I used to watch the Tarzan movies -- in black and white -- just to

[saltpoint]

see what fools Tarzan could make of the bad guys.

The bad guys tended to be "explorers" from maybe the U.S. or England. But they had come into the jungle to find diamonds and gems and gold and so forth. They weren't explorers, of course. They were exploiters.

And they wanted Tarzan to lead them through the dangerous terrain so they could kill him, grab the gold, and then high-tail it back to wealth and fame.

They were always sucking up to Tarzan in the beginning of the narrative.

In one episode, Tarzan provided them with dinner. The bad guys chomped it merrily, buttering up Tarzan smarmily.

"This is delicious, Tarzan," one of them exclaimed. "What is it?"

"Food," Tarzan told him.

John McCain reminds me quite a bit of those exploitative jerks from the West who were only in the jungle in the first place to loot its riches for their own advancement. He has much of the same termperament and is driven by the same selfishness.

My brother and cousins and I always knew that Tarzan would see through the exploiters' skullduggeries in the end. We watched with rapt anticipaton as some terrible but well-deserved fate befell the bad guys. Often it was a plunge into a bottomless crevice or down the side of a rocky gorge. Maybe something with tigers.

Tarzan defended the indigenous peoples of the jungle and he seemed to operate on an instinctual axis of what was noble and right. And he was damned resourceful.

And he outsmarted the greedy exploiters every time.

[Kahuna]

1. I love those old Tarzan movies.

:)

[XOKCowboy]

2. You're a couple of years older than me....

All I remember was "Me Tarzan, You Jane". And elephants, lions, zebras running when he called.

:)

[saltpoint]

3. Yep -- he was even better with critters than Ellie May Clampett.

[XOKCowboy]

5. Oh and good post...

We had some corny stuff on TV back then but most of it was good over evil and the cowboy in the white hat always won. You always knew who was the bad guy and who was the good guy. Makes one wish for the old days.

[saltpoint]

6. Thank you. It's odd, but I think we were taught a bit about

how to treat people ethically in those early films.

I'm a fan of contemporary film, but I think it may have been Tarzan and a few others who lit the match years ago.

[Dr Fate]

4. Johnny Weissmuller is the man!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Weissmuller