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Everyone has heard of Tarzan, the white man raised by apes in the African jungle who became a legendary warrior and fought for good against evil. He was the most famous creation of a prolific and popular writer of romantic adventure novels, Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875–1950). The books have been translated into thirty-one languages. Like many of the most enduring characters in popular culture, Sherlock Holmes, Raffles, Dr Fu Manchu, Bulldog
(2009) have written about, and this is a very American story, which I would be keen to hear the authors reflect more on. Affleck’s story draws heavily on traditions of adventure stories, such as Tarzan or Indiana Jones. His visits to the Congo, where others are unable (or unwilling, or afraid) to go, can be read in this way. Africa, and especially African conflicts, have become a frontier. In the absence of new places to ‘discover’, the extremes of life and death, danger
The importance of films in the cultural and social life of both Britain and the United States has long been recognized. Although radio survived in Britain more or less intact, by 1960 it too had taken second place to television as the prime domestic medium. This book begins by analysing the very different relationships between cinema and radio that emerged in Britain and the United States. It moves on to examine the ways in which cinema adapted radio programmes in the fields of comedy and detective fiction and then how radio dramatized films. When radio first took off in the United States in the late 1920s, it was regarded by the film industry as a rival, something to keep people at home and away from the cinema. But during the 1930s, Hollywood began to appreciate the value of radio in publicizing and promoting its films. The British broadcasting service was set up in 1922 with a monopoly and finance from a licence fee following negotiations between the Post Office, which controlled the air waves, and the radio industry, which manufactured the equipment. Radio in wartime was informational and inspirational. It provided news, entertainment, and propaganda. The book concludes with a look in detail at the ways in which the two media have dealt with three popular fictional characters, the
Grail relate in innovative and temporally specific ways to their source texts. One final example may serve to reinforce the linguistic synergy suggested here between film comedy and the medieval. In the 1997 Disney comedy George of the Jungle , subtitling plays with ‘medieval’ typography. Towards the end of the film George, a comic-heroic Tarzan figure who speaks in the classic tongue-tied manner in
-strapped 127 128 Popular culture and working-class taste in Britain mining communities could still afford. Moreover, Institute committees could be highly responsive to their customers’ economic needs. Joan Rogers, a child visitor to the cinema at Celynen Collieries and Workingman’s Institute and Memorial Hall, fondly remembers the compassionate endeavours of those individuals who managed it: On New Year’s Day through the 1930s until 1939 when the war started, a film was shown in the afternoon, usually a Tarzan or a comedy; afterwards a tea was given in the dance hall
specific audience, and their makers were highly aware of their intended audiences’ cultural capital. Indeed, in A Night at the Opera Driftwood echoes Tarzan’s jungle cry to the opera house audience, and remarks, to their Popular film and literature: textual analyses obvious bewilderment, ‘It’s alright, it’s just the Tarzan in me’. Working-class cinema audiences would have been well aware of the reference. These films not only offered working-class cinema-goers a high-spirited release, then, they also sought to give them self-belief. Neither of these films gained an
Patrol, and clean-cut American fly-boys like Steve Canyon … They include gentleman knights like Prince Valiant and Nature’s gentlemen like Tarzan and Joe Palooka … They include gentlemanly English actors like Ronald Colman and George Sanders, and gentlemanly American ones like Douglas Fairbanks, Jr and William Powell, and all those immortals, Gary Cooper, Spencer Tracy, and the rest, who have epitomized native American gallantry and grace.1 It seems to me that the lineage Fraser describes has been as much a feature of British popular culture as American, not least
’s consciousness’. 16 The figures Fraser cites, celebrated in books, plays, comic strips, radio, television and films on both sides of the Atlantic up to the 1960s, include the Virginian, Robin Flood, Prince Valiant, the Scarlet Pimpernel, Zorro, Philip Marlowe, Superman, Tarzan, the Saint, Bulldog Drummond and many more, a gallery of immortals committed to a code of values which included stoicism, selflessness
, although they quickly became over-used. A good illustration of its possibilities were shown by Baltimora’s Tarzan Boy (1985), which was created with multiplied images and blue backgrounds. It resembled certain avant-garde films, such as the abstract animated films by Len Lye and Norman McLaren that used saturated colour to obscure rather than enhance the image. Tarzan Boy also used the principle of simultaneity, rendering the singer one of a number of competing elements and undermining any sense that the image simply expressed the production of the music. The aesthetic
). Bruno has something of the spontaneity, humour, sensitivity and lack of respect for convention which characterised the Bruno of Cocktail Molotov. But he is more like a friend than a lover and there are no scenes of passion between him and Jane. Though his answering-machine recording refers to them as ‘Jane and Tarzan’, he is not a Tarzan-like figure. Indeed, though he becomes insolent and aggressive in response to Steve