Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O'Sullivan

Johnny and Maureen were a lovely couple.


Brenda Joyce just wasn't the same, even if she too was beautiful.

I wonder how it would have been had they not decided to make his Tarzan uneducated with limited speech.
I assume Jungle Jim is more like the original Tarzan conception in that sense--I need to check one of them out to compare.

Maureen O'Sullivan I think remains the best live-action Jane yet. Given Weismuller's limited dialogue (his range is debatable) she was acting for two people and did very well. Tarzan and his Mate is a great showcase for her talents.

Here are a few facts and figures about the Tarzan films starring Johnny Weissmuller.

With “Tarzan The Ape Man” (1932), Johnny Weissmuller became the first Talking Tarzan and brought the jungle adventures into the sound era. Weissmuller appeared as Tarzan in 12 feature films, more than any other actor.The first six of the dozen came from MGM. Maureen O’Sullivan played Jane is all of the MGM productions. The series then moved to RKO for the last six. Brenda Joyce was Jane in the final four. The first two from RKO had no Jane but Francis Gifford and Nancy Kelly as other characters for the female leads.

In the fourth MGM feature, Tarzen Finds A Son (1939), child actor Johnny Sheffield was added to the cast as Boy, the adopted son of Tarzan and Jane. Boy was the only survivor of a jungle plane crash. Tarzan and Jane had to get their son this way instead of having their own because, I mean, REALLY!, there they were, out there in the jungle, co-habitating and running around mostly nekkid and without the blessing of either clergy or city hall! Having an out-of-wedlock infant would have been the final straw. Sheffield remained in the cast for all but the very last feature when he was dropped for being too old at age 17. He went on to star in his own jungle features – another dozen released starting in 1949 and the last in 1955. This was the Bomba, The Jungle Boy series. The first of the series was the appropriately titled Bomba The Jungle Boy.

After Weissmuller’s 12 Tarzan’s, Gordon Scott and Lex Barker both had runs of 5 pictures. Scott is perhaps most famous as the man who royally pissed off Alfred Hitchcock by marrying Vera Miles and getting her pregnant, making her drop out of “Vertigo” – one of the most serendipitous events in movie history - The Tarzan Ape Call was a creation of the MGM Sound Department although Weissmuller could do a pretty fair version. After Weissmuller started to get a little on the heavy side, he moved to Columbia Studios who put clothes on him and called him Jungle Jim. Weissmuller invested in the Jungle Jim series which earned him a small fortune which he mostly lost through bad investments, a wild and crazy lifestyle, and five divorce settlements. However, he continued to be a popular figure into his elder years, especially with children toward whom he was very gracious and would usually belt out an Ape Call if a youngster requested it.

I didn't know that. Thanks.