Tarzan Film Original
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It was the first Tarzan film ever made and is based on Edgar Rice Burroughs' original 1912 novel Tarzan of the Apes. The film adapts only the first part of the novel, the remainder becoming the basis for the sequel, The Romance of Tarzan. The film is considered the most faithful to the novel of all the film adaptations.[citation needed] Its most notable plot change is the introduction of the character Binns and his role in bringing the Porters to Africa; the novel brought them there through the improbable coincidence of a second mutiny.
The role of Tarzan was given to Gordon Griffith, one of the best child actors of the time,[3] and to Elmo Lincoln, an actor who specialized in "strong man" roles. Enid Markey was the first Jane. Especially for Griffith and Lincoln the film represented a huge personal success, which gave them the opportunity to shoot other important films and guaranteed their presence in three sequels: The Romance of Tarzan (1918), The Son of Tarzan (1920), and The Adventures of Tarzan (1921).
A large portion of Griffith's role as young Tarzan is played in the nude, making Tarzan of the Apes one of the first films to feature a named actor in a nude scene. Most shots featuring Griffith in the nude are framed to hide his genitals, with the exception of one shot in which his penis is briefly visible. The film also includes brief scenes of female toplessness.
For the adult version of Tarzan, Stellan Windrow was first cast in the role and filmed a number of the film's stunt sequences involving swinging through trees. Due to his enlistment to fight in the First World War, Windrow was forced to withdraw from the film and Lincoln was cast to replace him. However, most of Windrow's stunt sequences were retained in the final film.[8]
Like many American films of the time, Tarzan of the Apes was subject to cuts by city and state film censorship boards. For showing in Chicago, its Board of Censors cut: "in Reel 1, the captain shooting man and his falling, two scenes of men with captain being shot and falling, striking man on head, Reel 3, scene of boy being frightened by lion and jumping up showing his sex, woman standing over kettle showing breasts, Reel 5, first two scenes of maid on man's lap in closet, three choking scenes, Reel 7, two closeups of Negro leering at woman and four scenes where he carries her off."[9]
Obviously, the silent Tarzan films were not going to contain an inappropriate kookaburra sound, so I excluded them from the research. There are seven silent Tarzan films that appeared between 1918 and 1928.
The interesting thing about the MGM franchise is that they seemed to be making an honest effort to portray Africa. Yeah, the lions and elephants were appearing in a jungle instead of a savannah, and some of the apes were actors in suits, but this particular film used a lot of on-location stock footage (originally created for Trader Horn (1931)). It was also clear that the crew was using Indian elephants onset, but the elephants were dressed in fake ears and tusks to make them look like African elephants. The sort of people who make an effort to put fake ears on an elephant are not the sort of people who arbitrarily use an Australian bird call as background noise.
When I learned that there were radio serials running during the early years of the Tarzan sound franchises, I knew I also had to dig into them. It was entirely possible that the kookaburra call could have been used as a sound effect on the radio first, before it moved to a film version of Tarzan.
When MGM came out with their Johnny Weissmuller films, producer Sol Lesser also obtained the film rights to Tarzan, and he started cranking out this competing film serial. The serial itself is now a lost film; however, the first four episodes were edited into a feature-length film for redistribution, and this is what survives.
This film is a 70-minute feature film edit of the four-hour serial described in the previous section. The sound from the original footage from the serial was mostly wiped out and replaced by dialogue by British actors and dubbed-in sound effects. Curiously enough, the film opens with an apology about the quality of the sound, which blames the trials of shooting on location, even though the original on-location soundtrack of the serial is almost completely replaced here.
There are no kookaburras in the film as it exists today. There is no way of knowing if kookaburras existed on an intermediate dub of the film, if one existed. (There is, however, a completely inappropriate peacock cry at 30 minutes, 50 seconds into the film.)
At Disneyland, the treehouse had a quaint, but effective, plumbing system that actually worked and provided kinetic entertainment for the guests. A huge, river driven water wheel at the tree's base provided the power for a mini-bamboo-bucket brigade that scooped up the water and transported it to the uppermost room, where it flowed into a bamboo canal system.
In 1960, Disney released a popular live action adventure film titled Swiss Family Robinson, based on the 1812 novel of the same name by Johann David Wyss. However, Disney made some significant additions to make the story more exciting and amusing.
Directed by Ken Annakin (whose name inspired George Lucas to create an Anakin Skywalker character) and shot in Tobago (in the Caribbean) and Pinewood Studios (outside London), the film recounts a large Swiss family on their way to New Guinea whose ship is attacked by pirates.
Shipwrecked on an uninhabited island, the father and his two eldest sons salvage material from the ship, including furniture, supplies, and ship parts, like the steering wheel and construct a treehouse on the island.
The treehouse (designed primarily by Disney animator and director Wolfgang Reitherman with input from John Hench) was built in a 200-foot spread samaan in the Goldsborough Bay area. Samaan is a wide-canopied flowering tree with a large symmetrical crown native to tropic regions.
After the filming was completed, the locals begged Disney to let the treehouse remain (without the interior furnishings) and it became a popular tourist attraction, but was finally destroyed in 1963 by Hurricane Flora. While the treehouse was destroyed, the tree itself remained, but fell into obscurity as new generations are now unaware that the Disney film (which has also fallen into obscurity) was ever filmed there.
Walt Disney felt that children of all ages wanted a treehouse of their own and decided using the centerpiece from the film would be a great addition to Adventureland because, at the time there was only one attraction: the Jungle Cruise.
Imagineers thought that it would be a waste of time, space, and money, because guests would never want to climb all the way up only to have to walk all the way back down. When the attraction opened, adult climbers outnumbered kids three to one. They studied the gnarled roots of the mammoth Moreton Bay Fig Tree planted in the 1800s by Anaheim horticulturist Tim Carroll to aid in authentically creating details of the Disneyland version. Imagineer Bill Martin was in charge of the ultimate design with input from those people who had worked on the tree for the movie.
The 62 concrete banyan-like roots go down roughly 42 feet and were installed on January 17, 1962. Ten months later at 2 p.m. on November 18 (just in time for the extended Christmas hours, the tree was unveiled. Actor John Mills (who played Father Robinson in the movie) and his daughter, actress Hayley Mills, were there for the dedication, along with the rest of their family.
A roughly four minute video of scenes of Walt, Mills, and his daughter Hayley at the opening of the attraction and enjoying the experience appears on the two disc Vault Disney DVD of the film. Hayley provides commentary for this featurette where she remembers the experience.
The tree's final cost was $254,900. It utilized six tons of reinforced steel and a 110 cubic yards of concrete. The smaller branches were taken from real manzanita trees and were adorned with vinyl leaves fiberglassed onto each branch.
Disney guests had to climb up 68 steps to see all the different rooms and areas like the kitchen, library, Mother and Father's master bedroom, the boys' room and more. Interestingly, they had to walk down 69 steps (one extra step) to return to the ground.
I don't think we should ever take out anything that is regarded as a 'classic' or even a 'semi-classic' for that matter unless whatever we were going to do was the same quality if not better than the original we were replacing.
I think all of us who love Disneyland liked having the Swiss Family Treehouse there but the reality was that people would walk by and smile and love hearing the music but would just keep walking. Disneyland is so tight for space that you need to have everything pulling its share. The attraction had dropped from 1,200 to approximately 300 guests per hour, and yet there was an hour-and-a-half line for Indiana Jones and a 30-minute wait for Pirates, just minutes away.
It was around May of 1998 when I got to see a rough cut of [the animated feature] Tarzan and I just felt it was extraordinary. The last three animated films just were not appealing to me and I didn't connect with them like I did with the Disney classics. I found a great depth of emotion in the film and that you cared about this character. It was centered around home and family, just like the Swiss Family Treehouse.
It just seemed obvious that if Jane was going to stay in the jungle with Tarzan and there was this treehouse that his parents had built that it was where they would set up their home. When we talked to the co-directors Kevin Lima and Chris Buck, they kind of smiled because they had the same idea if there was to be a sequel to the film.
Today, people just aren't as familiar with the Swiss Family Robinson movie. People don't see the film anymore and think they want to go visit it at Disneyland. It took on a life of its own as this Disney attraction even when the film was forgotten and we felt we could increase attendance if it was somehow connected to something Disney that the current generation knows and loves.
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