Last night I watched Tarzan and His Mate, part of the Johnny Weismuller Tarzan collection my parents got me for Christmas. Wow. Such memories. When I was a kid I’d often catch these flicks on Saturday afternoon TV. It would always send me to the back yard, where I’d climb our mimosa tree and think about stampeding elephants and hungry lions. Me and some friends would hang ropes from the branches and try to swing around the tree like Tarzan. Results were mixed, and sometimes painful.
As a kid, I never noticed how damn sexy Maureen O’Sullivan was. And this DVD version shows her nekkid! I didn’t realize Tarzan’s “vines” were moderately disguised trapeze or that the gorillas were guys in monkey suits. Or that the charging rhinos were on a screen in front of the actors. It was all real enough for me.
The TV series of Tarzan was also big then, but I only remember bits and pieces of episodes … no complete stories. A friend did have the loin cloth swimsuit with plastic knife that was often advertised during the show. I was quite jealous.
When Tarzan wasn’t the flavor of the summer day it was often Erroll Flynn’s Robin Hood. I had a longbow my dad had given me and some cheap target arrows. We’d draw targets on cardboard boxes and shoot them in the back yard. I once beat the crap out of one of my best friends for deliberately breaking one of those arrows during an arguement and refusing to pay for it. Eh, not all memories are good.
Something else I’d often watch as a kid was The Little Rascals. Yeah, it was 40 years old, but like Tarzan and Robin Hood, I loved it. Spanky, Alfalfa, Darla, Buckwheat and that crazy looking dog. And the bullies. I didn’t understand all the Depression Era stuff. I just saw a group of kids having fun with little parental supervision and that seemed like the way to live. I haven’t seen an episode of The Little Rascals in ages.
Okay, the journey down memory lane ends here. I just needed a minute to ramble about how the Tarzan movies take me back to being about 10 years old, when the definition of a life crisis was finding unwanted peas on my dinner plate.
Steven E. Wedel 
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