Baruuba in South Asian cinema

It is possible that the Baruuba franchise has spawned not one, but two movies which have focused on the stories’ unofficial Indian Bollywood and Nepalese Kallywood film equivalents. They are both called Jungle Love, despite containing very different plots. Earlier on, its official film companion’s long gone Mandarin dub was released decades earlier. 

In the early-mid 1960s, a lost but semi-official Hong Kong Mandarin dub of the Buruuba film, known as ‘Adventures in the Animal Kingdom’, was released in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia.

Like its official Japanese predecessor, the first Baruuba movie outside of Japan has so many Tarzan references that it was misleadingly billed as a Tarzan movie at the time of its July 1990 release! Unlike the succeeding Nepalese Mockbuster Hit, its hero and heroine get married with the help of their parents, as they are adults who have a consensual relationship, despite not knowing each other at first. 

But the Nepalese movie is a much different story. It was pre-censored to hell and back, more so than even the older Bollywood film. Nonetheless, thanks to horrible film management, it still came out as a nonsensically tepid, hyper violent martial arts movie. The more cynical reality behind its status as a viral mess is that Nepal is in such a long-term geopolitical quagmire that it is going to merge into India at any time in the future. 

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