Hollywood has been making Tarzan flicks for over 80 years now, and the basic concept — a white child from a wealthy family lost in the jungle and raised by apes — has never changed. If you’re going to make yet another one, as Warner Bros. has done, you can’t mess with this. I’m making this point because Lewis Beale‘s 7.1 complaint piece for CNN.com (“The Problem With Tarzan“) doesn’t seem to agree. He writes that “this new take on the Edgar Rice Burroughs creation, which first appeared in print in 1912, is…a total anachronism in an era of heightened race consciousness. And by greenlighting this film, it seems that Warner Bros., the film’s distributor, did not get the memo that the new movie, while not overtly racist, remains the product of an early 20th-Century colonial mentality — yet another example of the developed world patronizing the Third World.” Warner Bros. greenlighted The Legend of Tarzan for the same kneejerk reason they greenlight everything else — i.e., because they figured the brand is still marketable. Over and out.
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