I just read the first two Tarzan novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs. They’re not a bad read if you keep in mind they were written in 1914-15, so they are a bit outdated in their morals. But they are good glurge reading. My question for others out their who have sampled this series is this:
When did Tarzan jump the shark? There are 24 original novels by Burroughs, plus a handful more by authors with the blessing of Burroughs’ estate. There are almost a hundred movies, numerous tv-series, two radio programs and a video game based on the 1999 Disney Tarzan movie. Somewhere in there, it must have jumped the shark.
I honestly don’t think Tarzan ever “jumped the shark.” The quality of the later novels is not notably lower than the earlier entries in the series. (The movies are a different animal entirely.)
Now Doc Savage – in his *first *novel he not only jumped *onto *a shark, he killed it with his bare hands!
IMHO, ERB kept writing decent stuff up to his death, Tarzan & the Foreign Legion being a pretty gripping read that he wrote in 1944 and published in 1947.
I quit reading the series after #5, Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar, which took me forever to finish, it was so bad. That was back in the early 70s when I was in high school. Others have told me there are good ones after that, but it’s pretty hit and miss. It’s not what we consider shark jumping, when things go bad and stay bad. Sometimes ERB had a good idea and sometimes he didn’t. Either way, he’d still write the book.
The man had bills to pay and writing was his job. When you work at a factory you go in and adjust the sprocket wrenches whether you just had a good idea about sprocket wrenches or not.
Tarzan jumped the shark pretty early, in my opinion. He kept finding these “lost” civilizations in Africa that hadn’t communicated with the our=tside world or each other – Pal-ul-Don, Opar, Ant People, Lost Crusaders, and so on. Africa musta been friggin’ HUGE! And the incredibly repetitious plots.
When I first read Tarzan, I tried to read all the novels in one summer. I couldn’t do it – it was like trying to live on a diet of Cream Puffs. There was no there there. I had to break off and read something else, or my brain would’ve turned to putty. To be fair, old ERB wrote these over a period of some 35 years, and didn’t mean for me to OD on them in one summer. There’s a bit more variation at the end, but not enough to make up for it.
If you look at it objectively, and try to throw out your previous expectations (Johnny Weismuller, for older fans. Disney’s take on it for new ones, or any of the things between), Tarzan is really a pretty impressive creation. He really does act like an ape in human form, and not just a well-built white guy running around the jungle in his briefs. Burroughs did come up with an original character, and kept true to the conception (at least at first). But I think his plots started to pall within the first few books. I was surprised by “Jungle Tales of Tarzan” – THAT was surprisingly good, original, and different. But think that after that, it jumped the shark.
Well, to be fair, Africa is pretty damn big. And at the time that Burroughs was writing, Europeans hadn’t explored a whole lot of the interior of the continent. Machu Picchu (wrong continent, I know, but still) was discovered the year before the publication of “Tarzan of the Apes.” Not a lost civilization, but a lost city, certainly. I think the world seemed a lot bigger at the time, and more fantastic things seemed possible.
My recommendation: Get a list of the Filmation cartoons from the 1980s. Note the title of each episode. Then read the book that episode was based on. (Although this system is not infallible. They made a cartoon version of Tarzan and the Ant-Men. Though the cartoon was not quite as bad as the book.)
Another recommendation: don’t try to read more than one book per month. Like CalMeacham said, Burroughs is a guilty pleasure, best enjoyed in small doses.
The books can be read in pretty much any order, much like episodes of most TV series can be watched in any order. Read the first one first, and then go nuts.
It’s probably better to read the Barsoom books in order, but even that isn’t necessary beyond the first four.
I would amend this to say the first two should be read in order. And Tarzan the Terrible comes after Tarzan the Untamed, where he sets out to win WWI single-handedly after Jane get kidnapped, but apart from that it hardly matters.
None of the subsequent novels are as imaginative as the first one, but they are much of a muchness, IMO. After a while, it is the same book written over and over. Tarzan encounters a lost tribe, learns the language in a couple of pages, gets knocked out with gunshots to the head, there’s usually some racist stuff about how close somebody is to the apes, there’s a love story of some sort, and the evil white guy dies.
It’s goofy, it’s preposterous, it’s fun. It’s pulp, in other words.
