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osprey_archerOkay, so the thing with Tarzan is that I love stories where the main character comes in contact with modern civilization (or, you know, “modern” Victorian civilization), either because they’ve stumbled through a magic portal or been asleep like Rip Van Winkle or were raised by gorillas and have only now discovered that other humans exist. There’s something endlessly appealing about watching the character discover things like chalkboards and try to figure out what this interesting new stuff is for.
If 80 minutes of this film’s 90 minute runtime was just Tarzan Discovers New and Interesting Objects and Also Learns Some Words, I would probably still think it wasn’t quite enough. And of course the sequence is not nearly that long; the filmmakers wanted to have such trifles as “plot” and “story” and “a romance with Jane,” which to be fair is extremely cute and conveniently overlaps with Tarzan Learns English, and also Tarzan’s thrilling encounter with a magic lantern.
I saw this movie in theaters back when it came out, and the magic lantern scene is one of two parts that stuck with me. (The other part is the ending. I loved, and still love, the fact that the movie ends with Jane and her father throwing over civilization in favor of staying with Tarzan in the jungle.) Why does the magic lantern seem so enchanting? It’s really just a film projector that isn’t fancy enough to make the pictures move. I don’t know, there’s just something about the way the scene is presented that makes the magic lantern seem genuinely transporting, maybe because Tarzan finds it so fascinating.
Maybe part of the appeal of this kind of story is that it makes the familiar seem unfamiliar again to the viewer, too. You watch as the character goes to town figuring out what you can do with a mirror, for instance, and it makes the familiar dull world you live in seem rich and strange again.
If 80 minutes of this film’s 90 minute runtime was just Tarzan Discovers New and Interesting Objects and Also Learns Some Words, I would probably still think it wasn’t quite enough. And of course the sequence is not nearly that long; the filmmakers wanted to have such trifles as “plot” and “story” and “a romance with Jane,” which to be fair is extremely cute and conveniently overlaps with Tarzan Learns English, and also Tarzan’s thrilling encounter with a magic lantern.
I saw this movie in theaters back when it came out, and the magic lantern scene is one of two parts that stuck with me. (The other part is the ending. I loved, and still love, the fact that the movie ends with Jane and her father throwing over civilization in favor of staying with Tarzan in the jungle.) Why does the magic lantern seem so enchanting? It’s really just a film projector that isn’t fancy enough to make the pictures move. I don’t know, there’s just something about the way the scene is presented that makes the magic lantern seem genuinely transporting, maybe because Tarzan finds it so fascinating.
Maybe part of the appeal of this kind of story is that it makes the familiar seem unfamiliar again to the viewer, too. You watch as the character goes to town figuring out what you can do with a mirror, for instance, and it makes the familiar dull world you live in seem rich and strange again.
