The Film Detective has tabbed Aug. 23 as the street date for double-disc Blu-ray and three-disc DVD editions of The Tarzan Vault Collection: Special Edition.
It was just a story, a serialized version of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “Tarzan of the Apes,” that was published in All-Story Weekly in October of 1912. It would spawn a century’s worth of books, films, radio and television productions.
By 1917 the first rights to Burroughs’ first Tarzan novel had been acquired by the National Film Corp. of American and Elmo Lincoln, who had small uncredited roles in some of D.W. Griffith’s films (The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance) and was the Genie in the 1917 version of Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp, landed the role of the screen’s first Tarzan.
Filming took place in and around Los Angeles (various support studios), with jungle sequences filmed in Louisiana and some additional “atmosphere” footage shot in Brazil. The film, Tarzan of the Apes, opened in late January of 1918 and it is the first of three early Tarzan films included in this collection.
No less than the Queen of England has dispatched the Lord and Lady Greystoke, played by True Broadman (he would die the same year the film was released from the Spanish Flu — some his films before his untimely death were The Pitfall, Stingaree, Molly Go Get 'Em) and Kathleen Kirkham (The Foolish Matrons, Pilgrims of the Night, The Isle of Retribution), to South Africa as her representatives, but the ship that is carrying them has had a mutiny on board and the two are abandoned to fend for themselves in the jungle.
The early part of the film has the two constructing a shelter, making the best of it and Lady Greystroke giving birth to Tarzan. She dies when he is about a year old and Lord Greystroke is later killed by marauding apes … the infant Tarzan is adopted by an ape who has recently lost her offspring.
As years pass, a playboy nephew (played by Colin Kenny) takes over the Greystroke financial empire and blows up an arranged marriage with Jane Porter (Enid Markey — after an early career in silent films, she left for Broadway throughout the 1920s and 30s, returning to film and TV work after World War II) to diddle with a promiscuous barmaid (Bessie Toner). About the same time, one of the sailors from the mutiny returns to England and reports that the Lord and Lady Greystroke did not die and had a son, who is the rightful heir to the family fortune.
Jane decides to go in hunt of the missing heir … she has many adventures, is rescued by Tarzan and falls in love!!
Elmo Lincoln stars once again as Tarzan in the 1921 film releases of Adventures of Tarzan, with the role of Jane taken over by Louise Lorraine (Up in the Air with Mary, McGuire of the Mounted, The Great Circus Mystery).
And, the third entry in this collection from The Film Detective is the 1935 12-chapter serial, The New Adventures of Tarzan, starring Herman Brix (aka: Bruce Bennett — as Bert Pierce in Mildred Pierce, plus such films as Dark Passage, The Treasure of Sierra Madre, The Great Missouri Raid, The Alligator People) as Tarzan, who has “new” adventures in the jungles of Guatemala as rival groups search for the treasure known as the “Green Goddess.”
As to bonus features, Tarzan of the Apes, Adventures of Tarzan and The New Adventures of Tarzan include commentary by film historian Ed Hulse, plus there are three featurettes — “Law of the Jungle: The Cinematic Adventures of Herman Brix,” “Drawn to the Jungle: The Early History of Tarzan in Comics,” and “Swinging Into Action: The Early Adventures of Tarzan on Film.”
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