Despite having a long history of brawling with lions, feuding with hunters and generally sprinting through the underbrush with only a loin cloth to save him from a snake latching onto his undercarriage, it seemed that not even Tarzan was safe from Hollywood deals falling through at the last minute. You see, in the late 50’s, part way through Gordon Scott’s run as the lord of the apes, franchise producer Saul Lesser figured that Tarzan would cut a fine figure on the small screen and promptly commissioned not one, not two, but three pilots in an attempt to get a buyer interested for a full series.
However, while Tarzan usually has no trouble convincing warring tribes to not go to war, the lord of the jungle found that convincing TV executives wasn’t quite so easy and was summarily shot down by all and sundry. Not one to happily take the “L” and lose all the money already spent, Lesser instead edited all three episodes into one adventure which ended up becoming Tarzan And The Trappers, a disjointed and haphazard entry into the Tarzan cannon that stands as one of the most awkward instalments of Tarzan’s long reign.
Your average day in the African jungle brings the usual mixture of random snake attacks and jungle based homemaking as Tarzan brings home a batch of crocodile eggs in order for Jane to make his first ever omelette. However, while the lord of the apes and Boy both seem excited about this new culinary treat, a string of new threats arise that look to cast a shadow over proceeding that starts with the arrival of unscrupulous trapper, Schroeder, who is illegally gathering up a collection of wild animals for financial gain. However, while caging all these proud beasts with enough to piss Tarzan off, blowing away an elephant and chaining up it’s baby is the last straw, but after a struggle that sees Boy and Cheeta also both captured, the jungle’s top defender of justice manages to bring Schroeder to pay for his crimes.
Case closed right? Nope; not even close. You see, getting Schroeder locked up in some African hellhole may have solved the most recent issue, but it causes his vengful, hunter brother, Sikes, to travel to Tarzan’s neck of the woods in order to get himself a heaping bowl of payback. Aligning himself with the greedy Lapin, who is in town to hunt for the treasures of the lost city of Zarbo (yep, another lost city – apparently Africa is rotten with them), Sikes hopes to get his pound of flesh by hunting Tarzan, The Most Dangerous Game style to get his point across and abducts Tyana, a native friend of our hero, to lure him out.
However, if you recall, I earlier stated that this movie is made up of three scrapped TV episodes, so after that short rumble in the jungle, Tarzan then moves on to trying to stop Lapin from looting the city of Zarbo in order to bring this triptych of nogoodniks down once an for all – by with this gauntlet well and truly run, can the lord of loincloths finally settle down and enjoy that bloody omelette.
Once you take its production history into account, the noticably disjointed nature of Tarzan And The Trappers makes a whole lot of sense, however, while it may seem that the movie may contain an embarrassment of action riches thanks to essential having three times the content, what we get instead is a muddled tale that swaps its bad guys out at the rate of an overstuffed superhero movie. In its defense, you think you may be getting the ultimate Tarzan plot that manages to squeeze in Jane, Boy, Cheeta, vengeful hunters, lost cities, friendly natives, elephant stampedes, fist fights and the rather curious fact that it seems to take Jane the same amount of time to make an omelette as it does her hubby to go on three consecutive adventures in a very short running time, however, while the plot moves like a launched ferret up a greased drainpipe, it’s also messier than Josh Hartnett’s infamously tousled 90s hair, but nowhere near as alluring.
There’s many reasons to pick the film apart due to its rather low rent nature; the retreat back into black and white after Gordon Scott’s previous movie, Tarzan And The Lost Safari, was the first film to drench the character and his world in glorious colour feels like a major step back and the inclusion of Jane and her fucking omelette seems to be far too indebted to its TV origins to play in a feature. Also, there’s too much of a reliance on sets and stock footage to realise Tarzan’s jungle habitat which continues that odd, low budget feel and I swear, Boy (here often addressed as Tartu), has a complete change of hairdo between scenes that proves to be more bewildering than anything else in the film.
Of course, the rapid fire shift in antagonists and the fact that the entire plot keeps lurching unsteadily into completely different stories is the worst thing on offer here mainly because the film seems to be sequelizing itself within the same film and as a result, the villains don’t quite have enough time to make an impact before focus shifts to someone else. Lesley Bradley’s Schroeder is your typical, entry level trapper who couldn’t give a toss about the balance of nature, but he’s only the opening course who has to step aside for Saul Gorse’s more sinister, white hunter. But besides waxing lyrical about the nature of the hunt, his big plan to make Tarzan the prey doesn’t prove to be anywhere near as engrossing as it should be and soon, it too is shuffled along in order for a standard finale located in one of the many lost cities scattered about the place – question, are they really lost if Tarzan knows where they are?
It isn’t all bad. The fact that Scott visually seems disgruntled about having his Tarzan stint shift to the small screen mean that he is a far more surly jungle lord than usual and it means that when he has to go face to face with his plethora of nemesis, there’s a real sense that he’s genuinely pissed at them. In fact a slightly problematic scene that sees our lead demand two natives to dance the dance of their tribes in order to prove their identity gives us a Tarzan that feels nore like a hard bitten vigilante than a virtuous hero. Also, it’s nice to see Scatman Crothers around as a native friend – although it’s less nice to see him simply palmed off as mere kidnap bait in order for our hero to properly flex those white savior muscles – although it is cool when he cracks four baddies in each of their jaws in rapid succession…
However, at the end of the day, this is an entry to the Tarzan cannon that strains hard against its small screen limitations in order to dull the financial issues that came from filming them in the first place – could you imagine if the same thing happened to James Bond? Fun on a basic level, but hardly an auspicious third outing in the loincloth for Gordon Scott, you know that this teetering tower of triple tales fails to resonate when the most memorable plot thread contains the making of an omelette…
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