The station that loved me; jungle fever

Today's bLINKit: Since finally installing iTunes a few months back, I've become a fan of Internet radio. First off were classical and ambient stations. Now I'm exploring SomaFM, in particular the Secret Agent channel. Funky, retro and lounge stuff separated by voice excerpts from spy and espionage movies. Now I can be a mysterious while washing the dishes.

WMD: And for some reason, a few weeks back my mind wandered to memories of watching the 1960s TV version of Tarzan with Ron Ely. Ely was famous for doing his own stunts in the show, despite numerous injuries. According to Wikipedia, there was no harm done: he's alive even today. In my part of the world, we watched it in reruns a few years after it first aired, but it was hugely popular at my elementary school. The famous Tarzan cry echoed across the schoolyard for months, and it made me want a chimpanzee as a pet. And I wanted to swing on vines, except that the Ponderosa pines and firs in the mountains around me had none. The show also led me to reading the original Edgar Rice Burroughs novels, which were far grittier and violent than the show or almost any of the movies. There are also far too many of them (two dozen by my count), as Burroughs swung on the vine of his original apeman/nature boy idea one too many times. The original Tarzan of the Apes novel is kind of interesting, and I liked the later novel about the lost outpost of the Roman Empire, but it goes downhill from there, with Tarzan meeting little people, lion people, leopard people, people from the centre of the earth, and more lost cities and empires than you'd think would fit even in the dark recesses of Edwardian Africa. It seemed the only person Tarzan didn't meet in the jungle was Jane Goodall. But give credit to Burroughs: he apparently was the first multi-media cross platform guy, spinning his fiction into a lucrative empire of comics, movies and merchandise. This decades before Harry Potter. What's more, Tarzan wasn't even his only fiction. He wrote tons more books about Mars, science fiction, Westerns and history. Me writer, you market.

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[Bill Hillman]

For a more in-depth reference see the official Edgar Rice Burroughs Websites and Webzines ~ Over 5,000 Webpages.
Bill Hillman
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www.BurroughsBibliophiles.com