Ron Ely’s TARZAN-11-VILLAGE OF FIRE

 

Ron Ely’s TARZAN-11-VILLAGE OF FIRE

 

I have a number of issues with this episode. I don’t think it’s terrible but it’s just not as good as the other ten before it. First, Cheetah starts all the trouble by opening a cage to let a jaguar out. Okay, I get it that Cheetah might have thought they should be free but the animal has been injected with a possible cure for a disease (and I’m not sure this disease is a real disease).

 

So Cheetah starts ALL the trouble. Jai tries to get the cage closed and the animal gets away anyway and Jai is scratched and gets the fever. He seems to survive the night without the serum anyway but gets the shot anyway.

 

Totoni, leaders of a nearby tribe, is sick and tries the doctor in the settlement (a new one?) named Dr. Haru (from either Japan or China?). He and his “witch doctor” Bwanichi are both portrayed as incredibly stupid, dumb, backward, superstitious and just…well, stupid.

 

Where to start? First Totoni leaves Haru’s care even though he is still sick, relying instead on his witch doctor who does nothing to help him. Totoni, instead of returning to Haru, sends his men to get her medicine. WHY? Why not just have them take you back to her. He has no idea how to take the medicine ---it must be delivered via a syringe. Instead, he his men steal it and then asks the witch doctor how it must be delivered. He’s a moron. He drinks it as per the witch doctor’s advice…and this Bwanichi then blames Haru! He’s a moron, too. AND so are all the men who leave in a rage with fire to burn the village. Their chief is not yet dead but lingers. WHY not just take him back THEN?

 

Add to that, there is an exciting sequence where Jai is unconscious in the settlement building, which seems to change shape in long shot, medium shot, interior, exterior, etc. BUT it’s silly, too. WHY would gasoline be kept where a sick boy is being quarantined. And since when is being quarantined being LOCKED in? And NO ONE in the village thought to let Jai out? Is Haru the only one who knew he was there? Tarzan seems to interact with the villagers by eye locking only so none of them are known as real characters.

 

Bwanichi also acts stupidly when he destroys the serum when faced with Tarzan. Earlier, Tarzan’s mission was to get a plant that only grew at the bottom of deep water. Sigh. He has to dive for it and sadly, and also in boring fashion, he has to fight YET ANOTHER crocodile. This is the third one in only 11 episodes. Enough already. I hope they don’t do this again. Oh, and he also seems to put his foot into a giant clam or oyster that closes on it but he’s able to cut the thing (?) and free himself. I guess we’re supposed to imagine it snuck up on Tarzan from the bottom and behind? On the positive side, some of the underwater photography is beautiful and some vivid shots of Ely underwater really astound.

 

Yet, the stock footage, part of the show from the beginning, here looks badly integrated into the rest of the shots. At one point, Tarzan has to ride a giraffe to get to the body of water…and it’s clearly stock footage from another TARZAN movie, probably a Gordon Scott one. It looks too dark and this stunt double looks too Gordon Scott-ish to be Ron Ely’s TARZAN. What’s more, he jumps on the giraffe and this seems to be close to animal abuse and is uncomfortable viewing it today. One never thought about those things when one watched this as a child or teenager.

 

On top of all of that, Haru had the serum cure in front of her the whole time…when the jaguar recovered. She didn’t need the serum used from the plant Tarzan had.

 

Everyone recovers and that’s fine but Bwanichi, who goes to Haru after all of that and pleads for her to help Totoni, gets off scott free by Tarzan. So, too, does the bad choices and the poor leadership of Totoni. His men burned down at least five buildings here and the water tower…and while it looks as if no one died, they all get let off with a smile and vague idea that there is room for the old ways and the new ways in the jungle. Tarzan then lets Haru travel alone to the camp of Totoni to save him.

 

Is it me or is something totally wrong with this entire episode?

 

On a trivia note, Jai is back in his loin cloth…just. He seems to be growing out of it.

 

I’d be curious to know if the scenes at the start with he and Ely with Cheetah and Nabi, the baby elephant, were filmed later than the rest of this episode. Jai sure looks like he has VERY long hair in the start and not in the rest. He also looks older in the start than in the rest. I’d also like to know if a jungle set was being used. It all looks fabulous at the start, almost too good for a jungle but a dense jungle just the same.

 

We’re not specifically told that any of the animals Haru experimented on died but it seemed as if she thought the cat that Tarzan had to bring back in a spectacular sequence on the water tower, might die?

 

 Again, Haru, capturing animals to experiment on even for a good cause, might be someone that the old Tarzan of the 40s, 50s, and early 60s movies might fight whole heartedly against.

 

Not to nit pick even more but outside when Tarzan has a feverish Jai and Haru is explaining things, the editing seems….off. Haru seems very close to them in medium shot and then when the camera faces her directly, she seems to be sitting or standing in front of them and further away.

 

All in all, I wasn’t terribly impressed by this episode. I seem to have had a vague memory of either Jai or Tarzan unconscious near something that was about to explode and I still wonder if a future episode might contain a similar scene. Here, it doesn’t really help the episode and all the “action” feels contrived and almost useless to the plot and makes almost all the characters other than Tarzan and perhaps Jai, stupid. I mean really stupid.

 

On the plus side, Ron’s Tarzan cradling Jai in his sick bed and prompting him to tell a story, telling him to hang on like the snapping turtle and playing an animal naming game with him to keep Jai alive are worth the entire episode. It’s really touching and great stuff.

 

Oh and I don’t know if they were trying to convey that Jai was sick but he drinks water like a savage, letting it spill over him!

 

Almost forgot, Jai causes an avalanche by yelling for Nabi but Tarzan, who seems blameless, never warns him about the loose and old cave…which looks JUST like the cave Tarzan was trapped in …last episode, down to the space the boulders leave for Cheetah to get out! This time, though, Tarzan is able to remove the boulder all by himself. I guess I even have issues with the title: it’s not really a village of fire; but a village on fire…for a short time in the episode.