature of ERB’s creation.  And, no, he never says, “Me, Tarzan; you Jane,” in any of the books (nor does he speak those precise words in any of the movies, either).  The same departure is true of other movies based on ERB creations.  John Carter and his imitators (Jumper and others), the several iterations of The Land that Time Forgot (1975, 1977, 2009), At the Earth’s Core and others all can make the claim of being loosely based on the Burroughs original (or at least having appropriated the title of a Burroughs story) but hardly any of them are true reflections of their namesakes.  Interestingly, the few that come the closest are silent films that are almost one hundred years old.

So, thanks, Mr. Burroughs, for many an entertaining hour reading your books.