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.
I remember discovering the Barsoom series and the Venus books in high school and loving them. What fun!
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