‘Tarzan Collection’ DVD Review

Editor's Picks, Featured Article, Movies
on April 12, 2013
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The Tarzan Collection with Jock Mahoney & Mike Henry
DVD $49.95 (Warner Archive Collection)

The lord of the jungle, subjected to various media incarnations since his first appearance in magazines in 1912, wasn’t grunting “Me Tarzan, you Jane” anymore by the time these movies came along in the early 1960s. Producer Sy Weintraub, who purchased the rights to the character in the late ’50s, cast Lord Greystoke as a more cultured man of two worlds (as he’d been originally written by Edgar Rice Burroughs), and filmed his movies in color on exotic locations instead of studio soundstages. This budget-priced round-up of five full-length features (“Tarzan Goes to India,” “Tarzan’s Three Challenges,” “Tarzan and the Valley of Gold,” Tarzan and the Great River” and “Tarzan and the Jungle Boy”) is a treat for anyone who’d like to see just how pop-culture’s coolest jungle cat fared as portrayed by Henry, a former Pittsburgh Steeler football player-turned-actor who turned down the offer to take the Tarzan role onward to TV (it went to Ron Ely), and Mahoney, who at 44 (in “Three Challenges”) was the oldest actor to ever play the Lord of the Jungle. (DVD copies manufactured on demand only at WarnerArchive.com)