In years past, Walt Disney Studios created original concepts or adapted classic fairy tales for their animated feature films. With the acquisition of the Tarzan license, Disney seeks to resurrect an 87-year-old franchise that was once a marketing powerhouse in its own right.
Though Tarzan has been barely a blip on the cultural radar for over two decades, it wasn’t always so. In the first half of the 20th century, Tarzan was a multimedia phenomenon, appearing in pulp magazines, novels, films, newspaper comic strips, radio programs, comic books, games, and used to endorse products as diverse as gasoline and bread. The Tarzan media saturation occurred in the decades predating the Davy Crockett coonskin cap craze of the 1950s, considered by many to be the birth of the era of Hollywood mass-merchandising.
As with Mickey Mouse and Superman, Tarzan is the product of one man’s genius. Edgar Rice Burroughs, a novice writer, created the legendary character for his third novel after his premiere effort, Under the Moons of Mars (later retitled A Princess of Mars), proved a hit with the readers of the pulp magazine All Story. After Burroughs’ sophomore slump (the medieval adventure The Outlaw of Torn) failed to sell, the author decided to explore nature versus nurture, Civilization versus the primitive, and a host of intriguing concepts pioneered by Charles Darwin, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and others.
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