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Showing posts with the label Tarzan

Tarzan's breath-taking return to new adventures

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Hey! Love high adventure? You're here because you love Tarzan. You just might feel they don't make'em like that anymore! And I'm not the guy to argue THAT! Tarzan's books began a century ago, with Edgar Rice Burroughs- at a whopping dime per word- captivating imaginations the world over. Saturday afternoons brought us black and white Tarzan thrills with Johnny Weismuller and Buster Crabbe. (My pal Ron Frenz- who cut his teeth in the Savage Land drawing Ka-Zar- actually shared a theater with Crabbe one night!) (I love elephants. I want to tell you about the elephant orphanage in Sri Lanka...look it up and I will tell you, later.) That's the first Tarzan y'boy C Lue remembers. Even to the present day, the legendary Lord Greystroke has entered the Hollywood jungle, with a 2015 entry atarring Alexander Skarsgard that took on modern sensibilities head-on. I feel LEGEND will only grow in cult stature. Frazetta's ACE Tarzan covers, like all things...

Lost World of Apes: the Bili and Mangani

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Mangani is the name of a fictional species of great apes in the Tarzan novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and of the invented language used by these apes. In the invented language, Mangani (meaning "great-ape") is the apes' word for their own kind, although the term is also applied (with modifications) to humans. The Mangani are represented as the apes who foster and raise Tarzan. Dr. Peter Coogan wrote a page on the synthetic language created for the Mangani and Tarzan, provided here in pdf: http://www.pjfarmer.com/woldnewton/Mangani.pdf The language of the great apes of Africa that Edgar Rice Burroughs depicts in the Tarzan novels is not some simple, made-up collection of sounds substituting for English. It is a representation of a deeply structured, complex linguistic sign system with a grammar and syntax of its own. This grammar has never been worked out because its last living native speakers (with the exception of Tarzan himself) went extinct in the last century. Unfor...