Pellucidar nights

I enjoy victorian and edwardian era fiction, i love the works of Edgar rice Burroughs and just wanted to have a place to pour out my thoughts on these subjects

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Location: United Kingdom

A happy fellow with a lovely wife and great family. Never really grown up so made a career out of drawing cartoons. Happy to come from a hardworking background, so i know what it's like to be a grown up.

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Tarzan of the Apes.
But what apes.
To big for chimps and too small for gorillas (in fact gorillas are their enemy).
Philip Jose farmer suggests they were cavemen, throw backs to a much primitive time.

The fact is that ERB never really saw a gorilla or a chimp outside of a zoo. He relied on the tales of adventurers and game hunters.

So the beasts that tolerated Tarzan as he grew (only Kala raised him)were ERB apes alone, creatures of imagination, powerful brutes but family creatures. inteligent enough for leaders and councils, clubs and drums but still beasts.

Thats how i love them, not categorised as a creature we know, just similar to one.

Tarzan is as much fantasy as John carter and for that he needs his imaginitive world.
A world where Kong exists and atlantis sank beneath the waves and Ayesha lives eternal waiting the return of her love.

3 Comments:

Blogger RadRad said...

When & if Del Toro does make that Tarzan film, I hope he does an original looking Ape sPecies. After Hellboy & Pan's Labyrinth, those things should look sick!

7:42 PM  
Blogger Kit Cox said...

i had no idea del toro was doing a film. i think he'd capture the fantasy element well

4:31 AM  
Blogger Theodore said...

Forget about ERB having seen a gorilla in a zoo, if he ever could have seen one before creating Tarzan, it would have been a stuffed one in a museum...

4:29 AM  

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