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15 out of 16 people found the following comment useful :-
Tele-Tarzan, 1 October 2005
Author: jonesy74-1 from United States

Aside from Johnny Weismuller, Ron Ely is my favorite Tarzan. An unlikely show, in a sense, it played well amidst the superhero genre that was somewhat prevalent at the time - i.e. Batman with Adam West and Burt Ward and The Green Hornet with Van Williams and Bruce Lee. The show was also contemporary with Star Trek.

Unlike campy Batman, the show took itself seriously and yet, Ron Ely running around in a loin cloth week by week on prime time, didn't seem out of place. Ron played Tarzan serious and straight, dealing with poachers and jungle baddies of all sorts as though it were natural for a partially naked man to be a quasi-jungle policeman/detective. Ely's Tarzan was reminiscent of Hawaii Five-O's Steve McGarrett (played by Jack Lord).

This was no "Me Tarzan" ape-man. Ely's Tarzan was articulate and educated.

Enter Jai (Manuel Padilla Jr. - The Pharoah's Carlos from American Graffiti) and Cheetah the Chimp to provide the less-serious, comedy relief tone to the show. I always wondered how Jai fit in to the cast, as it seemed unusual for a Hispanic boy to be running around in Africa with Tarzan. Was he an orphan or what? Was he a "ward" of Tarzan's, a la Batman's Dick Grayson? Nevertheless, Jai provided an important element to the series - he took the serious edge off of Tarzan and made him compassionate, looking out for a young boy who emulated him (loin cloth and all).

You could always count on Cheetah to bring a smile to Tarzan's face at the end of each show with Jai in hot pursuit shouting, "Cheetah, you come back here," or something of that nature.

Ely had a great physical look for Tarzan. Long and lanky, yet sinewy and strong, he made the physical part of Tarzan's exploits look good. The vine swinging and running through the jungle were performed with style and aplomb.

The introduction always ran with Ely calling out that famous Tarzan yell (Johnny Weismuller's original recorded Tarzan yell - as it was with most Tarzan movies and shows).

The plots were well-contrived and enjoyable. It was one of my favorite series at the time.

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7 out of 7 people found the following comment useful :-
From great to terrible to pretty darn good, 5 January 2003
Author: Mark from Canada

This was one of my favorite shows as a kid. It was exciting and suspenseful and had some of the most evil villains on TV every week.

However, when I saw reruns of "Tarzan" in the early 1980s, either I caught a batch of bad episodes or I had evolved because I found 6 episodes in a row to be very poorly written and even boring, so I stopped watching.

Recently, a friend loaned me four episodes and all four were exceptional. So, I saw an additional four episodes and three were quite good. Aside from obviously being an uneven series (although I have read that the show had script problems during the first year), I agree with previous posters that just the fantastic on-location photography puts all of the other Tarzan TV series to shame. Ron Ely was perfectly cast, an honorable and articulate "lawman" who respected the native tribes around him. There's one episode, "Last of the Superman" (which must have been written by an Ayn Rand admirer) where Tarzan philosophically reflects on how humans owe it to themselves to be the best they can be.

The other distinguishing thing was that there was no holds barred when it came to violence - guest star William Smithers frantically firing a revolver as piranha fish devour him, and Bo Hopkins as a no-gooder who is lazing around a lake shore when he's pulled into the lake and killed by a crocodile (one of the goriest TV scenes ever filmed). When bad guy Pat Conway is shot to death as he tries to escape by swimming across a raging river, Tarzan angrily admonishes the shooter with, "He had a right to choose how to die!"

The show was attacked by critics in the 1960s, and yet dig the guest star roster - Helen Hayes, Jimmy MacArthur, James Earl Jones, Michael Dunn, Maurice Evans, Julie Harris, James Whitmore, George Kennedy, Sally Kellerman, Diana Ross, the great (if late) Gia Scala, Leslie Parrish, the late Michael Witney, Nichelle Nichols, etc. People like that don't appear on a show if it's bad.

TV Guide reported in June 1968 that the series still had a 31 share and finished in the top 40 during 1967-68, but NBC felt its demographics (too many older women and too many kids) made it unappealing and it was cancelled. Popular demand brought it back for summer reruns in 1969.

A good series.

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8 out of 9 people found the following comment useful :-
Tarzan of the TV, 28 January 2002
Author: Shield-3 from Kansas City, MO, USA

I have fond memories of this show, which one of our local independent stations used to air on Sunday afternoons as part of `Tarzan Theatre.' I loved the show at first simply because I was a big Tarzan fan, but I truly came to appreciate it once I started reading Edgar Rice Burroughs' novels. This is one of the few times Tarzan is portrayed as ERB envisioned him: intelligent and articulate. ERB, however, gave Tarzan a savage and violent side, something you would never see on a `family' TV series of the 1960s. Fortunately, the producers compensated by loading the show with plenty of action.

All the elements came together nicely: Ron Ely had both the physical presence and the acting skill to play a convincing ape-man. I've heard stories of the punishment he took while making the series, injuries that would make Jackie Chan wince, but he kept going. The producers were smart enough not to film in a studio jungle set, but instead take the show on location. The Mexican locations were a gorgeous stand-in for the African savanna and rain forests, and they increase the show's credibility.

There's just one thing I never liked: Jai. I realize there's probably a lot of Jai fans out there, but the kid just irritated me. His main function was both to ask simplistic questions about what was going on so Tarzan could explain for his (and the audience's) benefit, and to eat up valuable screen time that could be spent on Tarzan. It's part of the whole `juvenile sidekick' syndrome in TV, movies and comics that drives me nuts. Ugh.

In spite of that, `Tarzan' was a great series, deserving of much more attention than it currently gets. It may not be the way * you * see Tarzan, but you can't deny it was a well-crafted, exciting and eminently watchable show.

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8 out of 10 people found the following comment useful :-
ELY WAS THE GREATEST TARZAN OF THEM ALL., 16 November 2000
Author: ALAN MOUNT from CARDIFF, WALES

What a fantastic and action packed show this was.Ron Ely for my money was the best Tarzan ever (certainly the most articulate)and this series should be resurrected forthwith for modern TV audiences to enjoy.In the UK this hasn't been seen for many years.Certain episodes stand out in my mind even now as some of the best I have seen in any action adventure series;episodes like THE PEARLS OF TANGA, THE ULTIMATE COMPUTER and ALEX THE GREAT with guest star Neville Brand as adventurer Alex Spence(which packed more fistfights into its 50 minute running time than any other show I have ever seen)This was wonderful stuff and I maintain that this was the definitive Tarzan and unfairly one of the most neglected.

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5 out of 5 people found the following comment useful :-
What a swinging action-packed show of its day!!!, 12 July 2000
Author: raysond from Chapel Hill, North Carolina

After the huge success of Tarzan on the big screen, Producer Sy Weintraub took the ape man from the silver screen to television. Tarzan made its debut on the NBC network in September of 1966. Weintraub wanted Mike Henry(who played Tarzan in the movies),but instead got Ron Ely to portrayed the ape man on television. I have fond memories of the show when I was a child and it was one of the most action-packed shows of its day. Ely on the show fought off REAL man-eating lions,wrestled crocodiles(even though it was mostly retreads of scenes from the Johnny Weissmuller films of the 30's tinted in color),and always managed to save Jai from great danger from some tribe or animal poachers who were destroying the jungle. Jai however(played by Manuel Padilla,Jr.) was Tarzan's companion helping him out in any way possible(only in this one there was NO Jane here),and lets not forget Cheetah,the reliable chimpanzee. However,the show had very special guests who were in some sort of trouble and it was Tarzan to the rescue(especially in one episode where Diana Ross and the Supremes guest starred as Nuns who were from an missionary) to save the day and the jungle as well. However,the show ran for a good three years on NBC(from 1966 to 1969),and after that the repeats aired on CBS for one season(from 1969 to 1970). Rarely seen nowdays since the repeats were last seen on Chicago's WGN-TV back in the late 1980's,and one episode from the series on AMC(American Movie Classics). Now it can be seen on Nick at Nite's TV Land.

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0 out of 2 people found the following comment useful :-
The Racism Problem., 12 February 2009
4/10
Author: kenburke0627 from United States

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

The Tarzan series and movies, for the most part, can be accused of racism and it is not difficult to see why. In the movies black Africans were either presented as vicious savages or lackeys good for little more than carrying things on their heads or running away at the first sign of trouble. The whole persona of Tarzan comes across as white superiority to the infinite power. There he is - super strong, capable of killing the fiercest of beasts with little more than a knife, or lowering the boom on the bad guys by summoning elephants with his fearsome yell. The Tarzan movies and television series were not meant to be intentionally racist like "Birth of A Nation", regretfully they come across as an unpleasant reminder of past attitudes towards race. The saddest fact was the Tarzan television series aired during a sixties, a time when African-Americans were struggling to be treated as equals and civil rights were becoming the law of the land.

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