[6]

Call me a sucker for an Olympic swimmer in a loincloth, but I enjoy Johnny Weissmuller's maiden swing through the jungle. This first feature in the long running matinee series is the one where Tarzan meets Jane (Maureen O'Sullivan), whose on expedition with her father to find a fabled elephant graveyard. He kidnaps her, but then she saves him from her angry father, he learns a little English ("Me Tarzan, you Jane"), and the two fall in love. Hey, if it can happen that fast for the J-Lo, it can happen that fast for the Lord of the Apes.

Don’t expect the story to be faithful to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ source material — it’s a hammy bastardization with its own unique charm. Cheetah the monkey is a sweetie, and you gotta love all the animal fighting that goes on in these things. It would probably be illegal today (or accomplished via CGI), but in this movie, there are real stunt men fighting large, exotic animals. Some of the electronic hippos and crocodiles don’t fool anyone for a second and it’s hilarious that in the first act, all the African tribesmen they encounter are depicted via rear-screen photography. But then at the end, we get to see elephants stampeding over screaming pygmies. Cheezy? Charming? Either way, I dig it.