Obscure Adventures in Geek and Nerd Culture

Hello there, how’s your day been? Have you seen an anglophone Tarzan Musical in your lifetime?  Other than the Goan Tiatr classic, the first known significant Tarzan musical to ever survive the production stage (or more accurately, the first straight musical based on a Tarzan work wholesale) was made by Johnny Simons and Douglas Ballantine in 1977. It was named Tarzan of the Apes because it was based similarly on the first Tarzan book. The casts in both the original and 1988 revival runs consist of largely anonymous actors who played Tarzan, Jane Porter and others.   Then came the original version of the legendary Tarzan Rocks! It was the Broadway Musical’s spiritual predecessor, which lasted for six and a half years, from July 1999 to January 2006. John Coulter has had such a good Tarzan portrayal that he himself reprised for an unaired pilot of a scrapped live action show. It had the working name of Tarzan’s Animal Friends and was the ‘spiritual pilot episode’ for what would...

The Bionic Six aren’t going to have a reboot until the 2020s comes to a close.  For its impending 40th anniversary, there can be a continuity reboot series where the Bionic Six are now the Bionic Eight due to clearly adding two more women, a mixed Portuguese-Hawaiian and a Navajo, onto the mix.  The surname and ethnicities of Jack Bennett and his two children are revised to reflect the changing times. Not only will they be Jack, Eric and Megan Butala, they’re also of a multicultural background (mixed Croatian-Konkani American and Croatian-Irish-Konkani American). Jack is a mixed Croatian-Konkani American with an Indian mother of Konkani descent and a Croatian father. His children Eric and Megan are from a Croatian-Irish-Indian Konkani background, with the latter having a blonde ponytail while still being a tomboy. Helen Bennett is most likely an Irish American who will be Hella Harnett with a ginger bobbed hairstyle.  James Dwight Corey will be Jack’s office friend rather...

A Peruvian reviewer made a review on one of the worst jungle hero tv shows ever. And much more importantly, it's a freaking Peruvian one. Check It Out! They arrived one day in Iquitos, without having previously made a really constant research and reconnaissance of the work site, they arrogantly developed the details of “its production”, they took a luxury cruise to arrive at a hostel (also luxury), they stayed a couple of weeks having a relatively cool time, the owners of the jungle freaking out, and they immediately sent to move to Lima. Then they worked the post production with all the gags, stereotypes and reiterations of bad stories and thus they launched “their miniseries” based on the story of a supposed jungle girl who talks to monkeys, dresses as a girl version of Sheena and tries to save the world from a brotherhood led by a duo of baddies who badly imitate Pinky and the Brain and speak with an impossible accent, to the point that they look like sad dogs barking. Now it le...

Dear a majority of anime fans the world over, I am telling you an abridged version to the story behind one of the anime industry’s own shrewdest and most astute ever freemium lancers, Yukiyoshi Hane.  Not everyone knows about him before he began his career as a troubled but brilliant business minded animator. However, he began his career by animating a shit ton of scenes for the Little Prince and the Eight Headed Dragon Orochi.  Finally, he got his big break at the very end of 1972. It was when he was animating and character designing two very different shows, one a relatively much lighter and softer adaptation to Osamu Tezuka’s Triton of the Sea, and the other being a considerably much wackier yet more merchandise-driven adaptation to Go Nagai’s brilliant but long-troubled Mazinger Z. Otherwise, midway through season 2’s airing schedule, he awkwardly but slowly got replaced as a character designer by a dude called Keisuke Morishita, himself an otherwise mediocre animator on h...

The Barumba spinoffs  Parts in Barumba’s Journey (バールンーバの旅)  Barumba on the Nile River Japanese (ナイル川沿いバールンーバ)  Foreign, non-English versions: Croatian (Barumba na rijeci Nil)  Barumba visits the Mediterranean Japanese (地中海を訪れるバールンーバ)  Foreign, non-English versions: Croatian (Barumba posjećuje Sredozemlje)  Parts in Barumba the Globetrotter (地球の旅人バールンーバ) Barumba’s Hijinks   Japanese (バールンーバの悪ふざけ)  Foreign, non-English versions: Croatian (Barumbine nesreće)  Barumba in the Misty Isle of Okinawa  Japanese (霧深い沖縄の島でバールンーバ) 

Perhaps the first postwar Tarzan manga that we know of was made in 1946. Drawn by illustrator and mangaka Yoshio Inoue, Tarzan's Adventures was a pretty fine Jungle comedy for its time. Throughout the 40s and 50s, at least from 1948 to 1951, a film inspired Tarzan manga series was created by the late Fukujiro Yokoi and was briefly continued after his death by the little known Ippei Teranishi. Also in 1947 and 1948, the late Masaru Yoshitani did two Tarzan mangas, Jungle King Tarzan and the Adventures of Tarzan, while kawaii illustrator Seiji Nishida actually did a pretty decent Akahon about Tarzan, which is known as 'The Hidden Jungle Lands'. The other two mangas made before that, ‘Tarzan’s Jungle’ and ‘The Jungle Treasure Trove’ were just pretty crud.  In 1949, Illustrator Yoshizo Wada made a rather unofficial manga centring around the youth of Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan portrayal, which clearly suggests that such a portrayal was itself raised by Chimps and Gorillas among...

Most of us young people are pretty much tired of the Tarzan Boy trope being associated with both colonialist and classist depictions, but then again, it shall be noted that ERBU’s canon Tarzan is basically an apeman in all but human looks.  Unfortunately, there is another, much more disastrous issue entirely, when it comes to casting people regardless of caste, class, ethnicity and skin colour, to play Tarzan/Mowgli/Bomba-like hotties instead. Thanks to various entertainment industries in both South and Southeast Asia being always filled with chauvinistic humans, it is also an increasingly colourist trope associated mainly with paler skinned action heroes beginning on their way to stardom.  There are a lot of Indian action heroes, from various ethnic groups, who played Tarzan in nearly the past 9 decades alone, although they’re often lighter skinned and somehow less tanned than the actual canonical character, not to mention often having brown eyes, (shivers)! To be fair for th...