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Tarzan Lord of the Jungle The Complete Season One

                                 by Bobby Blakey

With the upcoming new big screen adaptation of Edgar Rice Burrough’s famed Tarzan hitting theaters soon what better time than to revisit the character in its many iterations. While there have been numerous films featuring Tarzan this is not the only adaptation out there. From 1976-1980 Filmation produced an animated series titled Tarzan: Lord of the Jungle. Now Warner Bors. is bringing the complete first season of the series to DVD for the first time.

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Tarzan: lord of the Jungle follows the adventures of Tarzan who seeks to champion the less fortunate, to right wrongs and to protect both the animals in his jungle as well as the human visitors. This is a pretty dated series that manages to bring the nostalgia to those that were fans, but any looking for some vintage type Tarzan stories may be disappointed. Every episode takes Tarzan on an adventure with a varying new set of people which would be fine, but a lot of them stop feeling like Tarzan stories. On a separate note he seems to get captured every episode which just makes the character seem way weaker than he should be. Despite the strange direction of some of these episodes the show is still entertaining getting to see Tarzan in action at all. Anyone that remembers the old Filmation cartoons know the realistic approach that they used which does lend itself great to this character. There are plenty of the classic Tarzan moments featuring his signature vine swinging and animal control, but blended with the varying new environments sometimes thins these moments out.

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The transfer looks decent enough, but would have been great to have a hi-def version, but was likely not possible from the original masters. While some of the adventures here may not be all that great there is no denying that this is Tarzan through and through and no doubt a collection fans of the character will want to add to their collection. This collection doesn’t offer up any special features, but does include all 16 episodes from the first season in all their classic glory so grab your copy of Tarzan: Lord of the Jungle the complete first season on DVD now.

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