The Legend of Tarzan seeks to jumpstart the franchise for a new generation, and it certainly puts its money where its mythology is. Like James Bond, Tarzan on screen has never gone away, but unlike the dapper double-oh agent, his movie appearances rarely generate much notice - one would have to go back to the final year of the last century to find a Tarzan flick that more than 12 people saw (that would be Disney’s 1999 animated take). I even suffered through the 1981 Bo Derek atrocity Tarzan, the Ape Man, a movie so agonizingly awful in every regard that critic Leonard Maltin, in his annual Movie Guide, amusingly wrote that it “nearly forced editors of this book to devise a rating lower than BOMB.” My habit extended to the filmic versions, including all 12 Johnny Weissmuller yarns, most of the Gordon Scotts and Lex Barkers, the TV series starring Ron Ely, and 1984’s intelligent and handsomely mounted Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes. In my youth, I used to mainline Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Tarzan novels as if I were Al Pacino snorting up all that cocaine in Scarface. Alexander Skarsgård in The Legend of Tarzan (Photo: Warner Bros.)
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