By Jonathan Storm, Inquirer Columnist
Posted on Sun, Oct. 05, 2003
The road to the jungle used to run through the Olympics. Now, all you have to do is lie around in your underpants.
Four of the gents who played Tarzan in his movie heyday, the 1930s and '40s, were Olympic medalists, including Johnny
Weissmuller, the all-time, all-star King of the Jungle.
The latest Ape Man, Travis Fimmel, got his job on the WB after one of the show's producers sat with her teen daughter
(remember: it is the WB) and picked him out of a fashion magazine, modeling in nothing but his Calvin Klein tightie-whities.
Fimmel swings through the urban jungle at 9 tonight in Tarzan, as the little network makes TV's fourth try at recounting the
live-action adventures of the world's most famous beastie boy. Plucked from a Congo paradise by his billionaire uncle, the graspy
proprietor of Greystoke Industries, the poor guy is held in a maximum-security lab, way up in a New York skyscraper - except
when he escapes.
That seems to be every five minutes, bursting through windows and doors with his awesome jungle power, leaving senseless
security stalwarts strewn hither and thither, and shimmying up the downspout or down the drainpipe, or sometimes just hanging
from the granite griffins that adorn the Greystoke Building, 50 stories up.
Fast-paced and fun to look at, Tarzan works best with an audience that chooses not to think about the shredded logic of its plot
and the confusing motives of some characters. Actually, it works best with an audience that chooses not to think at all.
Fimmel was hired without a moment of acting experience, but you needn't go all James Lipton about the dearth of artists in
contemporary video. The man has taken acting lessons, learning "anger" and "confusion" and "awe," and even "longing, with a
touch of lust," which he applies whenever he gets near Jane, of whom you'll learn more later.
OK, maybe Travis Fimmel never will appear on Inside the Actors Studio. But, ooooh, that hair, that face, those biceps, that chest!
"That's quite a chest you have there," director D.W. Griffith said to former lawman Otto Elmo Linkenhelt in 1912, when the
Arkansan got his shirt ripped in a fight scene in The Battle of Elderbush Gulch. And thus, a career began. Griffith changed Otto's
name to Elmo Lincoln, and the actor worked his way up through a passel of parts in silent movies in the teens, all the way to
Magic Genie, in Aladdin and the Magic Lamp in 1917.
Then he got the starring role in Tarzan of the Apes in 1918, sporting strange, bushy hair and a stranger loincloth, with a leather
diaper underneath, that has been a staple ever since. (There has been the occasional divergence. Miles O'Keeffe appeared nearly
naked in the 1981 film Tarzan, the Ape Man, with Bo Derek, who was even more nearly naked.) On the new show, producer
Eric Kripke told TV critics last summer, there will be "no loincloth, no yodeling." Fimmel always wears long pants, to accentuate
his tasty upper parts.
Tarzan of the Apes was one of the first movies to earn $1 million. Lincoln made four sequels in the following three years (you
think that's a new movie trick?), and Hollywood has never let Tarzan slip off the vine. Down the years, a lineup of more than a
dozen pretty boys - former athletes and stuntmen and, in the arty eras, B actors - have essayed the role in more than 40 films.
TV has had its Tarzans, too, and not just in cartoons. Ron Ely had three years of success in the '60s in Tarzan on NBC and CBS.
In the early '90s, a foreign-made Tarzan, starring the aptly named Wolf Larson, was syndicated in the United States with
half-hour episodes. An hour-long syndicated show, Tarzan: The Epic Adventures, ran later in the decade, and spun off a telefilm
that aired on UPN, though you should never mention it within earshot of WB executives, who would like to think they wouldn't
be caught dead copying UPN.
Some Tarzans have yelled. Most have swung on vines. None could be accused of emoting like Olivier. All featured fab abs and
perfect pecs, which, after all, is what Tarzan is all about, and what Fimmel's got.
He grew up on a farm in the Australian outback, and we shouldn't be too harsh on his layabout credentials. He says he once
played Australian football, and Weissmuller, after all, even with his world records and five Olympic gold swimming medals, didn't
get his Tarzan job until he did some print modeling for BVD swimsuits and underwear.
Fans should love watching Fimmel hurtling through the streets of Toronto, which will stand in for New York much as gymnastic
doubles help the young actor out. If he looks a bit like Spider-Man, don't be surprised. Laura Ziskin produced the Spidey movies
and is lead producer here. But Fimmel would rather you thought of his movements (he's had lessons in them, too) as "a monkey
on fire."
It may take a while to tell what you think about the show. First it was to be called Tarzan. Then, it was Tarzan and Jane, which
was the title when the episode you see tonight was made. And then, as WB honcho Jordan Levin explained in perfect TV Speak,
the netlet chefs decided, "First and foremost, it's a franchise action-adventure."
They were "really keen on exploring... the Greystoke family legend and mythology," Levin said. And he mentioned Smallville,
which is one of the WB's most popular shows, and the legend and mythology of its bad-boy family, the Luthors.
So maybe Tarzan will be Bigville, with a super hero who's not a superhero, but has a hotter costume.
