I got a kick out of the old Tarzan cartoons from my youth. They felt superhero-adjacent to me and I liked the character designs. Even as a kid, the limited animation did stand out to me. I remember getting a little annoyed with all of the re-used sequences.
A natural pairing but I'd like to see Vixen the model and Lord Graystroke with Jane along in New York City.
ReplyDeleteI liked the Tarzan series! The animation process used by Filmation in the late Seventies/early Eighties was somewhat more advanced than ten years earlier (post-superhero craze). In fact, Tarzan's running scenes almost reminded me of Ralph Bakshi's process for his LOTR feature film! Namely, live-action film repainted, by cartoon animators, frame-by-frame. The only limits inherent in that process would be budgetary. Definitely not limited in regards to imagination!
ReplyDeleteThe same process - known as rotoscoping - was used in both. Filmation also used it for other cartoons such as He-Man.
ReplyDeleteThe Fleischer family used rotoscoping before either of them. On the Golden Age Superman cartoons from Depression-era Paramount Studios!
DeleteI remember reading something by one of the Bros. Hernandez saying that because Tarzan was drawn with black hair and dark eyes in those days he was very popular among Mexican Americans.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if that's why they had an episode featuring Mayans and Kukulkan.
DeleteAh, Tarzan, so much potential as a series.
ReplyDeleteIt was certainly more faithful to the original ERB novels. Nobody else, but Filmation, has ever adapted Tarzan and the Antmen.
DeleteAnd no live-action version of Tarzan has yet given us a live-action Jad-Bal-Ja!
DeletePoor ol’ Vixen probably the most unused and misunderstood heroine in the dc pantheon, and the biggest selling hero of the 20th century ( books and films )
ReplyDeletewill they end up dealing with drug runners, Nazi’s, or lost cities full of beautiful women and gorilla men ?
That Ant-men comment by Anonymous isn't quite accurate. Russ Manning posted a much more lore-accurate version of the Ant men in his Tarzan newspaper comic strip in the late 1960s, which DC Comics reprinted a few years later and can be seen at Erbzine.com.
ReplyDeleteThanks for that info, JT. Unfortunately, I was in elementary school in the late 1960's. And Mr. Manning's strip wasn't syndicated in my hometown newspaper. So, the advent of Tarzan's Saturday morning cartoon, courtesy of Filmation, is the first non-print adaptation I ever saw of that particular ERB title.
DeleteThis one's AWESOME 👍🏽.
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